NICEE is committed to furthering earthquake safety in the built environment through empowering stakeholders in the building delivery process by information sharing and dissemination of the state of the art in earthquake engineering. NICEE has also actively engaged in awareness, sensitization and training programmes for faculty in architecture and civil engineering disciplines in colleges all over India through the NPEEE program that was in operation from 2003 till 2007. The National Advisory Committee of NICEE was unanimous in advising that NICEE should also target the architecture professionals of tomorrow by offering training modules to the students of architecture in colleges all over India. To meet this objective, a pilot Workshop for Undergraduate students of Architecture in Earthquake Resistant Design Practices was offered in 2008. The workshop was a great success and it was decided to make it an annual event. The 3^rd  National Workshop was held in IIT Kanpur during July 12-17, 2010. 52 undergraduate students who had completed six semesters of studies in their respective architecture programmes, from 19 institutes representing 14 cities from all over India participated in the 6-day workshop. The participants were selected from around 120 applications received.

The objective of the workshop is to sensitize the students to earthquake safety issues and in capacity building in the basics of earthquake resistant design at a conceptual level. It is expected that the lecture and hands-on studio sessions in tackling a design assignment will help the students in internalizing earthquake resistant practices as an integral part of their design decision making. The resource faculty for this workshop was from architecture and structural engineering disciplines in an attempt to recreate as closely as possible real life architectural practice. The objective is to equip the participants with the necessary expertise to arrive at architectural designs that are inherently adequate in resisting earthquake loads at a conceptual level.

The following faculty members were the resource persons of the workshop:

In addition to the above faculty, lecture was also be delivered by Dr. CVR Murty of IIT Madras to guide the students on how best to incorporate earthquake resistant features in their individual designs, keeping in mind all the other requirements of the design brief.

The selected participants were each sent a NICEE publication titled “Architectural Teaching Resource Material on Earthquake Design Concepts” authored by Murty and Charleson. The participants were advised to go through the book before coming for the workshop. On the first day of the workshop a quiz with multiple choice answers was given to the participants. Another quiz of similar difficulty level was administered to the participants towards the end of the workshop to evaluate the progress made by the students.

The students were given a design assignment wherein they had to a housing project in a hypothetical 200m x 100m site in Delhi, located in Seismic Zone IV. The final designs were evaluated by a Jury Board on the last day through presentations followed by brief questioning by the Jury. The Jury consisted of the following members:

After the initial scrutiny, best eight designs were shortlisted, which were again reviewed by the Jury. The final winners were as follows:

At the end of the workshop the participants were requested to fill the feedback forms. The average rating given to the design of workshop was 77.88%. 25% of the participants expressed a 70-80% satisfaction with the workshop, 38% expressed a satisfaction level of 80-90% and 13% expressed a satisfaction level of 90-100%. An average score of 4.19 (out of 5.0) was given by the participants in responding to the question if they will recommend this workshop to their colleagues.

During the Valedictory session, Chief Guest, Prof. Mahesh Tandon pointed out that the winning designs had all adopted configurations that were better equipped to withstand earthquake induced forces and they had also given due consideration to climatic, functional and aesthetic issues that are the hallmark of good architecture. Prof Sudhir K. Jain advised the participants to strike a balance in between the requirements of earthquake resistant design and the host of design considerations that they normally consider in their architectural design exercises. He appreciated the overall quality of the designs and advised them to take care in their architectural decision making to ensure a sustainable built environment.

The workshop was sponsored by:
 

For further details please contact:

Cdr Suresh Ailawadi, Retd,
asuresh@iitk.ac.in, nicee@iitk.ac.in
Contact no.: +91-512-259 7749, +91-9450162502