Could This Eco Apartment Complex Truly Clean Up Delhi’s Air?

Towering buildings with thirty-six storeys that will be housing offices, gyms, restaurants, swimming pools and 1,000 homes, ‘Hyperions’ is a self-sustaining urban utopia designed by Vincent Callebaut that has been proposed for construction at Delhi’s Jaypee City. Callebaut’s designs inject a beautiful ‘agri-tectural’ eco-neighbourhood in a city overrun by concrete, traffic and smog, that would not only grow organic food but would also theoretically produce more energy than it would consume.

A collaborative project with agroecologist Amlankusum, with two objectives set to be achieved--decentralisation of energy and deindustrialisation of food--the result is a combination of urban farming, bio-based materials and dense mixed-use planning in a self-sufficient structure. Built from versatile multi-layered panels of cross-laminated timber sourced locally and sustainably, and reinforced with steel, the entire structure will sit atop an earthquake resistant steel and concrete substructure, as stated by Inhabitat, that’ll take advantage of the Earth’s thermal inertia for stable natural heating and cooling. “The project is designed to achieve a net-zero environmental footprint with a recycling system that takes care of gray water, black water, and food waste on site. Energy for the buildings is generated via wind turbines and photovoltaic systems,” reports Inhabitat.

Fully-equipped with multiple glass bio-climatic domed greenhouses and solar panels, each tower will play host to a variety of living and working areas, right from business incubators and co-working spaces to student housing and larger apartments. Mixed with this will be farming spaces, which the architects state will be able to produce up to 20 kilos of organic fruit and vegetables per square meter, and rooms for raising livestock, as well as phyto-purification ponds and lagoons.

“We the ‘Urban Farmers’ claim that converting worldwide agriculture into organic techniques and bio-sourced construction could reduce worldwide CO2 emissions by about 40% by 2030,” write the designers. “Hyperions is a sustainable agro-ecosystem project capable of resisting climate change thanks to its healthy economic and environmental ecosystems. Solidarity, fairness, and the right symbiosis of human actions on nature: those are our founding ethical values.” Now, this all definitely looks and sounds incredible, but realistically it may be a little hard to imagine the project going through successfully, that too in India where there already exists dire infrastructural issues, not to mention the numerous incomplete abandoned buildings and projects we pass on the roads everyday, but we can choose to stay optimistic.

 Written By Sara Hussain