 Dear all, a very warm welcome to the Havel's Insignia presence, edX, a series by Real Diplasmaster class. Friends, edX Talks is a unique initiative dedicated to facilitate the development of an ecosystem for world-class designers in India. The one-of-a-kind architecture and design talk show aims to enable the process of collaboration with the best in the industry so as to position architects, designers, and manufacturers as partners offering complete solutions and not as may providers of a product or a service. I'm Sapna Srirvastava, Editor of Real Diplasmagazine, and let's begin with a brief introduction of Real Diplasm. Can we have the AVP? The stalwarts of Indian real estate industry have chosen to do just that by showing others the way to finding opportunities, even amidst a crisis. By showing the world how to go about delivering on promises, even amidst adversity. Success doesn't just happen, it happens by design. By pushing the boundaries, by raising the bar. It's days of creating a vision and nights of bringing it to life. Knowing that pictures are worth a thousand words and every word makes a difference. It's doing the research, trusting your instinct and finishing what you started. For the past 17 years, Real Diplasm has been turning obstacles into opportunities, keeping the industry informed on the latest developments in waiting to inspire debate and discussion. The perspectives of industry leaders, hard work and achievement, keeping the industry connected is what we are built on. This is what we are building, Real Diplasm, and we lead the way. So friends, this was a brief snippet of what Real Diplasm is, its products and its initiatives. And now moving on to the program of the day, I welcome Mr. Vivek Yadav, senior vice president, Havers India Limited, to share his views of this edX series presented by Havers Signia. Let me give a brief profile of Mr. Yadav. He is an industry veteran with over 31 years of experience in electrical and automation. Having worked in all boomkins from residential, commercial, industrial and infrastructure, he has extensive experience in products and solutions from circuit protections in low voltage and medium voltage to automation in industries and homes. Mr. Yadav is currently heading Havers Domestic Circuit Protection Electrical Wiring Accessories and Home Automation Business, along with projects and enterprise business, which cuts across all business verticals in Havers. Mr. Yadav, I hand it over to you now. Thank you Sapna, thank you so much. Okay, so this series of edX, we restarted after a brief break because of the pandemic. We've already had three international designers and today we have a very good personality, an Indian personality who's achieved a lot in this field and of course Sapna will be introducing him shortly. Before that, I would like you to know a little bit more about Havers and also a bit more about this program and why we have this program. So before I give more details on that, I would request Sapna to run Havers AV to show, tell you what Havers is all about. It's not just a few product lines, a plethora of product lines that we have in this industry where we serve not just residential customers, but industrial infrastructure customers as well. So Sapna, can we have the AV please? For more than six decades, Havers India Limited has been focusing on building a better future, a future where technology is used to drive progress, improve business outcomes and create a better quality of life. Today, Havers stands tall in the FMEG sector as a major power distribution equipment manufacturer with a strong global footprint, owing to its innovative future-ready products for a wide spectrum of applications. With the acquisition of Lloyd in 2017, Havers has made a foray into high-potential consumer-durable segment with offerings of air-conditioners, LED televisions, washing machines, refrigerators and dishwashers. The new synergy further complements the brand's deeper-into-homes vision. Havers owns some of the most prestigious global brands like Crabtree, Lloyd, Standard and Rio. Its global network constitutes over 5,000 professionals across its offices. As part of its Make in India philosophy, Havers is manufacturing 97% of its products in-house. With 14 state-of-the-art, fully automated manufacturing plants located across India, Havers offers superior quality and globally benchmarked products to its customers. Havers has set up a large distribution network to set new benchmarks in prompt delivery and service to customers. Over 11,000 dealers, 150,000 retailers and 700-plus Havers Galaxy exclusive brand showrooms across the country are helping customers to choose on its wide range of products. Havers has a robust supply chain management system with 31 warehouses located in Band India. The meticulous forecasting and demand-planning delivers seamless tracking system. Havers is the first FMEG company to offer doorstep service, offering a seamless post-purchase experience. It has the largest service network with 800-plus service points covering 441 towns, 247 across India. Havers Centre for Research and Innovation, CRI at Noida with a team of highly qualified engineers and designers continuously work towards creating differentiated and innovative products while adhering to stringent quality norms at par with international standards. Havers products are certified by nationally accredited laboratories such as CRI and ERDA. Havers has a strong in-house IT vertical which develops innovative technology platforms to support its robust service and supply chain management system. Growing together is ingrained in the ethos of Havers and has resulted in it launching many innovative and profitable schemes for its dealer community. Havers has strong credentials in B2B and large government projects as well such as lighting up Kolkata railway station and partnering with NBCC India Limited to beautify and transform the night view of India's heritage monuments like Omayustu as it believes in the philosophy of spearheading the progress of the nation without ignoring the past. Havers has taken giant strides to create an innovative world full of possibilities not only for itself but also for all its channel partners and customers with a commitment to improve people's lives and help create a better global society Havers is inspiring the world and making a difference. There are a number of product lines that we take into our customers and taking this to customers would not be possible without the help of the influencer community. So last year when we were debating how to engage with the specified community we came up with this idea of creating a platform, a program called Havers Insignia and under this program we said we will bring this community together for the benefit of creating an ecosystem benefit of all the influencers, our customers where we not just bring them together share knowledge, engage with them and create an ecosystem where there is a development of this community development of the interaction between industry and the influencer community. We are going to use a 4I framework for this when I say 4I means incubation, interaction, influence and innovation and under these four heads we will create properties, one such property is edX which is under the interaction amongst the 4I and the other would be in the form of innovation contest redesigning of cities, creating monuments from the ruins or white papers or ear books which would have the top of the line projects outstanding projects which could form part of this and these trend books and white papers would be used by the community for reference point for future trends. So these four platforms that we are