Last September, Krishi Bhavan in Bhubaneswar, Odisha made headlines around the world for her avant-garde architectural finesse after being chosen for the prestigious World Architecture Festival (WAF) award 2019.La architecture of the expanding campus has been strongly encouraged through Odisha’s unique ikat fabric in a way that is also climate sensitive.
More than a hundred professional craftsmen worked with regional fabrics and reproduced classic and colorful vernacular narratives about the layout of the building. For example, the fabric palette uses a mixture of exposed bricks and local stones such as laterite and khondalite.
Agricultural folklore and local mythologies are meticulously represented through handmade furniture, stone carvings and steel installations inside. For example, mature rice crops are superbly woven with the strategy of laterite bas-relief sculptures and are illustrated in the hate Pattachitra flavor (fabric-based curling paints).
A night purge formula has been designed to capture new air at night and distribute it in construction during the day, so it’s no surprise that only 20% of the campus has an air conditioning unit.
“Thanks to this mechanism, new air is sucked into the construction through the north facade when temperatures drop at night, using a custom-designed ‘low-tech’ surprise absorption system. The superior thermal mass of the construction traps the “novelty” and becomes a “completely new” exchanger with the surrounding air on the day the outside temperatures are high, said Sidhartha Talwar, co-founder of Studio Lotus at The Better India.
The construction also features solar panels on the terrace, stormwater collection and on-site wastewater treatment and an anaerobic composting unit.
Krishi Bhavan is one of the rare buildings in India that captures local traditions in a complex way and celebrates the dying art of artisans while remaining environmentally conscious.
Krishi Bhavan built through Delhi-based Studio Lotus, an architecture company founded through Sidhartha, Ambrish Arora and Ankur Choksi in 2002.
What distinguishes the sustainable practices of this company is its ability to draw inspiration from local culture while relying on new generation designs and climate reagents.
The integration of jaalis, for example, is an effective and reliable way to slow the sun’s glare and allow the breeze to penetrate through your pierced skins.
RAAS Jodhpur, a luxury boutique hotel in the city’s Mehrangarh Fort, is a testament to this. Inspired by old practices, the corporate has developed a double panel structure, the buildings have an external jaali (stone lattice) cladding and an interior masonry and glass cladding.
Built with jodhpur’s local sandstone, Jaali helps with passive cooling and ventilation while maintaining privacy. The jaalis are built so that visitors can fold them to see the strong magnánimos nearby. Other strategies come with skylights and skylights for poorly lit interior spaces, low window-wall ratios, masonry with a superior thermal mass. Water bodies and plant-shaped thermal dampers also play a role in cooling temperatures.
These strong principles are not limited to Krishi Bhawan and RAAS Jodhpur; are noticed in virtually every single work done through the architecture company nominated for the Aga Khan Award. For more than 18 years, they have moved from thousands of tons of carbon emissions through their diversity of ecological fabrics and passive cooling strategies.
Today, the corporate has its hands on many cakes because their projects have independent bungalows, network houses, government offices, corporate houses, restaurants, hotels, etc. The team has also experienced exponential expansion in its sixty-five directors, Ambrish, Sidhartha, Ankur, Asha Sairam and Pankhuri.
His phenomenal and guilty paintings have won awards, recognitions and awards on domestic and foreign platforms. Some of them come with the World Holiday Building of the Year (2019) at the World Architecture Festival Barcelona.
“You want to have much more knowledge about the carbon footprint of other fabrics and the actual burden of a new construction (which is the burden on the planet) compared to studies on the adequacy prices of existing constructions. It was hoped that this will divert attention from the destruction of forged structures to build new ones, with a more competitive technique to adapt existing constructions, which still have decades of life,” he says.
The technology can be used to innovate viable alternatives. He is an example of structure blocks made of recycled structure waste.
Take, for example, Stacked House in Delhi. The architecture company worked with BL Manjunath, a structural engineer, to expand a hybrid structural system, consisting of a modular beam and column steel grid that maximizes heights and creates a perfect line of sight. It has a palette of earthy fabrics that supports open and ventilated spaces.
As for the diversity of fabrics of the architectural studio, the basic objective is to optimize sunlight and ventilation, especially for residential projects.
The “Brick Veil House” in Delhi is a good example of building a passive cooling construction.
The challenge here is to bond with nature in a congested residential domain that has an unpleasant view with scattered trees and traffic jams. The building, with a stack of 3 apartments, is a brick masonry design that has a superior thermal mass that maximizes sunlight and minimizes sun gain.
The 345 mm thick “brick veil” around the construction acts as a buffer between space and noisy city in a different way. The open volume inside is divided into two and placed at opposite ends of the space to create ventilation and light.
“Despite being in a densely populated area, the courtyard brings a lot of softness to each and every room. The space remains well ventilated and is new all year round. Thanks to the lock, I don’t know how many times we’ve been grateful to be in this beautiful space. Not being able to walk out the door for almost six weeks was much more fun because of all the glorious spaces, kindness and views,” says Darpan Wadhwa, a resident of the building.
With immediate industrialization and globalization, India has experienced a large influx of foreign building fabrics at the best indices. Imports also increase in particular the carbon footprint and the ecology of additional imbalance.
Instead of opting for a luxurious lifestyle at the expense of nature, we will have to stick to the classic roots through the authenticity of the uses of curtains.
“We inspire the minimization of intake and empowerment of all stakeholders. The common use of recovered fabrics and architectural elements, the creation of homogeneous interior-external connections, the optimization of the entry of sunlight, ventilation and cooling, and the strategic integration of craftsmanship as a functional and artistic expression is, in our opinion, adequate and becomes an intrinsic component of the return to the roots,” sidhahart notes.
When asked if this would be the rank of office, he said strongly that long-term prices deserve to be an idea and whether losses due to environmental degradation were calculated.
“While it’s true that these systems can be expensive to use in the first place, however, operating prices over the building’s life cycle translate into significant monetary and environmental savings,” he says.
For the architectural studio, the combination of sustainable practices, artistic skills and a cultural landscape to give buildings different identities is not an overnight activity.
“When we started, one of the most important classes we learned was that the concept of the task was as smart as its execution on the site. People, groups and craftsmen were key catalysts. This people-centered approach, where the architect becomes a facilitator – as opposed to – in the creation of construction, was a marked departure from our past fear of concept-based assignments and has served as the basis for practice ever since. Array Construction is as smart as the sum of the pieces that combine to create it,” sidhartha says.
Edited through Gayatri Mishra
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