IE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2012 Reinventing Architecture and Interiors: the past, the present and the future Ravensbourne 28-29 March, 2012 ENERGY EFFICIENCY IN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNS IN THE INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION: LESSONS LEARNT FOR NEW DESIGNING Authors: Shreyas Panambur 1 , Siddhartha Mukherjee 1 , Sat Ghosh 2,3 1 Final year Mechanical Engineering, SMBS, VIT University, India 2 Senior Professor, SMBS, VIT University, India 3 ICAS Associate, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, U.K. 1. INTRODUCTION: HOW IDEAS ENDURE Charles Sanders Peirce famously said “All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite.” That statement holds even today, particularly, when we connect cities of the Third Millennium B.C to the cities of the future. Those ancient city builders had a luminous awareness about the use of light and shade and the play of coolth and warmth. Unlike us, they did not have to worry about dwindling resources. With a spiralling increase of the world population, Asian mega-cities in particular, are becoming increasingly unsustainable. Urban conurbations such as Mumbai and Chennai, once laid out beautifully during the British Raj, are becoming cluttered and unsightly. Poverty, squalor and dereliction make these cities less functional. It is not that the sub-continent lacks brilliant architects – for example, Charles Correa promotes organic architecture in a very sustainable manner. However, commercial builders are now concentrating on mini-cities, adjacent to the metro- cities that house tens of thousands of people who are upwardly mobile and reasonable affluent. It is these housing enclaves that are proving to be the least sustainable. It is time we honourably ponder about tomorrow’s designs. It was in the sub-continent that the foundations of the world’s first cities were laid. These cities survived the ravages of time and tide and were sustainable over two millennia. In this paper, we zoom in on a portion of the Indus Valley Civilization – Lothal – because it is still accessible to us in India. We shall study the essence of energy efficiency in Lothal and utilize the best of the ancient paradigms with extant architectural practices when we design our proposed new city, “The Sanctuary”. Lothal is very much a part of the Indus Valley Civilization. Its eastern flanks extend across the border showing two very interesting Harappan settlements-that of Kalibangan in eastern Punjab, and that of Lothal in Saurashtra, near the head of the Gulf of Cambay. [1] See the location of Lothal in the Google Earth image shown in Figure 1.