Hyderabad, TELANGANA :

Hyderabadi Takbir Fatima is an architect, engineer and educator who is always on the lookout for projects that challenge her.

As part of Hyderabad Design Week, Takbir Fatima from Designaware is doing a series of workshops and installations leading up to the event. She is in the city to conduct workshops on design. “We’re experimenting with crowdsourcing the design process to bring together many minds to create something collectively.

Under the theme of Humanizing Design for Hyderabad Design Week, we are crowdsourcing through multiple activations leading up to the event, involving students, young designers, architects and children in designing installations and public art for Hyderabad,” says Takbir, who has completed her BArch from CSIIT School of Architecture & Planning (JNAFAU), Hyderabad, and an MArch (Architecture + Urbanism) from the Design Research Lab at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London.

Born in Hyderabad, Takbir was shuttling on and off between Saudi Arabia and Hyderabad. She was inspired by one of the greatest architect in Hyderabad sparking her interest in the profession.

Highly creative, she has handled some challenging projects at a very low cost. One such project was a hilltop school located in Golconda. She explains, “Bright Horizon Academy is a charity school. The challenge was the Golconda fort, which has an outer wall and inner wall, which is a part accessible to the public.

The outer wall has a very old settlement as old as the fort. All these houses share a common wall. Everything is on a hill, so for this particular site we had to completely sheer rock and boulders. Half of the site was on the upper part of the cliff and half made up the lower part. It was quite challenging to navigate the terrain.

And budget was an issue as it was a charity school. We designed a building which uses low energy as much as possible, and with lot of windows and natural light in the centre. There is sunlight and natural ventilation in every part of the building. It has been awarded the silver rating by the Indian Green Building Council in 2018.”

For most of her projects here, Takbir follows Vastu in residential and commercial properties. “If the client is not particular, we do recommend the vastu, as the property will have a resale value,” says Takbir who was given the Telangana Young Architect award by the Indian Institute of Architects in 2016 and was also recognised as Emerging Architect of the Year by NDTV Design & Architecture Awards 2016.

Takbir feels that now there is lot of opportunities for design aspirants and she aims to bring design to as many people as possible. She wants to do away with the misconception that design is not affordable and not for common people. Currently, her company is handling a few residential projects, restaurants, series of workshops, etc.

source: http://www.telanganatoday.com / Telangana Today / Home> Personalities / by Madhuri Dasagrandhi / September 11th, 2019