PULIYA: A Parasitic Framework That Turns a Chandrapur Rail Bridge into a Civic Host

Most cities treat a bridge as a single-purpose machine: it carries traffic over an obstacle, and everything around its edges, beneath its deck and along its approaches is left as residue. PULIYA starts from the opposite assumption. It reads a road bridge over railway tracks as a structure already doing half the work of a public building, offering height, connectivity and a steady flow of people, and asks what would happen if architecture simply plugged into it. The proposal does not demolish or replace anything. It adds lightweight layers of seating, platforms, cafés and landscape that borrow the bridge's strength and give it a social life in return.

Designed by Saheel Birewar, the project was a Shortlisted entry in Parasitic Architecture 2020. Its site is Varora Naka, an important urban node in Chandrapur, India, where a bridge spans the railway line and links major parts of the city. The surroundings are crowded with competing uses: educational institutions, a stadium, offices, commercial properties, religious spaces and residential neighbourhoods. Birewar's central question is a practical one: can spaces already embedded in the city accommodate more public life?

Lifting a Pink Deck Above the Neighbourhood Grid

The exploded axonometric shows the strategy at urban scale. A pink pedestrian deck floats above the dense grid of Varora Naka, carrying rooftop parks, cafés and sitting areas, while trees and building blocks fill the ground plane below. Pulling the layers apart makes the dependency easy to read. The new elements sit around, beneath and alongside the existing infrastructure, so each addition takes a position in relation to the host instead of claiming fresh land. The saturated colour does useful work here too. It separates the parasite from the host at a glance, which is the clearest way to show that nothing original has been erased.

This matters because the site is already crowded with demands. A standalone civic building at a node this busy would compete for scarce ground. PULIYA sidesteps that conflict by putting its programme in the undercrofts, edges and leftover spaces that bridges usually produce and then abandon. The argument is that new public facilities do not always need new buildings; sometimes they only need a host.

Mezzanines and Platforms That Thicken the Bridge Section

The diagram sheet moves from concept to fabric. Axonometric views and plans, drawn in teal and timber tones, show bridge decks extended with mezzanine floors, café seating zones and exhibition platforms. What reads from a distance as one gesture turns out to be a kit of smaller parts, each scaled to a particular activity. Birewar's programme list covers seating areas, pedestrian platforms, cafés, coworking environments, exhibition spaces and landscaped zones, and the drawings place them as layers stacked against the existing structure.

The relationship the project describes is close to symbiotic. The bridge provides structure and connectivity; the interventions provide occupation and reasons to stay. A mezzanine café hung off a movement corridor takes on a different character from one on a quiet street, because the bridge brings it a constant audience. The timber palette suggests the lightness the brief demands, keeping the additions visibly secondary to the concrete they rely on.

One Stepped Plaza, Three Times of Day

The strongest drawings in the set may be the three sections of a stepped plaza, shown in the morning, afternoon and evening. A large tree anchors each frame, with cyclists, parked cars and people sitting on the steps. The fixed geometry stays the same while occupation changes around it, and that is the project's real thesis. Birewar documents Varora Naka's daily rhythm carefully. In the morning people walk, jog, cycle, exercise and eat breakfast. During working hours the area becomes a corridor for students, office workers and residents. Later, cafés and informal gathering spots take over, and in the evening street food vendors and recreation add another layer.

Instead of fixing a single programme, the plaza is designed to absorb all of these uses in turn, and to stretch further during the religious fairs and seasonal gatherings that periodically change the district. Steps work as seating, viewing tiers or overflow space depending on the hour. Drawing time as a design variable, rather than showing one idealised moment, is a discipline more student projects would benefit from adopting.

Why This Project Matters

Indian cities hold enormous amounts of infrastructure built for movement alone: flyovers, rail overbridges and junctions whose edges and undersides sit unused. PULIYA offers a credible model for recovering those spaces without large capital projects or demolition. By treating the bridge as a civic host, Birewar recasts parasitic architecture from a formal provocation into an urban design tool, one that adds public life incrementally and lets it grow from existing patterns of use.

The proposal is persuasive because it is grounded in observation. The programme comes from watching how Varora Naka is actually used across a day and a year, not from a generic list of amenities. That attentiveness, combined with a clear structural logic of host and parasite, makes PULIYA more than a competition image. It is a reminder that the most useful new public space may already be standing, waiting for someone to notice it.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Saheel Birewar

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Project credits: PULIYA by Saheel Birewar Parasitic Architecture 2020 (uni.xyz).