Reclaimed Wooden Floors

At AKDA, we have a thing for wood. In any form, wood is a fantastic material and we love to use it. More accurately, we HATE to waste it. I have been known to pick up scraps of wood at site and have the carpenters turn them into handles, name plates, even coasters and platters! Long story short, wood is sacred, it is provided by the earth and used wisely, it is by far, the most sustainable material there is.

Demolishing old buildings is part of our job on a regular basis. Typically, these old structures are between 30-40 years old and they have marvelous old wooden frames and doors. Rather than have them thrown away for scrap or being burnt by the site workers, we greedily harvest them. Nothing is allowed to go waste, especially since the wood that has had a quarter of a century to dry out is incredibly stable. Anyone who has worked with wood knows that is bends and warps and changes shape with the seasons. Aged wood does not have that problem and can be used for any number of applications, and looks especially good in one - flooring.

Wooden flooring is a bit of a fad these days, with hundreds of companies vying to sell plastic laminated planks to customers. It is cheap, and it looks cheap. Basically consisting of printed paper covered with a hard coating, it isn't wooden flooring. It is laminated flooring with a wooden pattern. If you wanted, they could print charlie chaplin movie posters on it, or swiss landscapes or photos of relatives you don't like. Anything, that you may want underfoot. Real wood flooring, though is a different animal. Real wooden flooring has grains that speak of the seasons, it varies in colour and it has character.

Wood that is removed from an old building comes in all sizes and normally varies in length as well. As a typical procedure, we have them all cut to 1" x 1/2" strips, leaving the lengths variable, so we can play around with the patterns a little bit. Coupled with a plywood base over a screed floor, this forms a robust flooring material. We generally put it in a part of the building where it adds to the character of the room. 

The photographs in these post are from our De Stijl House project in New Delhi. The owners have a strong sense of design and were more than happy to use the wood that was removed from the old building. We were even allowed to experiment with a unconventional pattern in the flooring, something that unfolds over the entire room, not just a repeating module.

If you have some left over wood and don't know what to do with it, send it to us. We'll make something splendid with it and then happily sell it back to you. Cheers.

India Art n Design: Bookshelf with an Attitude!

India Art n Design: Bookshelf with an Attitude!: By Priyanka Vikash 

Photography: Kabilan S & Amit Khanna.; courtesy AKDA

IAnD discovers how imagination meets sustainability

Bookshelf with an Attitude!

By Priyanka Vikash

Photography: Kabilan S & Amit Khanna.; courtesy AKDA

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IAnD discovers how imagination meets sustainability in simple design re-use giving rise to an innovative exhibition design component; courtesy Amit Khanna Design Associates, New Delhi.

An invitee participation in an exhibition, with an opportunity to showcase the firm’s prowess is something that every designer looks forward to. So one is accustomed to seeing large panels of images and pop-ups that speak of the philosophy and working of the design/architecture firm.  

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At the recently (Feb’13) held DesignxDesign’s 20 under 35 exhibition at Delhi, Amit Khanna Design Associates came up with a simple but intriguing twist to the regular exhibition panel. They decided to make their participation tangible via a spatial intervention instead of just another wall-mounted flat panel.

Bearing in mind the firm’s staunch and acclaimed philosophy of making regional specificity and sustainability intrinsic to the product and the design process, and its constant engagement with ‘suitable materiality and innovation, irrespective of appearance’, the firm decided to use their cherished first piece of office furniture – a bookshelf – as the innovative mouthpiece of all that they stand for.

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“The focus at AKDA is to deliver innovation that uplifts our environment, instead of allowing our built environment to be a mish-mash of private agendas,” explains Amit. “The bookshelf was repurposed for the exhibit staying true to our sustainable attitude, and secondly, the modular system design helps to demonstrate our design ethos.”

With just 9 sq. ft. allotted to the exhibition display, AKDA transformed the bookshelf from its regular avatar into one with multiple interventions that resulted in an outer frame and inner partitions, making it easy to assemble and dismantle. Freestanding and placed in a well-lit area of the exhibition space, the modular bookshelf successfully engaged viewers, who could walk around it. The idea here was to let the exhibit grab the spotlight and it did.

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A simple exercise of innovative thought and design application that served to take away the old chore of an exhibition installation that would become redundant in the future; and instead replace it with an exhibit ‘that would go back to use'. The bookshelf now wears an attitude!

