Ar. Deependra Prashad is the Principal Architect at DPAP, a firm working on Sustainable Design of buildings. He has 28 years experience in designing and delivering projects all over the country and has won various awards and design competitions in India and Abroad. He has been involved with training people at various government and non-governmental bodies in the area of sustainable design and humane city planning.
He is also the founder member & Coordinator, INTBAU, and is a former chair of its apex international body, the INTBAU - ICC. He has done B.Arch from SPA, New Delhi and Masters in Energy and environment management from IIT, Delhi.
For the SMARTEX’ 24, Ar. Deependra Prashad presented ‘The UHBVN Building’ in Panchkula, Haryana. This is India’s first large scale super ECBC Building working to disseminate the principles of design and services provision, to help promote the wide adoption of the Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) in India, developed as an MOU between BEE and Ministry of Power.
India is a land of 2 opposites. On one side are humongous developments suffering from carbon emissions and pollution like the NCR. On the other hand, there are projects putting sustainability as their first principle. The ECBC-17 is one such endeavor of the Govt. of India.
Following this project, Govt. of India has also announced creating 1 Super ECBC such project in each state of the Country. The UHBVN Building is located in Panchkula, which is Chandigarh’s sister city, with its own emphasis on retaining its ecology despite what’s happening in the NCR and surroundings, but with extreme winters and summer.
Form Development of the Project
As the 2 Acre site was not strictly North-South Facing, the linear Building was angled twice to take maximum benefit of the orientation for Solar control.
The 2 Lac Sq Ft building is in the shape of a cascade, and it steps down to the eastern side, thus creating morning terraces for incumbents on every floor. The terraces could be used for getting the morning sun, work as fire refuge areas, and also offer views of the mountains at higher storeys of the G+6 building.
Lastly, the Western edge of the building mainly consists of service areas and staircases and includes minimal fenestrations, thus cutting out the harsh afternoon UV radiations.
The Orientation
N-S Orientation to minimize incoming radiation in the extreme composite climate. This aspect has a significant effect on cooling loads. Insulation and Active systems kick in for further incremental savings
Orientation helps Promote Cross Ventilation with wind flows running parallel to the Himalayas creating passive cooling. Greens on opposite corners aid the cooling.
Compact Core to Reduce Circulation Area (minimizing building area by 10%, thus creating incremental savings)
Despite being a large building of approx. 2 lac square feet, the building has been designed with a narrow floorplate to get benefit of natural light from both North and South and possesses 2 cut-out atriums in the center to augment this light and allow natural ventilation from these atriums.
To further augment the daylight ingress, a large number of partitions parallel to the windows within the office halls have been built using glass.
SMARTEX, a symposium celebrating creativity, innovation, technology, and sustainability in architectural design and construction worldwide. India's no.1 platform to honor diverse visionaries and brands, inspiring viability.