The Architecture, Culture & Tectonics Research Group warmly invites you to attend their Seminar on Wednesday 6th March 2024 at 13pm, B38 Lenton Firs.

Applicability and scalability of a sustainable re-construction framework for seismic-prone heritage areas of Gujarat, India

 

 

 Abstract:

Vernacular housing in heritage settlements is liable to deterioration, damage and destruction due to disasters and human-induced hazards. This non-monumental heritage is mainly built by local inhabitants as an economical and affordable response to local climatic and environmental conditions. When located in seismic areas, this built heritage is at greater risk due to earthquakes posing a destructive and recurrent threat. Despite this, responses are usually triggered afterwards, lacking mitigation strategies to diminish destruction. The fastest and most common post-earthquake approach is to build anew, yet the most sustainable is to reuse, considering the building’s embedded energy and heritage significance. However, there is a lack of relevant documentation for culturally sensitive recovery and preparedness, repairs are usually costly and slow, and large numbers of affected constructions make damage assessment difficult. As a response to these challenges, and going beyond the usual aim of restoring ‘as before’, a new framework for re-construction was developed towards a culture of repair, reuse, adaptation and risk mitigation for the seismic-prone heritage settlement of Bela, a village located in the Kutch region of Gujarat, India. It is a fast, affordable and scalable approach to break the unsustainable cycle of buildings’ replacement and subsequent heritage loss using a combination of tools to capture social and built environment data, such as interviews, mapping, drone capture, photography and 3D laser scanning. The proposed framework could improve the chances of an effective response in case of an earthquake, enhance the design possibilities of reusing existing structures, and increase preparedness and resilience in local communities, suggesting institutional collaborations for its potential implementation in other seismic areas. The presentation will summarize the latest phase of this research project, which studied the applicability and scalability of this framework developed in previous phases, by creating a disaster risk management plan for Bela, a re-construction map and building a prototype, as a tangible example of repair strategies. More information and previous publications are available at: www.3d4heritageindia.com.

 

Dr Bernadette Devilat is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Nottingham (UoN), part of the Architecture, Culture and Tectonics Research group. She holds a PhD in Architectural Design from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL); and an Architect and Master in Architecture degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

Her research includes novel ways of improving heritage intervention in seismic-prone settlements, which started after the 2005 earthquake in Tarapacá, Chile, when she co-founded the Tarapacá Project, building a Community Library; as a prototype. She developed housing strategies via her MA, contributing to her work at the Heritage Reconstruction Programme of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development after the 2010 earthquake in Chile. She introduced advanced recording technologies to this subject in her PhD studies, continuing in research projects.

In 2016, she created a 3D laser scanning teaching cluster at UCL. Dr Devilat has presented her research at International Conferences, and published and exhibited internationally. She is a member of professional associations and a peer-reviewer. Dr Devilat is also the co-founder of DLA Scan Architectural Studio. From 2020 to 2023, she worked at the Centre for Architecture, Urbanism and Global Heritage at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), obtaining several grants to lead research projects as Principal Investigator.

Currently, at UoN, she is teaching and leading two research projects: 'Applicability and scalability of a sustainable re-construction framework for seismic-prone heritage areas of Gujarat, India’ (www.3D4heritageindia.com) and the EWAP Grant: 'Documenting the Heritage Churches of Chiloé’ (www.churchesofchiloe.com), in collaboration with international partners.