Limestone commons
Building a self sustaining community with construction waste in Nandyal
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Professional work | sP+a (Sameep Padora and associates)
Nandyal, Andhra Pradesh
Oct ‘22- Oct ‘24
Project Lead
Aparna Dhareshwar, Vedant Khedekar, Vritti Shah
Concept Design and planning, Design Development
Master planning, Material mapping, Architecture Design
The project brief was to develop a vibrant and equitable community focused on housing and social infrastructure for their industrial town of Nandyal. It is developed around ores of limestone which is very essential in making cement. The project was commissioned for housing 200 families and 750 migrant workers, and creating a social network to facilitate lives of the people who are a part of the cement factory. The current conditions of the employees working in the factory is they have to commute daily from the neighbouring town of Nandyal which is 20kms away from the cement plant.
Heaps and piles of stones, resulting from the extraction process, are being dumped far away from the cement plant. The slag used in the cement factory contributes to the production of high-quality Compressed Stabilised Earth Blocks (CSEB). The construction materials were sourced locally within a 2 km radius of the site, making the material ecology truly local. The building structure is a hybrid load-bearing, primarily using CSEB blocks or Cyclopean masonry made from waste stone, with minimal steel required to support the load-bearing walls. The construction cost was around 1,700 INR per square foot, which is significantly lower than typical costs in the Indian context.
