As a child Alok Shetty was always around his father, who owned a construction business in Bangalore which was where his first thoughts about the waste came about. Most times, waste from the site were sold as scrap or simply cleared though the thought “there could be a way to use all this waste” always struck Shetty’s mind.
Ealier this year, Shetty was awarded Time magazine’s title of Young Leader of Tomorrow for being able to find simple solutions for complex problems. Of his many architectural marvels, his work on providing shelter for slum dwellers using scraps and unwanted leftovers from construction sites in Bangalore affected due to the monsoons has got the most buzz.
Bangalore’s LRDE slum houses over 2,000 people most living in huts and makeshift homes made of plastic. Monsoons are the worst for the slum dwellers who mostly work as construction laborers, their homes turn into breeding ground for mosquitoes and ultimately diseases like malaria and typhoid.
“Slum dwellers in India are mostly construction workers that live in makeshift homes made of tarpaulin sheets. Most of them are squatters and can be evicted at any point, which is why it is very important for them to have portable houses,” said Shetty in an interview with Time.
Using five percent of building developer’s scaffolding, Shetty designed a housing unit for four by planting the scaffolding one foot above the ground adding bamboo and wood to the design.
The entire project uses bamboo for the walls, reused discarded scaffolding, plastic tarapaulin sheets for the roof and wooden shuttering sheets for the floor. The cost to put up a 100 square foot house is Rs. 35,000. The entire set up can be set up and dismantled in matter of four hours.
He is currently working on a model that will cost much lesser than this amount and hopes to have 100 such houses in the slum by June 2015. Also as member of the Parinam Foundation, that helps the urban and semi-urban economically underprivileged, Shetty has taken to implementing various academic programs for children of laborers from the slums.
Of the many acclaims the 28 year old has won, another is the Black Box theatre. What began as a challenge to literally be able to take an auditorium anywhere you go developed into converting a shipping container into an auditorium.
“It’s a 40-foot shipping container that completely opens itself out to become a 250-seat auditorium in around four hours,” says Shetty describing the concept as the video shows a shipping container open out into a V shaped structure and pop out seats and a staircase to enter the structure.
Part of the architect’s plans now is to apply the concept of the Black Box theatre to a foldable mobile school and health clinic. “The idea is to attach them to train compartments. They get dropped off at a village and then the next train comes and picks it up. In between it opens up to become a school or a health clinic,” he says with plans to launch it next year.
His firm, Bhumiputra Architecture’s main aim is to promote adaptive architecture as Shetty says this can be an extremely effective solution to help address many of the country’s developmental problems. “We are also experimenting with developing lightweight construction bricks from trash. The idea is to use them in earthquake prone areas so even if buildings fall, the damage would be limited,” he says.
The 28 year old studied at Columbia University where he was the youngest recipient of the Lucille Smyser Award for Design Excellence and at the age of 19 set up his own architectural firm, Bhumiputra Architecture where he redesigned a hospital in Jaipur.
Shetty’s approach to the design was different. Instead of drawing blue prints first, he spoke to the staff and patients of the hospital gathering information on the problems they faced architecturally, incorporating the solution into the design. For example, access to clean drinking water was an issue many in the hospital faced. Shetty’s solution was to build a rain-water harvesting system within the building itself.
He has also been part of various TEDx talks and was even featured in Forbes magazine’s list of their 30 under 30 list of young achievers.
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