creating edX as I said is one of them would be of course dealt with partners like reality masterclass something like ear book which will have annual publication for cutting edge design ideas, innovation and viewpoints which would also set the agenda for design themes for the coming year which will also have globally benchmark products by reading specifiers across the globe. Similarly, white papers would be used for educating audience to bring light, bring to light a new or different perspective dealt deeper into issues, trends and policies which could be related to residential and commercial infrastructure causes that experts feel strongly about and deep dive into their implications and benefits. Similarly, when I said contest it could be redesigning a new city it could be looking at historical monuments in a different manner altogether and post COVID how the social architecture is changing how the norms today for developing new architecture are changing in the new scenario and I said reusing the ruins how you can create monuments out of them. We are also looking at rewarding the best in the specified community how their work could be recognized so there would be awards as well. So this is the overall program as we have envisaged and we would be working closely with an invited set of specifiers who will be part of this program and of course with the involvement of the larger community we will take this program to this entire community over the period of time. Today it is virtual as things improve it will be in physical format as well. So this is from my side Sapna let's take the program forward back to you. Yes that's correct Mr. Yadav it is fine for collaboration between the entire community the stakeholders of the design and building construction fraternity including the end users. So thanks Mr. Yadav for sharing that brief on various HAVALS initiatives in this direction including this first of its kind design talk series and also for setting the tone of the day. So as you rightly said now let's bring on stage the star of the day joining us is architect and urbanist Madhav Raman co-founder of New Delhi based design practice Anagram Architects. Let me give a brief introduction of our speaker architect established in 2004 Anagram Architects is an internationally recognized top emerging practices in the world with a commitment towards delivering BP and textual designs that encourage sustainable lifestyles. Madhav's interest in cultural histories and urban economics adds depth to his practice as he brings insight and experience in transit, urban ecologies, multidisciplinary strategies and new technologies to the projects. Over the years the practice has garnered much international acclaim and has featured in the International Architecture Biennial 2010 in Rotterdam and Biennial of Design 2012 held in Slovenia. So that was a brief introduction of our speaker of the day, architect Raman. Thanks for being here with us today. I hand it over to you now. Thank you. Thank you so much, Apna. Thank you also HAVALS and thank you all really for taking the time out to listen to me. I'll just share my screen. Am I visible? Is the screen visible? Yes, you can see. So thank you for the opportunity, like I said, and the kind introduction. I'm a partner in a practice called Anagram Architects and we've been in business now from 2004 officially, but really speaking the story started a little while earlier when Webhav and I were friends in college. So I'll tell you a little bit about ourselves as we go along. I've titled this talk Design for the Proto-Cities Disaggregations of the Future. So I look at the subtitles first. I think disaggregation is like a complex way and perhaps a slightly less negative way of saying falling apart. And thanks to the pandemic, I think this idea or notion of things around us falling apart has become quite relevant and many of us have these notions fill our heads. But I'd also like to think about how we live our lives. You see, architecture is considered urban practice. It's meant for urban spaces. And therefore, very many times architects tend to think of the urban as an ultimate final state of living. Whereas my argument in this talk is really speaking going to be that there never really is a single end resulting city. Cities are better understood in stages of development and therefore the idea that designs and architecture and architects and urban designers are involved in the making of a proto-city that it is always just short of being that ultimate city that we all seem to envisage purely because that ultimate view keeps changing. So let me start with a little bit about instead of starting off by talking about how we are falling apart let me start by how Webhav and I got together. So we met in 1996 in college. We became very close friends. We did a lot of theater while we were in college and then that deep friendship evolved into a business partnership where we decided to start anagram architects around 2001. By 2004, we had formalized the firm and we were practicing and that's how we've continued in the past 20 years. So what I'm going to tell you is basically based on my understanding on what all we've been doing in the past 20 years and what that means for us. I'm also going to in this talk therefore project for another 20 years. So a lot of what I'm going to say is going to span 20 years in the back and 20 years forward and I'll hope you stay with me on that journey. So just around the time when we got together really speaking in many ways the world started growing apart. Now this is a snapshot. In 1990s there were 174 countries if you opened an Atlas by about 2000 because of various geopolitical conflicts that number had increased to 195. So you find 195 flags in the UN in 2000. But if you were to take an internet search right now and find out how many country internet domains because now you realize post-pandemic even more so that space is no longer just the physical space is also the virtual. So how are divisions in the world happening in the virtual is that there are 250 country internet domains in 2021. So now that to me is a huge change if you just look at the past say 25, 30 odd years. And architecture in various ways has responded in an evolutionary way to that. So if you were to look at global architecture and the architecture of Sir Norman Foster or Richard Rogers in the 90s or if you start now looking at the other more global practices like that of Zaha Hadid architects or the Archingels group through the past few decades you've seen that architecture has become more urban. It's become more global. It's definitely more high tech and there is an emphasis on architecture being cool. So if you were to look at the 70s and 60s there was a strong notion that architecture was solving problems and now that has kind of been replaced with this idea that architecture not only has to solve problems it has to do it in a cool way. So there's a certain say cultural traction that architecture seeks in being cool. But the fact that architecture is in cities means that urbanization is actually what all of us should also be looking at and if you look at the urbanization in the past 20 years across the world it's really not an urbanization. There is actually a destabilization of rural space in the world and there is a deruralization by exodus. So there are mass movements of people in distress who are moving away from rural environments into city environments, city like environments and they're not doing this in the traditional way that we imagine that my urban migration happens seeking opportunity. It's very often means it means to escape distress. So you have three types of such communities