athletic ripples by Amit Gupta from india

Architects – Studio Symbiosis (www.studio-symbiosis.com)
Principal Architect’s – Amit Gupta and Britta Knobel Gupta
Project Team – Dharampal Singh, Mohammad Shaique Uddin, Rakesh Mathur, Mohit Soni.
Landscape Architects – Studio Symbiosis Architects
Structure – Constructure
MEP – Apostle design studio
Client - Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti
Site Area – 1,00,000 sqm
Built up Area – 31,000 sqm

Design Concept: Landscape in motion

“Athletic Ripples” is a project based on interfacing the user and his built environment into a coherent whole. The program has been translated into trajectories of movement. These flow lines generated the formal idea which is underlined by interweaving of the various activities. This results in creating a design with an inherent quality of interaction through uninterrupted flow of movement embedded as a result of the fluid forms.

Designed as a sports complex, motion in sports in terms of the Athletes was depicted in the design form. The project emerges from the landscape and flows out to describe the built forms.

The program analysis resulted in the distribution of the various functions on site. Conceptually these programmatic zones were treated as pebbled dropped in water. It is the inference of the water field, thus creating ripples giving a guideline for the formal design language of the project.

The central pedestrian zone caters for the primary movement on site. This linear zone has been kept exclusively for the pedestrians, thereby instilling the feeling of being in a green sports complex.

The program asks for a stadium which accommodates cricket pitch, football ground and an athletics running track. Along with this function a number of indoor outdoor sports activities are located on site as required by the brief.

A continuous silhouette has been designed for the project. The design proposal seems to be emerging from the landscape and creates the various forms still keeping an overall gesture. As a design outlook it has been taken into account that being a sports complex an atmosphere of being nested in nature is created. The built form does not sit in disjunction with the surroundings, but on the contrary flows out of the landscape itself.

Piezoelectricity is being looked to be applied on the landscape pavers. The system will harvest the kinetic energy generated by crowds that effective in areas of heavy foot traffic.

Solar cells are proposed for the roof of the stadiums to harness the abundantly available solar energy. These solar cells would be integrated on the roof of the stadium as a design feature and only a certain percent of the roof panels will be designed as solar panels. There is a proposed mix of solar panels and pneumatic panels on the roof to maintain the required light intensity inside the stadium.

The foundation stone for the project was laid by Ms. Sonia Gandhi on 6th Feburary 2011.

With the recent achievements in sports by the Indian athletes and the importance of excellence in
sports signifies the growth of a nation at the grass root level.

Background:
The project is located in a remote area of Uttar Pradesh namely Raibareilly. The brief for the project was to create a sports complex with a number of indoor and outdoor stadiums as a part of the existing school complex. This complex is envisioned to cater to the students along with being used for games at national level. The client wanted that a sports complex which acts as an identity marker for the city and the organization (Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti).

Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti is a program whereby students from rural area are selected and the organization pays for their boarding, studies, clothing, food and any other aspect relation to their growth. The motto of the organization is “It was felt that children with special talent or aptitude should be provided opportunities to progress at a faster pace, by making good quality education available to them, irrespective of their capability to pay for it”.

This aspect of the project makes it a very special brief for it is a project that looks at grooming the future of India in the field of sports.

Shri. Jawaharlal Nehru once said that “Dams are the temples of modern India”. In view of the contemporary outlook it could well be said that “Sports complex’s are the temples of contemporary India”.