TEAM : Akanksha Agrawal and Samiksha Agarwal
Keywords: Biomimicry, Curve, Skin, Sustainable, Twisted Geometry
Our planet is being pushed to its limits, as the global population continues to grow, our consumption is growing with it. If we continue with our current ways, all our food, water& energy to carry us all will be vanished. Are we creating the future we dream of?
It is clear that growth model of the last century is outdated&the economy needs to grow in a new way that delivers value to all humankind in a way that protects our planet for both present and future generations.Changing our course is urgently needed.
By 2050, there will be nearly 10 billion people living on this planet, and two-thirds of us will be in cities. To handle the rise of human population and global temperature, our construction should take a sustainable shift. This design which we came up with, is not a perfect design but if we start our way of thinking this way, we can save our planet.
This entire structure greatly resembles a technologically-savvy cactus plant, and it’s being built as a hybrid building. This resembles of nature in our structure greatly representing our main theme of our unit which is eco-form. But the shape of the building isn’t really its secret. It’s the structure’s skin. Instead of going for an uber high-tech, environmentally nasty air-conditioning system, we are indulging in a little biomimicry. Specifically we’re borrowing an idea from the cactus stomata, the “pores” that the plants breathe through: To cope with the arid, hot environment, cacti usually open these only at night when it’s cooler. Hence the this building in Gurgaon will have a side of smart shutters over its exterior, and these will open and close automatically to keep the interior of the building within comfortable temperature levels.
After 2050 research, we came across food production will be a problem in the future due to increase in population. So, the building will have attached terrace farming, a building which will produce its own food. Here also cactus will play a role, since cactus does not have leaves but its stem is modified and it possesses chlorophyll so the activity done by leaves in other plants are performed by the green stem of cactus. So in this way it forms food of its own.Of course the plants alone don’t do very much, and the environmental cost of keeping them watered and fed in an essentially alien environment makes the actual eco-friendliness of this part of the design questionable. So to solve this we came up with the idea of rain water harvesting and fog collector which will help them to keep it watered. It may not be helpful entirely but will surely contribute.