that spring up as population segments and constituencies and demographics and so on so forth which are these three the ethnic refugee the climatic refugee and the livelihood refugee. The livelihood refugee of course is the one that has been of most recent concern during the pandemic. So it's my argument that as things stand in 2021 we are actually now looking at ourselves as being a post-globalized world. So we've gone through colonialism, gone through liberalization, become part of a global economy, a global space but now we've reached the point where things are starting to break apart and we are post-globalized. So one is trying to discover what that post-globalized reality is like and is going to be. The second is we are hyper-connected. So from the point that we were trying to take steamership boats from Europe to Asia during colonial times to now where we are thinking of building hyper-loops physical communication has changed radically but also the virtual communication has completely exploded. So we are connected in so many different socio-cultural economic ways and yet there are certain barriers to physical connections that are now happened post-pandemic and of course the reality that we can all as a human species cannot escape anymore is that we are well and truly climate-changed. So what does this mean in terms of actual way things are right now? So you'll all see that there's a general tendency in a post-globalized reality that all nations seem to be clustering around these three ideas of ethnic nationalism, economic nationalism and ecological nationalism. That is the kind of ecological assets that a country owns or is it basically the assets of ecology that fall within the territorial boundaries of a country are now more and more becoming being thought of as assets that belong to that country and can be exploited by that country whereas as we all know ecology does not pay any respect to national boundaries. Connected silos we are hyper-connected so we are getting more and more introverted in our ways of living we are becoming more gated more guarded about our neighbors post-pandemic of course the term bio-bubble has become very frequently used but equally we are trying to create pockets of global economic activities that are cut away from the local economy so we are trying to create ideas of free trade zones while emphasizing a certain self-reliance and self-containment of national economies and of course now more and more when Wi-Fi at a certain level is being handed out free but even there in cafes and so on so forth you'll start finding that hotspots and online zonings are being created in terms of how we are able to access the internet. In terms of climate change finally we are looking at biospheric breakdowns and these involve things that are coming out of the ground so geospheric depletions things that are being put into the atmosphere pollution so atmospheric ground clouding hydrophysioric mayhem so sea change tsunamis sorry not tsunamis but huge super storms rains that cause urban flooding these sorts of things in the hydrosphere and of course we are losing species by the minute so there's huge biodiversity loss. Let's look at India closely India as a population in the past 20 years has basically been stabilized as we are contributing about 15% of global population and we'll continue to do so for the next 20 years but if you look at the rate at which population has increased we've added a third of our population in the past 20 years but we don't intend we're looking at a declining population possibly by 2050-2055 we'll probably have a stabilized population of 1.6 and decline post that. So how does this population live so as you can see in the past 20 years there's been a shift of about 15% of population to so called urban areas now my argument is there's no such defined understanding of something that is purely urban. Most of India is living currently and has been in situations of being almost cities so the gray band in the middle is the extent to which we can define urban so some of us put a very high value on you know the metropolitanism of a city or the cosmopolitanism of a city saying that okay if it has Wi-Fi it is urban by definition that urban commerce is possible so then you have to dip into the rural bandwidth so there is this expanding band of what we call almost cities and what I call proto cities and this is a short of what that looks like so this is what India's urbanization is like it's a lot of in-betweens with clusters around some things that are the most evolved form of city living in that region and therefore you'll find urban settlement is actually fractalized settlement of this kind so this is a Google Earth image of a stretch from Delhi to Himalayas which for all intents and purposes for a city like Delhi is the closest form of nature, pure nature that we have our reserve forests in the Himalayas so you'll see this entire range of different proto cities and different stages of evolvement evolution spread across the entire valley of the Ganga right up to the foothills of the Himalayas and this is what it looks like from the air so this is a photo of Dwarka but any city of any size in India whether it is a small town or district headquarters or even the capital of the city which is the second largest urban agglomeration in the world you'll only find not more than 30% of it can be correctly called formal where people are living in stable conditions which are part of their master plan they are participating in formal economic activities not more than 25-30% of any urban settlement in India has this whereas a burgeoning big amount of 70-75% actually live in a disarray of informality in the middle which brings me to my city which is New Delhi which is why I define it as the big cheese because it's like cheese there's a plan which accommodate very many numbers of our citizens in urban villages slums in various forms of informal settlement and occupations whereas the policy and the legal terms with which one interacts with the city is restricted to only 25 which is the cheese part of the cheese and not the whole part of the cheese and this is the end result of this form of city making and city building is that we end up in these situations where try as we might even though we know how bad air pollution is for all of us regardless of where we live in our city we are not able to control it so Delhi continues to be called the big V's it's not only the big cheese and that's essentially because we are now dealing with collective problems from which we are kind of not being able to think our way out of so with that I like to show you some 6 or 7 of our projects very quickly pointing out certain specific things that we learnt help us now start thinking what about the future of Proto city what is going to happen in the next 20 years in our cities and settlements really I don't want to keep calling it cities so this is a project that was we did in the mid 2000s was very early in our practice and we this is a small office it's 50 square meters 5 meters by 10 meters at the edge of Sardarjan Sardarjan enclave extension which is essentially a formal colony part of the master plan but it sits on the edge of a part of the city beyond a park which lies Humayunpur which is an urban village which is about say 750 years old but finds no part in the master plan and therefore there is this kind of edge of a city a lot of these projects that I show you are in various ways built on edges because that's where you discover the most about the nature of the spaces on either side of the edge so this is a certain edge we have in our city between a formal city and informal city our site occupied the