The Living Steel Kolkata demonstration building is approaching the final stages of preparation prior to the start of construction. The team, made up of architects, engineers and steel member companies from the United Kingdom, Europe and India, has been diligently working through Indian regulations to optimise the original winning scheme for construction. Images of the latest design are shown here, and Matti Lampila, Project Designer from the architects, Piercy Conner, tells us about the scheme's progress:

When we first presented the competition scheme in India, there were quite a few things that came up early on that we had to change in our scheme. Our original scheme included eight apartments, but we then introduced two additional floors (the building is now Ground plus six floors) to accommodate developer Bengal Shrachi Housing Development Limited needs, which increased the apartments to twelve.

In terms of internal layouts, we started out with two and three bedroom apartments, but that increased to three and four bedroom apartments at Bengal Schrachi's request. Originally the extra bedroom was meant to accommodate maid's quarters, which are needed in India, but we were able to arrange some maids quarters on the ground floor of the building. Now this extra room is designated as a guest room, increasing the value of the apartments. The apartments themselves still are two-floor maisonettes with living area on the lower floor and bedrooms on the upper floor.

A major compromise was the amount of parking space. Understandably the brief for the 1^st Living Steel International Architecture Competition specified at least one parking space per apartment. In India, the regulations require one parking space for every 100 m² of built area, which includes circulation and common spaces. The apartments in the Living Steel building are relatively large, which means more parking spaces required in the scheme. This led us to include a basement in.

Another thing that came to light was the way they work around the site boundary lines. Depending on the height of the building, you have to set the building a certain distance from the boundary, so the taller your building, the further back it has to go. That again changed the dimensions and length of our building so that we fit within the regulations. It started to get a bit tricky because our site is rather small, but we managed to get there in the end.

And the amount of electric and water servicing needed for the scheme increased. We had to include a main transformer room as well as an electric meter room, and some underground reservoir tanks for garden and fire sprinkler systems. We've managed to minimise the amount of service space on the ground floor by including a pump room in the basement.

No, we were able to make all of the changes and still maintain our original design scheme. A main feature of the building was the double skin steel panels that provide solar shading for cooling and to reduce air conditioning use. The perforated panels have been kept throughout the entire development, and thanks to the Living Steel team and the Indian team we were able to find a manufacturer from the local supply chain. Consequently, an important feature of the building is kept. These screens will provide privacy and allow residents to rely more on natural ventilation for cooling rather than keeping air conditioners on full all the time.

And though we have had to increase the floor space to include an extra bedroom, the extra space did not come at the expense of the external terrace. We'll also be looking at incorporating rain water capture and grey water reuse systems as we originally proposed. Indian regulations give extra points for these types of systems. And the roof-top terrace space is still in the plans, though its design is still under discussion. All in all, the scheme is still very much the same as it was initially proposed.

Obviously in India they aren't used to using steel in residential buildings, and there is quite a lot of work to prove that steel buildings are a sustainable and economically viable option to concrete buildings. We have a team of engineers from the United Kingdom (Price & Myers) and India (Tata BlueScope Steel) that are working together to provide the most sustainable solution within the context of the regulations. Right now, the engineering team is value engineering the whole building in terms of the amount of steel we need to use for it. For example they have optimised the column sizes to make sure they are efficient and cost effective. I think that the local engineers have learned quite a lot from this exercise because the structure has been very much optimised for residential buildings. They were more used to industrial and office buildings, I believe, where the loads are quite different.

They're working as the local consultants, informing us of the regulations and advising on what we need to do to satisfy them. As well, they are helping us with detailed technical parts of the regulations and assisting us to optimize the scheme to work with the local rules and regulations.

We're finishing off our drawings and elevations and the outline of building specifications for materials in preparation for the submission of our building function application to the West Bengal Housing Infrastraucture Development Corporation (HIDCO). HIDCO will review the scheme and provide a scrutiny report that will detail any changes or additions we need to make in order to comply with their requirements. Once those things are addressed, we will obtain permission to start construction, which we hope to begin in early 2009.