Bangalore International Airport Landscaping

Friday, July 10, 2020

When a comprehensive landscape master plan was undertaken for one of India’ functional airports, Bangalore International Airport, there were quite a few challenges which had to be taken into account. While phasing, flexibility to allow future infrastructure works, need for instant visual effects and reducing the civil work were among the top of the list, Bangalore’ cultural & natural heritage coupled with its image as garden City had also to be upheld. 

While addressing these issues, DESIGNCELL took up the challenging task of making the total landscape intervention of 150 acres, truly sustainable. Most of the intervention was to be in the form of earthwork and planting, involving time and water respectively. While functioning airport calls for making the earthwork involved to be faster, the proposed planting calls for finding a way to provide irrigation water in a scenario of fast depleting urban ground water levels.




Project area being part of surrounding region’s storm water catchment area, existing lay of land was analyzed to be offering an opportunity to create rainwater harvesting ponds for irrigation water in a system of interconnected tanks and water channels, another cultural heritage of the Karnataka region.

In its strictest sense, all planting design was done by carefully balancing the water requirement of proposed plants and total annual harvestable water. While this robust planting design addressed the issue of water requirement, lent character to the design, the issue of lessening the earthwork remained.

Then a brilliant stroke of combining two ideas of natural capillarity and subterranean water channels not only decreased the earthwork involved but also established the most self sufficient, self serving and sustainable way of irrigating the proposed planting.

The simple idea of making the proposed earth embankments using buried conduits of large diameter, equipped with sufficient number of water absorbing wicks to supply water as determined by the natural process of evapo-transpiration to the planting above, can be demonstrated this way.

POSTED BY PAYAL AGARWAL AT 11:34 back