Student of SMEF’S BRICK school of Architecture Amay Raskar wins the first honorable mention in Charles Correa Gold Medal Award 2022

September 12, 2022, Pune: Charles Correa Foundation held its Annual Award ceremony for the most outstandingon Undergraduate Architecture Thesis pan India. It was held s the memory of the 92nd Birth anniversary of its founder Ar. Charles Correa.  This Award ceremony was held in presence of this years’ Jury of esteemed Architects – Kapil Gupta (Serie Architects), Rohan Shivkumar (Architect, Urban designer, film-maker), Meghal Arya (Co-founder, Arya Architects), Suhasini Ayer (Co-founder, Auroville CSR Trust) and Arthur Duff (Mentor + Principal Architect, Praxis Architects), where they mainly looked for entries that consider the site and context of the proposed project with clarity in formulation and addressal of real-life issues.

The evening witnessed one of the proud moments for Amay Raskar, from SMEF’s Brick school of Architecture, Pune who won the first Honorable mention this year under the guidance of Ar. Ninad Rewatkar. The project titled “AI + X Paradigm Research Centre” an insightful proposal from environmental research center foregrounds the computational intelligence, building diagnostics software as a tool to enable and evaluate passive design strategies while creating a vibrant urban realm for users and the city. The project deploys a set of procedural transformations to a generic volumetric grid of programs. The addition and subtraction  modules is rationalized by computational optimization, for daylight penetrations, thermal mass efficiency and cross ventilation, besides efficient organization of institutional programs. The typological repetition of elemental public space building which generates surprising porous building with human scaled Green terraces and open to sky voids which facilitates visual connectivity across the campus.

“Amay’s design was a fusion of traditional climate responsive strategies activated by Artificial Intelligence. SMEF’s Brick School of Architecture believes that technology can be intelligently harnessed for leveraging vernacular values. It grooms the students to leap into the future with their feet rooted to the earth.” Dr. Poorva Keskar

 The Charles Correa Gold Medal is an award initiated in 1998 by the Indian architect and urbanist Charles Correa. The medal recognizes quality and talent among young students of architecture for their undergraduate thesis project in a first professional degree course. The Charles Correa Foundation (CCF) administers the Gold Medal annually. Initially the award was open only to Mumbai and Goa architecture colleges, but from 2022 forward, CCF invites all colleges across India. This year, the Charles Correa Gold Medal focused on thesis projects that addressed climate concerns through architecture design. Charles Correa coined the phrase ‘Form Follows Climate’ and often said “to build in India is to respond to climate.”

The outcome was a collaborative effort of the SMEFs Brick School of Architecture’s Team of diverse sustainable Design expertise by Ar.Vinita Lulla. & Principal Dr.Poorva Keskar.