corner site over there you've got to see in black immediately you know what one notices over here if you can see my mouse as it travels is that there is this red line this thin red line is a very important part of circulation over here which leads which is the common ground for the common place used by both the informal city and the informal city so in many ways this corner is activated by this movement of people so it was very important for us to device a design that was very very conservative gave maximum flexibility in plan because a tiny plot but would respond to the movement of the people on the street this also happened to be the western side of the site the southwestern side and therefore gained the most amount of heat so we knew we needed to build that facade with this sort of intelligence and this is what we came up with principle it's a very simple I mean it's a simple organization of masonry which is a 6 brick module sorry a 6 brick module that turns 360 degrees every floor but the structural strength of masonry comes from the fact that actually masonry while we were taught in college was a monolith masonry is actually a weaving of bricks together and just like a weaver would be able to change the weave pattern it's possible to do that in architecture quite effectively to achieve your purposes which includes perforation for that interaction it moves a certain texture on the wall that is kind of interesting when you walk past it and it causes a lot of very interesting interaction between the inside and the outside based on light ventilation and thermal comfort so these are a few photos a diametrically opposite view can be taken on a different sort of edge so this is something we finished just before the pandemic and this is a completely introverted sense of a urban plot in a similar condition there the road's edge was with a very very busy road very close to an industrial estate a lot of truck movements a lot of heavy pollution vehicles movements on that road and therefore the family wanting a sort of introversion we call this a cleft house because cleft means to break through and basically what we've done if you look at the volumes of the house now the reason I talk about this is simultaneously in the past 20 years there's been a change in which our families also find themselves so this was usually plots of land we imagine are occupied by single families but we all know that these number of residential units multiply and as the generation changes we've now got in India a form of a halfway between a joint family and a nuclear family so many generations living together on a single plot but living fairly independent socially independent lives of each other so an introverted house came to us as an idea and so cleft was born and the idea here is to create a lot of interaction a lot of light and ventilation this is a naturally ventilated space across a courtyard which is similar to a traditional courtyard for a lot of interaction between the families and very often these are things we you know bedrooms we usually have three blank walls and a small window because we feel we want television and so many other things in a bedroom but very often now with technology you don't need these so you can actually enhance the interaction that people have within a house to kind of look at how our evolving families play themselves out this is a plot in Greater Noida again at the edge of what is a formal city growing city this is a very edge of Delhi and this is an artist who hired us to design a studio and she has a very particular question for us she said why must I design a studio like a cave why can't it be a much more open where people can see me make my art rather than just a production space for my artwork and she works on sculptures that are very very large as well as art pieces that are very very small it's also very strain-sided you know trapezoidal and we came up with this idea that usually we stack residences one on top of the other but what if a single volume could offer multiple spaces based on a vertical uncoiling of space so we actually had a ribbon of concrete that looked around itself and moved away from the neighbor's wall here and it was supported by a steel structural framework with a lot of openable openable facade on it and this is what the space looks like the picture on the right is her residential area on the top floor and the picture on the left is the main studio space and you know the primary thing is this wall which actually opens up to lead because that's the side from which the monsoon wind comes in so this actually helps keep so this is not an air conditioned space at all in Greater Noida but it's constant it has the ability to keep the temperature inside constant thanks to the thick thermal insulation by the allowing ventilation to be brought in to different parts of the building socially this sort of open living has instigated something in her and Anita Dubey our client has started holding weekly cinema shows in her front lawn she doesn't have a boundary wall as you can see and she's happy to have her neighbors who are also artists come and sit and view movies together in her front lawns this photo on the left is a staircase that just evolved out of the geometry of the building when she became the curator of the Kochi Biennale couple of years back she invited us to design a pavilion at the Kochi Biennale which we named Koodaram and it's an interesting site because it's a abandoned industrial site now as our cities evolve the nature of manufacturing changes we'll soon start finding a lot of sites that are brownfield where we have to develop with a sense of history with a sense of ecology and with this idea that large parcels of land are now being re-released into the real estate market with these sorts of locations that are in the middle of the city and we came up with this idea of creating a pavilion that was completely knocked down disassembly this was built during the course of the Kerala floods by the way and I must commend the team that worked through the floods in order to build this but the idea here was what if architecture was not permanent what if it was something that would be structurally kept up for a year or two disassembled because as climate change poses a threat Kerala floods being an example a lot of our architecture needs to explore impermanence and impermanence, temporariness and dislocation in much more interesting ways so this is a pavilion for 450 people to enjoy performances in air-conditioned environment and 650 to enjoy it in a peripheral sort of way the whole pavilion opens up it's half underground half above ground it's half covered half uncovered so there are lots of binary arguments of spaces that are being established to create a lot of interesting uses and multi-utilities of the spaces used for seminars it was used for performances for art installations it allows people to look in on a performance without necessarily turning their cell phones off or not enjoying the fact that they are amongst the branches of these very old trees and you know a lot of us when we think of cities always imagine ourselves as being very permanent owner owned people who have stake in a city but a large number of our city dwellers don't have stake and they live on the peripheries in slums and one of the primary ways of distinguishing that is access to water and therefore to sewage so this is a project called project Samman that we started off in 2012 working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the municipal authorities of Bhubaneswar and Qatar and the idea was to build around 120 community toilets for various slum settlements 120 slum settlements across the