Architects services in Guwahati
By
Sibani Sarma
Guwahati falls in a high–risk earthquake zone. It has the history of several high – intensity earth-quakes in the past. Infact, in 1950 an earthquake had wiped out a large chunk of its population. Houses built during that time were fewer in number and were built with light weight material and were constructed largely in tune with the local environmental conditions. Because of the number of lives lost were less.
If one takes a look at the style of architecture prevailing in the city like Guwahati today, it is more or less the same as what we see in any other metropolitan city in India. High rise apartments, commercial buildings, retail outlets, all of them are RCC framed structures. Engineered to a certain degree, however, not 100% earthquake proof. Till about 20 years back Guwahati and Assam had probably a handful of architects. There has been so much development in a city like Guwahati in the last 10 years that the handful has increased to over a hundred architects and interior designers.
There is an intense competition between the architects in Guwahati. The competition is for different types of works, namely, commercial buildings, residential complexes, retail outlets, interiors of multinational backoffices, interiors of homes.
The city itself has expanded beyond its CBD and has today become one of the largest cities in India in terms of the landmass it covers. This has allowed the city to develop large projects like schools, institutions, malls, multiplexes and large township projects. This has proved that architects in Guwahati are not restricted in doing small homes which was the scenario 15 years back but are also doing large buildings and the interiors of those buildings as well.
What is very important for an architect in Guwahati to remember is that only on the surface Guwahati looks like any other modern city in India : it actually sits on a very high risk seismic zone. If an earthquake of a magnitude half of which came in the 1950s comes today, the risk of lives is very high largely because the population has increased tremendously and more and more people live in RCC multi–storeyed buildings. So buildings in Guwahati need to be constructed as per accepted earthquake codes and this is the only way forward for a city like Guwahati.
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