Location: Agarkar Nagar, Near Pune Railway Station, Opp. AISSMS Institute of Information Technology

Design Guide(s): Architect & Urban Designer Anuradha Shende, Architect and Urban Designer Vikrant Shinde

Principal Architect: Anmol Yogleela

Design Team: Jyoti Panchal, Brajesh Kumar, Rajshree, Swapnali Deshpande, Rutuja Patil, Mohd. Bilal Siddiqui, Deepak Tope, Aarti Desai, Pranali M Chiplunkar & Ujwal Mehra

Our proposal for a competition held in 2015 to design a housing project in Pune for employees of Indian Railways. The project was conceptualised by going through Housing and Urbanism strategies of Indian Architect Charles Correa and uses an unconventional design approach when it comes to Housing, where most of the housing schemes that were submitted by other Architect’s had high rise buildings, our design is much more on the ground and utilizes the area on land in very efficient ways, also, our scheme was the only one that was able to fit in Duplex Bungalows.

All bungalows and apartments have access from two sides, one from the road and the other from central landscapes which are totally free from vehicular circulation, this creates a very suitable space for children and senior citizens of the society. The moderate climate of Pune was considered while orienting these interlocking bungalow and apartment blocks and most of them avoid openings in the South to help create thermal comfort in most of the units.

A very interesting challenge for us was the Railway yard just behind our site. Our design incorporated a lot of buffer zones to handle sound and air pollution caused due to the presence of this yard. Apart from this, there was an array of trees that had to be retained, we were able to retain 95% of existing foliage, which was the highest percentage achieved in this competition.