Water has always played an important role in the culture of India, both as a resource for everyday activities as well as a source of spiritual value. It is in this respect that the project, located on the edge of the Ganga River in Varanasi imagines a new typology of water purification infrastructure that transcends mere utility. Merging the disciplines of engineering, architecture, and urban design, not to mention sociology and anthropology, technical requirements are combined with places for social gathering and cultural rituals, in a set of carefully designed architectural interventions at the threshold between river and land. Key to the proposal is not only the treatment of the highly polluted water, but most importantly the making of a genius loci, uniting the sacred with the profane.

The jury praised the skilful presentation of the project’s ideas and greatly appreciated the clarity and beauty of the submitted drawings that intelligently refer to Indian tradition, while acknowledging the present. This said, the jury wondered whether the technology deployed, particularly with respect to the water purification processor, could not have been partially substituted by more subtle and less intrusive methods as used in other parts of the project, for example, by means of rock and gabion water filtration as well as sedimentation pools. Criticism notwithstanding, the jury greatly valued the author’s objective to regard infrastructure as more than a mere servant to utility – to be reclaimed as a truly public resource and thus as a matter of design.