Automated Warehousing Facility

Surrounded by a rapidly urbanizing village settlement, the 7 acre site is on the outskirts of New Delhi. The site’s existing rocky terrain posed a significant challenge to the spatial planning of the site. The project brief was to create a large warehousing facility that would be equipped with a high degree of automation. With the exception of the office block, the building would have minimal human occupancy. However, a comprehensive environmental and energy strategy became essential required to maintain habitable temperatures throughout the year.

Planned in 3 incremental phases, the 140000sqft structure is programmatically divided into 3 parts – the warehouse, the loading bay and the north-facing office block which is interlocked with the other two. This layout enables easy stacking of future expansion with no loss of efficiency in material/ man movement. Each block is designed from within, the individual requirements dictating the overall dimensions. The office is thin and narrow, facing the norththrough a glazed wall that brings in optimum daylight. The warehouses are largely square to enable efficiency, and the dimensions of robotic arms and stocking pallets dictate the spatial planning, including the 20’ high ceilings. The loading bay provides the interface between the two elements and also the exterior cargo area.

Delhi has anextreme climate anda severely dusty micro-environment, both of which contribute to making buildings notoriously energy-intensive in trying to cool down ambient temperatures to human comfort levels. Traditionally, walls were made dramatically thicker than required for structural integrity, with the intent that the increased thermal mass would minimize heat gain. In modern times, a single skin façade is simply not adequate to reduce the temperature and air-conditioning is mandatory.

Rather than overlay a conventional window-based punctured façade over the structural frame, the warehouse and loading bay are wrapped in a perforated brickwork screen.This screen shades a glazed dust barrier, recessed by 1200mm from the south and north facades, creating a buffer zone that cuts glare, servesas a utility zone and provides a high degree of passive insulation. The glazed barrier can be opened during good weather for ventilation and during extreme weather to allow for mechanical ventilation. The west facade is mostly blank with only a sliver of brick screen near the ceiling to permit evening illumination and the completely blank east façade faces the loading bay. The exposed brick unifies the various facades and minimizes the visual impact of the building on the surroundings.

Additionally, the building is set nearly 4m within the ground, allowing for the parking, mechanical and canteen spaces to be naturally illuminated while the adjacency to the ground provides thermal insulation. The surrounding site is sloped away from the subterranean floor, saving costly retaining walls and providing views from within. These sunken areas catch rainwater for harvesting which is diverted to a local well. The roofs are covered with reflective tiling to minimize heat gain and a slim courtyard between the office block and loading bay helps draw out hot air from within the building.

Post occupancy evaluation of the building shows a temperature differential of over 10degrees between the exterior and interior spaces. As if that wasn’t good enough, the light quality within the building is even, cool, bright, but without the glare. Which, in a climate like Delhi, is nothing short of a miracle.

Location

Village Anangpur, Faridabad

Client

Undisclosed

Typology

Commercial

Climate

Composite

Built-Up Area

1,40,000Sq.Ft.

Completion

July 2014

AKDA is part of "20 under 35"

Our firm has been chosen to be part of "20 under 35", an exhibition showcasing the work of 20 young Indian  designers below the age of 35. The participants are selected from the fields of architecture, apparel and textile design, graphic design and products. We are one of 5 architecture firms this year. Woo Hoo!

"20 under 35" is an intitiative of DesignXDesign and Alliance Francaise.

The exhibition is at the Gallerie Romain Rolland, Alliance Francaise at 72, Lodi Estate, New Delhi. It opens on the 7th of February and runs through till the 27th of February.

We will be there on the 7th at 6:30pm at the opening. See you there.

About the Exhibit

The Plane Wins

"The Plane", a floor lamp designed and manufactured by AKDA has won a citation in the Products Category of the IA&B Young Designer Awards. 

The light is conceived as floating planes, of wood and glass, alternating and revolving around a central axis, to craft light around itself.  As an object, the alternating voids aid in generating a dramatic pattern of light, augmenting the light quality of the space it is contained in. Envisaged as a composition of overlapping surfaces, The Plane shapes light form through its planar surfaces. Light is produced in multiple directions and reflected through the multiple layers of horizontal glass

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

AKDA has had an interesting 2012. We have wrapped up some successful projects and have broken ground on many more. We look forward to 2013 where we'll continue our quest to make great architecture. We would like to thank all our clients, employees, consultants, contractors and soon-to-be clients for supporting our love for making well designed buildings.

Have a Merry Christmas & a great new year!