10/09/2012

The Indian Express on SABA 2012 Rajpur project


"Students of architecture from Jerusalem-based Bezalel University and CEPT University kicked off their joint ‘spontaneous architecture’ workshop by building four classrooms for a government school at Rajpur near Gandhinagar on Tuesday.
As part of an exchange programme between the two design schools, 25 students along with their faculty lived in Mota Chiloda area for over 20 days for the project and the classrooms were inaugurated on Tuesday.
“The idea was to use materials easily available in the area. The students have made them from scratch without using any machines or engaging labourers. Usually, students are used to urban construction, but here they learnt to build in simple yet creative way under budget and resource constraints in the rural context. They have taken a playful interpretation of the classroom and each classroom is done up with a theme,” said Neelkanth Chhaya, Dean, Faculty of Architecture at CEPT University.
“We have just incurred a material cost of Rs 25,000... We are planning to take the model to a policy level and have approached Hansmukh Adhia, principal secretary (education) and Tulja Shankar Joshi from GCERT,” said Parth Shah, a faculty at the architecture school."

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/cept-israeli-university-architecture-students-handmake-classrooms/1012262/

Spontaneous technology in India, Ahmedabad