twin cities for which while we were designing we realized that if you want to create situations where open defecation is discouraged we need to understand what are the gaps in user experience for community facilities please understand community toilets are stopgap at the end of the day all of us deserve our own personal toilets there are huge advantages for that but as stopgaps how do we work to improve the experience of using community facilities so that we discourage the use of open I mean for the discourage open defecation for which we understood a lot of studies with settlements in Odissan, Qatar where we evolve the design based on what exactly how people actually defecate what is their defecation behavior what is their ablution behavior when do they go to the community facility how does that tie up with their daily work cycle how do women behave in community facilities how do men behave in community facilities and to evolve a robust design where we are able to build an innovation for example one of the mandates given to us was to encourage hand washing we realized that a lot of men firstly a lot of people in Odissan don't feel necessarily clean after washing their hands but after using a community facility but also feel the need to wash their feet so we needed to design hand and foot washing structures for that to encourage men to wash their hands after urinals we provided washing facilities just above the urinal and the runoff was used to wash the urinal and we evolved these now these are being rolled out in Qatar in Odissan they've been used quite enthusiastically and we're very very satisfied with the results of our innovations in this I'm also part of we are also contributors to a collective called PAKTA.in and you can check that out online wherein we try and build base of the line infrastructure in villages this is an example of a community toilet built in a small village outside Bodh Gaya called Burgaapur this is meant for women and children and as you can see here the innovation was to actually create masonry units out of waste material picked up from Bodh Gaya plastic waste that the tourist center generates and use that as compression masonry blocks to build the toilet we are currently in the process of building an Akhada in a village called Malakpur near Meerut which is extremely rural sugarcane territory the people here have a certain connection to the soil their agrarian but a bulk of them the sense of body building has resulted in them getting caught up in a lot of urban crime a lot of urban politics and there is a cycle wishes cycle that the elders in that village wish to break so they felt that if we could give mat wrestling facilities in the village it would help keep the youth within the village not take them to the city so our work is in process it's in progress we are trying to create a community Akhada which also doubles up as a panchayat space which creates a community facility that is self maintained we intend to make this out of earth a rammed earth because a lot of their rituals of soil preparation the pehelvans so the pehelvans are expected to build this facility themselves final project it's at the edge of human construction and nature there is a place called Angadi which was a washed out mango orchard in the foothills of Uttarakhand every rain there is exposed to landslides so we need to stabilize this the idea here was to build a resort an eco resort that would work off the principle that this land was originally forest you try and rewild it by stabilizing the soil the water the way it moves and then locating the places to stay within it rather than the other way and this is what it resulted in in the fact it allows you to spend time in this resort absolutely as if you were in the middle of a forest views like this and just to round it all off I'd like to end by saying that I feel in the coming 20 years we're going to be looking at streets our own streets in our various towns and cities as sites for commerce and entertainment and sites from which there's a lot of economic production and consumption happening it's not happening more it never had but now that's coming more to the front resource generation like electricity water supply is going to be more disaggregated we're going to have to look at not centralized systems of generation and dispersal but more disaggregated systems closer, smaller geographical units that self sustain and this the idea of material moving from things that are plastic to things that are ceramic what do I mean by that there is a lot more emphasis now in trying to look at semi-conductivity so on and so forth the idea is that a ceramic material is something that can get back to its nature of being part of the soil faster rather than getting into systems where we are extracting rare metals from the geosphere and processing it to put a lot of atmospheric pollution in the air to get a high-energy embodied energy product like plastic ceramics can evolve in much more lower embodied energy the next 20 years are going to be very vocal we've all got devices that allow us to create our own content this is where a lot of design and architecture needs to focus on multiplicity of ideas and the ability to project those ideas the last two are really go hand in glove we are now looking at more decentralized disaggregated place in which we create resource reservoirs for communal advantage rather and a lot of that is going to be self-built rather than have developers and agencies we are going to have to look at people doing things themselves, building themselves we need to think of ways of facilitating that even if that is with a profit motive because that's where the future lies so I will end with that this is the four of us now wherever I started it we are now joined by Shruti and Khyati please visit our website anagramarchitects or join us on Instagram and Facebook on the same channel and you will be able to follow our journey in the next say two decades or so at least if not more where we discover newer things about the nature of our urbanization and how ecology and technology tie into that I will stop there and I am happy to take questions Thanks architect, mother Raman for that very interesting presentation where you spoke about not only on a bigger scale the cities, the semi urban areas, how they are behaving where we should be looking out to make them bring within the formal arrangement of developing our cities as you rightly said many a times they are pockets of unorganized semi urban areas which do not get proper attention from the authorities as well as that is where the attention should be your case studies about the projects how passive design and technology and also the people life side has been kind of intertwined to come out with some fantastic design so design is not only about designing but also about many other factors like you spoke about and also in next 20 years as you rightly said we will be seeing a lot of changes happening so thanks for that wonderful presentation Mr. Yadav what do you have to say about that entire what we just saw Yeah Sapna I am really amazed at the diversity of projects that architect mother Raman's firm and the team is doing and it is really heartening to see this variety and I would say first and first and foremost that mother is the first Indian architect on our platform and seeing his work I actually would say that I did not know much about the firm and the work that they do I am really amazed and I am happy that he is the first Indian designer on our platform so thank you again mother for being here the first question which came to my mind while I was seeing the presentation was you design these buildings right