Excelsior Correspondent
New Delhi, Oct 25: India’s leading architecture institute, Sushant School of Art and Architecture, Ansal University, Gurgaon commenced its Silver Jubilee year activities by partnering with ARCHADE Foundation (Arch-itecture Research Conservation Habitat and Design Education), a non-profit organization of architects, town planners and architecture students to create an immediate, easy to construct and affordable shelter prototype for victims of the recent natural disasters in Uttarakhand and Odisha.
The single room prototype is the result of a series of architectural design workshops and competitions attended by over 200 professional architects and architectural firms alongwith over 500 architecture students from 7-10 leading institutions in and around Delhi. It is a sustainable, expandable model with recycling of materials and uses a substantial amount of local resources, thus, aiming to bring sizeable employment to the local people. It can also be quickly replicated in varied sizes and can be easily multiplied in various combinations to create clusters.
The sustainable model with its simplicity of design and construction details allows local users to build such structures by themselves with a minimal dependence on external technical support. The prototype is being shared with NGOs like Seeds India and habitat for Humanity, government bodies like BMTPC and individuals working in shelter creation on site in the affected regions.
According to Dr. CS Nagpal, Vice- Chancellor, Ansal University, Gurgaon, “The recent natural disasters in Uttarakhand and Odisha have rendered millions homeless and created an urgent requirement for shelters for a large population in the shortest possible time.
The affected districts in Uttarakhand come under extreme cold winter region with vulnerability to earthquakes (zone 4-5), landslides, heavy winds, snowfall and flash floods during the months of monsoon. In Odisha, however, due to completely different climatic and geographical condition there are different set of constraints that need to be addressed while designing an intermediate shelter. Keeping in mind these differences the Uttarakhand shelter is constructed of stone for foundation, earth bags (empty cement bags filled with loose earth) in walls tied with coir ropes or reinforced with barbed wires, timber poles or Bamboo to provide vertical, horizontal and diagonal support as well as for rafters and purlins for roofing.
According to Dr. Rupinder Singh, Dean, Sushant School of Art and Architecture, “It is our 25th year of existence as a premier architectural institution and through the shelter prototype creation we’ve aspired to use our knowledge and skills to create a memorable social initiative aiming at the rehabilitation of people in adverse climatic circumstances. Some of our students and faculty have also visited the Uttarakhand region to get a first-hand experience of the areas of concern before working on architectural solutions. “
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