AMIT MITRA A LARGE number of the over 700 mud houses built by the Karnataka Housing Board (KHB) at Yelahanka near Bangalore are showing signs of falling apart. This is a major setback to a project that described by V Suresh, a HUDCO director who was then KHB chairman, once …
MUD IS no longer inferior. As a building material, it can be strengthened and stabilised to function as a viable alternative to concrete and steel. Traditional mud-building methods include mixing specified quantities of rice husk, cow dung or lime with raw earth. One of the oldest techniques is the wattle- …
ARCHITECTS hoped to establish mud as a viable building medium when they set out to build the country's first major environmentally-sound building. The mud headquarters in Delhi of Development Alternatives (DA) headquarters was built to prove a point, recalls Shrashtant Patara, a DA architect. "It was one of the first …
S GOPIKRISHNA WARRIER IN 1976, the biogas lab of the Centre for the Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas (ASTRA) was constructed on the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) campus in Bangalore with unique building blocks. They were not conventional kiln-fired bricks but stabilised mud blocks. Fourteen years …
MUD IS a versatile building material that has been used to make some extraordinary architectural marvels -- from 1,000-year-old ksars (forts) in Morocco and 6,000-year-old arches, vaults and domes in the Nile Valley to multi-storeyed houses of adobe, sun-baked bricks of mud and straw, which is the traditional building material …
"EARTHQUAKES don't kill, buildings do," says John Beynon, principal architect at UNESCO's regional office in Bangkok. Today, people are shifting to "killer buildings" as they give up their traditional building technologies in favour of modern designs and materials. This disastrous transformation has taken place not just in Garhwal, but idso …
JUST 55 seconds in duration, it left 1,000 people dead. The earthquake, measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale, which devastated the hills of Uttarkashi, Tehri Garhwal and Chamoli districts in UP last October, also left 20 per cent of the houses in the region totally destroyed or severely damaged. What …