from office to residence to museums and even toilets some of the buildings not everywhere is technology used in bringing wellness to the occupants to the environment and how the whole occupants and the whole structure how do they communicate with the environment is technology used there to make life simple easier convenient in these spaces and how do you use that technology actually you will permit me a little bit of time here because this is an area of particular interest in our practice I am the guy who is the geek so I am the techno nerd I am the guy who keeps urging moves towards technology I will give you a sense of what I have I think the Indian technological context is actually very very interesting in Europe and in first world nations technology has been led by innovation and defence and large scale industry in India it has actually been led by the idea of communication and entertainment so essentially the high tech work which is consumed by the end consumer is based on products that give them access to information communication technology city building and construction technology unfortunately in this country has stagnated to the point where it was introduced by the British in the 1920s we have not innovated on materials beyond that because after that we become part of the global cement based construction technologies we didn't have the push in the industrial thing to innovate into steel construction technology we have only just started and now therefore we need to do a lot of things simultaneously in order to achieve a certain up frontness because I am very very positive about the relationship architecture and technology have in the coming there will be one of the defence has been architecture and construction and city building is going to be one of the lead things where innovation will then impact other sectors like innovations and defence have impacted electronics and electricals and the worldwide web and so on and so forth so to answer your questions I think they have an umbilical connection it starts with the construction material it ends with the consumption of resources of business which is electrical resources whether it is fed by a photovoltaic off grid mechanism or whether it is fed by a on grid because we are looking at a hybrid of this at least for the next 20 years we are not going to completely get off a centralized system we are not going to completely get on to this unless there is a climate catastrophe we are not going to go off the grid so a lot of the interesting combinations there are very same applies to connectivity, home automation so on and so forth the way we are now consuming entertainment for example the way we are consuming content on the internet is soon going to start defining how we live our lives what we see as private public like I am facing my cupboard right now you guys all have blinders on you so a lot of how we look at our world around us is a large part of that is now being taken up with how it looks like on a screen we used to find television set design for news networks when we started in the 2000s for NDTV for Archduck and so on so forth and we find that a lot of the way people are now thinking of their spaces remind us of what producers used to talk about when they were producing television shows for news so there is a lot of this that we need to keep connected with environment I think it is important for technology now to play a role of connecting human beings and their notions of their lives their lifestyles to nature physically and a lot of that has to be a negotiated mediated because a lot of people have to be nursed out of ideas of comfort and convenience and be told that no there is value in doing things slightly differently maybe not just comfortable in a different way or convenient in a different way but is something that makes you empathize with another living thing that is not human and we see that now under lockdown people are treating their plants house plants like they were pets people are making connections with their morning jobs and birds that they see there are lots of these things that are happening that in a gym you don't have birds but if the gyms are floors and you are jogging in a park then you see birds and spirits so then you say oh it is a good thing I have this next to my home but then how many of us have that luxury so it kind of rolls back sorry that's why I said give me a little bit of time complex answer but I think there is a lot to be done basically that's true one question is according to you mother what are the top 3 trends that you would like you know top of the mind that comes in terms of sustainable technology that we are going to see going forward I think top 3 ok so the top most thing which is at an emergency crisis level we need to look at technologies that impact sewage and sewage and waste disposal in our cities and our settlements that are not cities also this is a crisis level because we desperately short on drinking water to be able to occupy these cities the second thing I think is of interest to Havel's for example I think at the second priority I would give is to technologies for sustainability in terms of electrical consumption I think are so far we've talked about petrol prices diesel prices clearly they've gone out of the bullet size of most Indians now is the time to start thinking intelligently about how we are generating transmitting consuming or even wasting electricity the third is actually got to do with content creation I think now before anytime earlier in human civilization we have a situation where more than a majority of individuals, individual humans have the ability to put content, create content for consumption by online content for consumption by other human beings the level of interaction is mind boggling and I think a lot of the logistics issues don't necessarily have to mean that we provide products to the end consumer a lot of the logistical issues will solve if we start imagining potentials or profit of making opportunities in providing ideas to consumers and especially if they are open-ended ideas that can then be built on open source types of platforms where financial benefits can also be distributed in a more amenable way because the disruption one sees in world politics right now is largely because of a huge inequality financially so I think these are the three areas that I would look at technologies for water efficiency for sanitation efficiency technology for energy efficiency and technology, the online communication the communication technology these are the three top technologies architect Madha Ravan says is going to change you know a lot of our way we are working and living going forward and rightly so we have had been able to you know collaborate with so many foreign architects only because of online communication which we wouldn't have caught up earlier you know we would have done a physical event and tried to bring as many experts possible you know my next question from our audience goes to both of you Vivek and Madha is about home as you know Madha mentioned earlier that homes have gone for complete transformation with work from home and especially in cities you know congested cities like Mumbai where you know it is a challenge of working from home with online studies of children going on in this so one is the transformation where do you see this transformation leading and what are the reinventions view and research in this segment we will start with you Madha well work from home is was actually an idea waiting to happen it's just basically being fast forwarded extremely quickly by the pandemic so I think that the basic change is a change in perception our own notions