Winning projects 2011 in Asia Pacific

This school project in the small village of Jar Maulwi, 35km northwest of Lahore, is an extension of the existing Tipu Sultan Merkez School, which has provided education for underprivileged rural girls for more than ten years. The new two-story building will provide seven new classrooms. The building was completed in March 2013 and is made from locally-sourced cob and bamboo. The structure is divided into two compact parts connected by a light gallery to mitigate earthquake risk.

A former textile factory and abandoned farmland on an adjacent block shall be transformed into a 1.4ha agricultural production site and retail outlet. The atrophying rural economy is reactivated in the context of modern urbanity, and elaborated in a remarkable way. The factory building is converted into an eco-supermarket, additional buildings, such as a restaurant and marketplace are integrated into the crop production by becoming agricultural structures themselves.

The 14-level commercial and retail building is located on the main boulevard of Malaysia’s planned city and federal administrative center, Putrajaya, 25km south of the capital, Kuala Lumpur. The building concept is based on a sophisticated, well-elaborated and integrative merger of eco-friendly state-of-the-art technologies appropriate for high quality use.

The primary focus of this group of initiatives is on construction as a vehicle for education and consolidation of a community using an architectural project rather than on the realization of a specific building.

The aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake is still visible in the city, which left more than 6,000 casualties and caused USD 100 billion in damage. More than fifteen years later, a number of buildings that were constructed quickly after the incident now require extensive renovation. The aim of this project is to upgrade an existing concrete structure using simple means. In five steps, the interior and immediate surroundings of the building shall be improved.

This project, 20km west of Dharmapuri in Tamil Nadu, lies in the southernmost part of the Indian peninsula. With a low budget, the project serves to improve healthcare in this hot and semi-arid rural region. The compact and small-scale building distinguishes between a high-tech medical core and a low-tech surrounding layer. Construction was completed in September 2011, and is reported to be functioning well.

A fundamental element of this school project, Sekolah Alam Baki child-friendly learning located in central Java, is its pedagogic concept that strongly respects children’s rights. A focus is laid on imbuing all elements of the school program with the theme of respect for nature, such as through the teaching of sustainable farming methods and the principles of hydroponics.

In the mid-1970s, a ring railway was established that circumscribed the extent of New Delhi at the time. Further extension of the passenger rail service was not integrated with other transit systems and has therefore been underutilized. The Changing Tracks: Re-imagining the Delhi Ring Rail project converts this spatial resource from a restricted mono-use barrier into a multi-use civic and traffic space within the urban fabric.

This housing strategy in Jakarta aims to offer an alternative semi-organized structure, addressing people otherwise living in informal settlements that continuously face severe flooding. At the same time the project promotes waste recycling and thereby helps address a major problem and cause of flooding in Indonesia’s capital of ten million inhabitants, where the congested canal system is jammed with waste.

Like many rapidly-growing cities with a prospering society, Beijing faces significant problems caused by rapid growth in private automobile traffic – and a further 1,800 cars are added to the city’s streets every day. The Auto-Mobile Beijing project aims to reestablish a bicycle culture in the former “bicycle kingdom” providing the potential to be a model for other cities with similar conditions.

This project targets the further development of Ulwe, a precinct of world’s largest planned city of Navi Mumbai. The modernist master plan was developed in the 1970s and revised according to aspirations for a globalized urban development in the 1990s. The Village, the City, and the Ecosystem reconsiders the monotonous past developments of the region that led to a rapid transformation of the area with little consideration of the existing landscape.

In underdeveloped settlements, a lack of sanitation is one of the major problems. By applying an additive strategy, this project in a resettlement area of Savda Gherva significantly improves hygiene and strengthens social cohesion within the local community by involving the residents throughout the process. A pilot project commenced in 2012 to provide off-grid sanitation to more than 1,500 people.