“A Vernacular Canvas” responds to a national brief calling for standardized bus shelters across India’s National highways. As someone who’s spent a lot of time on the road across India, I began to notice how much roadside commerce acts as a place marker. Roadside stalls along highways were were cultural signposts, helping travelers read the landscape through local goods, crafts, and flavors.

 

I also noticed that bus shelters were rarely just bus shelters. In rural and semi-urban areas, they were often reclaimed by locals as meeting points, market spaces, resting zones, or as informal stages for everyday life. They were already deeply social spaces - but the way they were being designed didn’t reflect that at all. So when the brief asked for a “standardized national highway bus shelter,” it felt reductive. How do you standardize something in a nation of 28 states, 22 official languages, and hundreds of cultural identities?

 

This project combines these two realities - the symbolic role of roadside commerce and multifunctionality of bus shelters. It repositions the bus shelter as a site of cultural exchange, where national travelers encounter local identity. Honoring the need for standardization for ease of construction, the design embraces modularity as a tool for customization and social connection.