of home our own notions of privacy in a home have changed and the idea of a home as a capital asset I think because we've always focused on homes and their real estate value comes from their location in terms of transport transport transition so you have these notions of what a home is one of the important notions of it is something that is a capital asset that then gets handed down the generations that's family structures are going through a change so what you know if you look at it in any home now with four or five individuals having online sessions occupying different four corners even the home gets re-territorialized so for example I am now talking to you from what used to be our sense of a guest bedroom but honestly I don't foresee having that many guests anymore so unofficially it's become the place where I hold my video content far enough from the rest of my home I can no distractions but equally I have territorialized this so in effect it has my arrangement screen not too many people are allowed to really change this around so you know something as simple as that helps us understand the notional changes we are going through in our heads and that will give rise to more architectural opportunities to interpret those yeah sir your take on that yeah I think what is changing today is basically because a lot of people are suddenly forced to work from home because of this situation and as mother was saying that finding difficult to find that corner which can turn into an office there is no comfortable chair there is no comfortable table in the house a lot of bedrooms don't even have a working table so I think a lot of people now are thinking they can actually make their home suitable for working from home not just for them because there is not just one member there is a son or a daughter who needs space for studying online wife if she is working she needs space for working for her area and then husband so how do you get them in a house which is small so not just existing homes need to change even new homes which will be coming up designers have to think so my question would be to mother what is he thinking and what is he thinking when a new project comes up so our experience yeah let me just we are discovering things that our grandparents used to talk about when they used to reminisce about homes especially homes they left behind or homes they had been forced out of to come and forced to stay with us because their health wouldn't allow otherwise these are ideas of say for example the Barsati the balcony the veranda ideas of the Chandni there are spaces in Delhi homes that used to have an ability to not have any interference from your neighbor but you could spend your evening under an open sky and look at the moon there are some very because we are now I feel we are not cooped up in our homes I think we were cooped up in a certain lifestyle where we were caught in interiors we were caught inside a mall we were caught inside our gated community we were caught inside our home we emphasis was on safety security focus was on a large green TV now you mentioned different workspaces I was going to say across the generations the screen sizes have compressed so the eldest takes over the largest screen and the youngest does a whole lot more from a really small screen so I just feel that my perspective is we are now going to have to rediscover ways that have more social meanings for ourselves so that formal living room no one's coming in that they never were no one ever came if they were close enough to the family to visit they would use your informal areas they wouldn't use your formal you throw one party your particularly social one party a week now that's gone down to two parties in six months you know so there is that huge real estate piece called the formal living room that can be reinvented bedrooms you know you have this whole thing of a dresser like I said this is my this is a cupboard so you suddenly start discovering uses because the lighting here is the best and you know I have all the light coming on my face so you'll start discovering these uses for spaces and yeah so it'll be a fun ride I guess right mother so I mean one more experience I would like to share that we are seeing suddenly demand for you know retrofit automation coming in from a lot of people who have started working from home so that's one change we are witnessing and there will be many more trends that we will see which will be inspired by this and a lot of people still live in that hope that life will be back to normal and I mean it's already one and a half year gone in this situation we don't know how much more time so normalcy I don't know if this is the new normal or if this is the you know train to continue but I see that a lot of things will change a lot of habits will change and they will change for good okay so both our speakers agree that there is a lot of change in people's belief systems lifestyles that are happening we'll take one last question which is about you know buildings are getting taller and complexer which also includes high energy use with vertical transportation needs electrical needs so do you see that sweet spot between modern and complex buildings and low energy or energy efficient use is there a sweet spot mother yeah I think like my talk indicated I believe the sweet spot will be in that proto city in these various you know because we don't have a binary so you it's a question of land really speaking and how land is utilized to achieve densities now densities are defined by where you live and where you work and what how much part of the day you spend in each because that has an immediate energy outcome so we have now discovered that those of us who are now rich enough are able are engaged in tertiary sector jobs economic jobs are now it's possible for us to work literally from anywhere in the world we've discovered that it was always there but we've discovered it and it's now not so daunting an exercise okay I would argue therefore we will try and hunt for more meaningful use of our investment and we will not start hunting for these holiday homes and second homes and homes for investment and so on and so forth that will ease up the real estate market a little there will be correction but that will happen the question is now how do we start building new homes and offices and so forth so there is going to be a compression in commercial space people won't want that kind of real estate we now have to start rethinking redevelopment projects of how those large because commercial space in cities take up a lot of land because they require a lot of infrastructure trunk sewerage trunk electricity trunk parking these are big big demands so there's a lot of disaggregation there that needs to be thought through high rise living will always you see the thing is finally at the end of the day the value of the real estate results in how high you go if there's a crash in the real estate value the others won't work out you'll much rather hunt for new ground which is what will happen in most cities want to develop no one wants to become backward so if the point is as people who are involved in development are we focusing only on the biggest of the big cities or can we open up our view into seeing what can be done elsewhere you know and in that you will find various arguments that are from extremely low rise to extremely high rise and various stages in the middle so my sense is we're going to be a complex city with various individually simplistic ways of living you know okay okay so no need to go too high or too modern or too complex you know let's find out alternate solutions each city needs and one solution will not apply so