Abstract
The depleting fossil fuel reserves and the constantly surging levels of atmospheric pollution have made the architects and building owners join hands to foster sustainable initiatives. A modest experimentation in a sustainable domain had been inculcated at SAINTGITS, a much sought academic institution at Kottayam, in the state of Kerala, India. The campus houses multiple high rise buildings and a plenty of other small structures. The iconic structure, the Central Lecture Complex (CLC) exhibits its uniqueness with an arc shaped plinth which houses 3 stories to accommodate several conventional lecture rooms, faculty cabins, sophisticated seminar halls and other essential amenity spaces. It provides natural shade to the SAINTGITS Amphi theatre, structured and maintained at the eastern side. The proposed green façade retrofit on to the East and the West facing walls of CLC has improved the indoor operative temperature and hence, an approximate 15% reduction has been estimated in the building cooling load. An additional 2 m high temporary parapet wall has been recommended on to the existing CLC to provide extended shading hours to the SAINTGITS Amphi, right from 14:15 h onwards. The comprehensive acoustic modelling of the latter has given promising results for the Reverberation Time (RT60), which is on par with the international standards for performance spaces - ISO 3382-1 and ASTM E2235. The analyses inferred that the state-of-the art design of the existing CLC and the proposed green façade retrofits will reduce the entire energy demand by 20% and it certainly will provide guidelines to similar structures at tropical metropolises.
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Varghese, J.T., Thomas, S., Herbert, J. (2020). A Sustainable Green Façade Retrofit for An Iconic Built Structure: A Case Study at SAINTGITS. In: Dissanayake, R., Mendis, P. (eds) ICSBE 2018. ICSBE 2018. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering , vol 44. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9749-3_37
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