Ice House
Adaptive Reuse of an ice factory in Mumbai fishing village
Making Matters Mumbai Studio
critics: Anupama Kundoo and Gavin Hogben
Fall 2024
Versova, Mumbai, India
Versova, a longstanding fishing town on Mumbai’s northwestern edge, is now being engulfed by the expanding megacity. Urban development, industrial fishing, and oceanic pollution have significantly diminished local fishing activity. As the neighborhood economy shifts, existing fishing infrastructure faces adaptation or obsolescence. This project examines an ice factory that supplies the fish market with preservation ice—a facility whose production has halved amid declining fishing activity, leaving much of the building in disrepair.
Diagram of existing conditionsThe factory has two ice production halls in the back of the building. The front contains a refrigerated room for storing ice and a worker lounge. To the side there is a walled off, overgrown area where large water tanks circulate and evaporate water to keep it as cold as possible in Mumbai’s scorching environment. The ice is produced in metal buckets that float under the floor in a salt brine bath kept cold by an industrial refrigerator. When the ice is ready, workers lift up the floor caps and lift out the ice buckets using gantry cranes.
Site planPlan
The building is at the fish market on the edge of Versova, where the
fishing community meets the rest of Mumbai both geographically
and economically. This bustling location provides an opportunity for
Versova to interface with the changing city, and a last-line of defense
against its influx.
This project proposes to expand the ice factory’s usage and
transform the surrounding empty area into a park. Because ice
is produced under the floor, multiple programs are introduced to
the ice production halls such as events or exhibits while retaining
their ice-making capacity. Events are scheduled in this cool space
outside of ice-production hours.
ModelModel Roof
The existing building’s roof has two sets of stairs leading up to it but no program takes place there. A third set of stairs is proposed as well as a large shade struture built from locally available bamboo. This shade structure is angled such that it harnesses the breeze emanating from the sea to the southwest. This breeze evacuates heat from the roof to create a comfortable environment for markets, celebrations, and events, in addition to greatly reducing the energy demands to cool the ice down below.
Section
Bamboo DetailBamboo shade structure
Bamboo was chosen for its wide availability in Mumbai and to harness the plethora of local expertise. This carbon-sequestering grass is both lightweight and strong in compression or tension, which makes it ideal to rest on an existing building without the need to reinforce its structure.