let's have more choice on the menu that's right that's right Vivek do you see that you know how do you see the challenges and opportunities between modern and complex buildings and low energy I think you know the big challenge for any building coming up now is to you know have low energy usage efficient usage of space efficient usage of material any new building first the stats that today more than 50% of the electrical energy usage is in buildings be it residential or be it commercial and the big energy guzzler in these buildings is your lighting and AC door so these buildings will have to use technology to reduce that energy bill by usage of efficient lighting sometimes smart lighting connected lighting and even the air conditioning technology with better equipment with better technology they have to be very efficiently selected and designed so my view is that companies like us actually equipment will have to definitely play a big role in reducing that energy bill not just by way of making these equipment more efficient but also by encouraging alternate energy sources like solar of course it is being made mandatory by governments in most of the buildings at certain amount of energy has to come through but the specifiers have to play a big role our clients have to play a big role my leading question to Madhav would be I mean when you design spaces how much of stress you lay on let's say selection of lighting whether intelligent lighting is being used in your projects or not and of course how do you look at the total energy bill coming down for that particular building so what are you doing that as our architecture has evolved our design sensibility has evolved in the past 20 years you'll see that there's a strong emphasis on this idea of interaction with the outside we've never really believed in having a very solid divide between inside and outside and that has direct impact on light and on energy consumption on air conditioning so we've always felt that you know considering the diversity of climate the diversity of time of use for a long time now we've no longer been a society that goes to sleep at 8 o'clock so a lot of our daytime-night-time activities have to be reconciled with how this space interacts with light when it's available where cooler climate when it is available where pollution also drops excellent air quality luckily in Delhi these are times where we need to turn off these things and open up like right now there are no lights operating it's all operating out of daylight so we've always had this sense I think the critical jump coming forward we're going to make is like you rightly pointed out certain intelligence being built into these devices that can recognize occupancy so we have worked indirectly in that field in that we work very closely with an entity called Experiential Design Lab which is based out of Delhi and where we are looking at making smart spaces spaces that are self-aware so you have sensors RFIDs motion sensors, lasers infrared sensors that are able to count people understand behavior patterns you can feed these into algorithms and they can actually tie up with things like Alexa so if you have automation devices token instruction and they are able to also monitor occupation, time of occupancy patterns over a day, over a year you are able to start getting the build to make it not necessary for human beings to remember to put off lights anymore because that is our biggest feeling we just don't be lazy we don't do things even if we know that there's a protocol to be followed so if we can try and get buildings and spaces to become more smart and intelligence and self-aware we can do a lot to take that that entire headache off the human mind and move it into a more intelligent system more intelligent than human something that's artificially intelligent okay thanks that's fantastic so it is technology, design and lifestyle so these are all three interconnected and that was one very informative and interesting conversation that we just had so thanks architect Rahman and Mr. Yadav and I'm sure our viewers have you know some very valuable takeaways from today's session let me now bring on screen Mr. Remel Behl head for enterprise business, Abel Zindia Limited to give the thank you note of the day Mr. Remel Behl is the head for enterprise business and engages with architects, consultants, interior designers, industry, government and infrastructure and key commercial project stakeholders. He's an electrical engineer with 26 years of experience and he is his expertise lies in enterprise solutions, business development, strategic planning and sales Mr. Behl you had been listening to the entire conversation and presentation so you know how do you summarize that Good afternoon all wow what an interesting discussion first of all on behalf of Havels I think it's an honor and a privilege for me to be part of such a discussion and really to thank architect Raman for his views and his thoughts and whatever the projects and entities he shared with us I think this discussion has really opened up our minds on the cities in that present form falling apart and the need for a more globalized and hyper connected and the climate changed cities in the future so I mean the case studies which were shown like the Clefthouse project the Koodaran project the Akhada facilities especially the Eco Resort project were really eye openers in my view and each project in itself was a unique project and a memorable architectural experience I really like the unique approach and solutions which are proposed by architect Madhav and especially his thoughts on the need for hybrid systems on the need for reducing electrical consumption on the efficient use of electricity and also the use of technology for sustainable cities of the future so I mean we at Havels are also committed to providing such energy efficient electrical products and solutions for such global class projects and you know which will push the boundaries of architecture as well as technology so we at Havels look forward to working with architects such as Madhav Raman for such projects and really I feel that he is really shown us the way forward in the future I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the participants who have taken time out for this edX series platform and I would also like to thank the organizing team from Havels as well as from reality plus for all your efforts so thank you so much and have a great day Thanks Mr. Bahel for you know expressing that note of appreciation and sincere thanks on behalf of reality plus and Havels India to our speaker Mr. Yadav as well for being part of this session sharing your views as a solution provider and for that very interesting conversation with our speaker of the day most of all our sincere thanks to our awesome audience for being here sharing their time and sending in the questions which we presented to architect because of the limitation of time we cannot take much of the questions but you know I once again thank our speaker of the day architect Madhav Raman co-founder and principal anagram architect for sharing his knowledge with the Indian and global design fraternity so dear viewers to know more about reality plus do get in touch with Ms. Tripti Katiya publisher and business at realityplus at Tripti at exchange for media.com and also do keep watching this space as we bring to you yet another acclaimed design expert till then thanks and goodbye thanks architect Madhav Raman for being here with us we will you know stay connected for more collaborations thanks Mr. Vivek Yadav for initiating this series of collaboration between the industry thank you so much and thanks to our viewers