The idea of the Ecotel was conceived by three JJ School of Architecture students, who won the first prize at a design contest for students of architecture and design for their creation.
This one’s the hotel with a difference. It’s an Ecotel. It not only has a golf course, suites, spa, entertainment zone and a health club but also rainwater harvesting units, solar tube collectors in every room cluster and biomass used for street lighting.
The idea of the Ecotel was conceived by three JJ School of Architecture students, who won the first prize at a design contest for students of architecture and design for their creation. The idea of an Ecotel — the eco-friendly, green hotel building — beat eight other teams, who fought it out for the top slot at the Saint Gobain Transparence-2009.
“We wanted to keep the architectural ethos of rural Maharashtra alive with the courtyard plan in every module, albeit in a more contemporary form,” Supriya Krishnan, a member of the group from Mumbai, said. “The creation is a self sufficient entity that provides a heavenly experience to the resident and is least harmful to the surroundings.”
The first and the second runners-up of the contest were groups from IIT-Kharagpur and IIT-Roorkee respectively.
The IIT-Kharagpur group had placed special emphasis on water and used it in building spaces. Row boats to ferry guests and luggage and water channels brought into the site to evade the problems of vehicular emissions.
The design made by the students of IIT-Roorkee had rooms in the shape of bubbles outside the main building, which were connected by tubes. Only non-conventional sources of energy were used in this plan made for the sea shore. “The water is circulated from the bottom of the sea using tidal energy to cool the rooms,” Shashwat Singh, from IIT-Roorkee, said.
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