While we’ve seen architects use wasted materials to construct buildings, never have we seen a complex use its own construction waste to build parts of a building. But that’s exactly what’s happened in the North India city of Kishangarh, where an innovative industrial complex has created earth-cooled floors and a stone screen facade using waste from the complex’s own construction.
The complex will serve as the main site for Stonex India, one of the country’s top marble manufacturers and suppliers, which explains why the company wanted to incorporate stone into its design. To do this, the stone screen was fabricated using a combination of leftover stone from a nearby rock quarry and actual stone wastage generated from the building site itself. The screen not only provides solar shading from the southeastern and western glares but also presents a sustainable alternative to wasting stone scraps.
What makes the complex even more eco-friendly, apart from the solar panel arrays, is that part of it is sunken into the ground, combating the hot and dry regional climate to stay cool in the warmer summer months and warm during the winter. Additionally, the build itself does its part to facilitate climate responsiveness through the concept of earth berming, which involves building a wall of earth around the outside of a structure to achieve passive cooling.
All in all, the building’s nifty design represents another fantastic way architects can reduce waste and save resources.
