PEOPLE WORKING ON ALTERNATE TECHNOLOGIES / ENERGY EFFICIENT CONSTRUCTION TECHNIQUES

[Narendra]

1. Dr. Puttagunta Sudhakar Specialized in Green Materials and Sustainable Development

Dr. Sudhakar started his career as a researcher in electronics at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IITD) in 1972 and spent one year as a post doctoral fellow in Paris during 1979-80 at University of Pierre et Marie Curie. He quit the research faculty of IIT Delhi in 1984 and founded Haritha Association for Learning from Environment where he endeavors to use day to day productive activities as experiments in teaching at least some concepts in the current main stream school education. He also founded Haritha Eco Trust to develop green technologies. He developed the bamboo bow as a structural load bearing element in 1989 that has eventually lead to development of a technology using bamboo as a modern green engineering material.
During 2006 to 2011, he worked at Centre Rural Development and Technology of IITD exploring and validating the bamboo technology for which the name ‘Haritha IITD Bamcrete (HIB) technology has been suggested in one of the two graduate theses submitted to IITD. While at IITD, together with Haritha Eco Trust, he developed cost effective test equipments including the hydraulics based ones, for evaluating static and dynamic performance, including creep and fatigue by cyclic loading, of bamboo and its life size structural elements. The said equipments are very simple to operate, requiring a few orders of magnitude less power compared to the ones currently available, all of which makes field level testing of bamboo affordable, a long felt need , considering the large variation in the mechanical properties of bamboo, but neglected by the researchers all along. He has specialized in green materials, houses and life styles and sustainable development. Some of his notable projects include 8 bamboo houses in AP under innovative stream of rural housing in Khammam, NMBA project on engineering validation of bamboo bow technology, NAIP bamboo project at IITD, Bamboo project at IITD from MoRD.

Contact Details:
Haritha Ecological Institute
Harithapuri, Bcm. Road, New Paloncha – 507115
Khammam Dist., AP, India
Email: sudhakar.puttagunta@gmail.com

 

[Narendra]

2. PRB Rao (Bheemesh)
Bheemesh graduated from JNTU college of Architecture, Hyderabad (1982-87). He worked for architect Anil Laul at the Nizamuddin and the Anangpur Building Centre for six years from 1987 to 1993. In 1994 he set up his own practice in Visakhapatnam under the name ‘The Living Spaces'. He was also a faculty in the department of architecture at the Andhra University.
He now continues implementing and developing several systems that he had learned at the Nizamuddin and the Anangpur building centres such as funicular shells, ferrocement technology and cluster housing concepts in his projects at Visakhapatnam. In the process of his work, he has been able to train a team of people in the use of appropriate technology. He believes that rather than concentrating on appropriate architecture, one should first talk about appropriate lifestyle and also that an appropriate technique need not necessarily be low cost, as it has a much larger role to play in being appropriate. For him an appropriate or alternate technology is the one, which uses locally available material in an optimum manner to achieve maximum strength without compromising on the aesthetic, social and cultural factors. He also works to educate the masons/labourers involved in the process of construction. He believes that if the architect simplifies the technique, the work becomes faster, affordable and the mason is able to learn and reuse the process again independently. Also if a certain technique needs to be implemented on a large scale, it needs to be as simple as possible. He believes that for a person to be able to identify with his space the space should first have a strong identity and that it should consequently bring out the user's identity. Hence, social identity is as important as the economic value of the building. Some of his notable projects are The Rishi Samskruti Vidya Kendra (RSVK) at Boduvlasa in Vishakapatnam district and he has also designed and built the buildings for the Department of Architecture and the extension of the academic wing of the Dept. of Geo-engineering in the Andhra University campus.

Contact details:
118, Sri nagar colony, Banjara Hills,
Hyderabad- 500034, Andhra Pradesh
Email: thelivingspaces@rediffmail.com

 

[MAR]

Excellent. Also can you provide the details of Urban Planner