A Life In Design Ar. Vinod Gupta

A veteran at building sustainably, architect Vinod Gupta of Space Design shares his journey of silent crusade much before it became fashionable to talk of conserving resources.

- Mridula Sharma

Working constantly and relentlessly to find alternative methods of cooling buildings in a cost-effective manner to designing and facilitating ergonomic furniture at competitive pricing, Ar. Vinod Gupta has dedicated his career to improving the consumption patterns and making the world a better place.

You’ve worked mostly on institutional scale. What has been your experience vis-a-vis acceptability and mindset?

I have worked on large as well as small scale and I have had greater success in applying new ideas to institutional buildings and campuses than to residential buildings, where decisions are personal and not always based upon logic.

Please explain some of the new concepts developed by you.

While working on an international competition for squatter settlements of Manila in 1975, one realised that apart from houses, the poor urban dwellers needed water, work, energy and food. We devised a system of using plants to deal with waste water and help produce energy and food. Over the years, I have tried to implement these ideas and though parts of this were implemented in several different projects, a complete system has been installed at the IIT Gandhinagar campus, in the last few years.

While working on a co-operative residential colony in Gurgaon in 1990, where there was no water supply and no natural drainage for the 23-acre site, it became clear to me that one needed to take some drastic measures. We devised a zero discharge solution that cost very little to implement and that conserved every drop of rain that fell on the site. This innovative system is now commonly used and called ‘rain water harvesting’.