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ECO
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CHICAn early model for climate-adapted mass housing
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This 1962 design for the Tube House was one of Charles Correa’s cleverest yet simplest designs, one also way ahead of its time.
Its simple rectangular footprint provided an economical model for mass single-family housing, with blank sides designed to enable each unit to be combined in a variety of terraçed or clustered formats. However, its more complex section, rising at the centre to a double height apex over a mezzanine level, was modeled to cleverly funnel air, and thus ventilation, through, the house, with heat able to escape out of a sheltered internal court, open to the sky.
The design, adapted to economical construction and the extreme heat and monsoon rains of the regional climate, won first prize in an all-India competition for low-cost housing, yet only a single prototype was ever built, demolished in 1995.
Tube House, Ahmedabad, 1961-62. The building exterior has blank flanking walls, allowing for its mass-multipliaction and attachment in terraced or staggered formations. The interior has profusion of deep louvres and grilles, shading direct sun from the interior but maximizing air-flow and ventilation. (Photos © Charles Correa Associates, Courtesy The British Architectural Library, RIBA.)
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