Tutors: Catherine Desai, Melissa Smith, Kruti Shah
Students: Anagha Anand, Aneez Mohammed Kooliyattayil, Apoorva Bhamare, Chandra Shekar Subramanyam, Kunal Barve, Nessa Phillip, Sahil Gandhi, Samruddhi Dhawale, Vihaan Murthy
SAATH Charitable Foundation | Contractor | Urban Resilience Collaborative
Behrampura, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
Wind Tower
This course offered students a hands-on opportunity to build and install a retrofit for a building in Behrampura, contributing to the broader study of urban resilience. The retrofit was based on learnings from design proposals from CEPT’s Resilience Thrift Studios conducted in 2023, 2024 and 2025 in conjunction with SAATH Charitable Trust and residents of Behrampura and Vatva. Students have fabricated a 1:1 prototype of a ventilation and light tower in CEPT workshops and then installed it on-site. Following installation, climatic sensors will be placed in the building to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention over the next year. The project explores how design can offer simple, beautiful, and transformative solutions to complex, technical urban challenges.
The team organized an open exhibition for the residents of the settlement, inviting the wider community to engage with the project. The display featured physical models, including smoke test models, through which students demonstrated and explained the proposed design interventions. These interactive explanations helped communicate how the interventions would influence ventilation patterns and improve spatial conditions within the settlement.