This installation isn’t a graduate student’s idea of an art piece, it’s a sophisticated air purifier that could be key to making India’s capital more livable.
With the worst air pollution in the world stemming from a variety of factors, New Dehli was recently selected as the home of a husband-and-wife architecture business. But seeing the smog out of their window, Amit and Britta Knobel Gupta from the UK resolved to help fix the problem.
Their offering is the Verto tower, from their business Studio Symbiosis. This sleek and curved, aerodynamic design forces air through the multiple openings where inside lies a stack of air filtration cubes that can clean 600,000 cubic meters of air per day, the equivalent to the contents of 273 hot air balloons.
Amit and Britta imagine the tower as a mass-produced object to frequent city parks around polluted cities of the world, since the whole thing can be flat-packed, and the manufacturing is subdivided.
The cleaning footprint of each tower could be as much as 200 to 500 meters (656 to 1,640 feet) of air in enclosed spaces, and between 100 to 350 meters (328 to 1,148 feet) in outdoor spaces, varying due to wind direction and other factors.
The one pictured here is a prototype from the New Dehli Sunder Nursery.
“Now that (findings from the prototype) are what we expected, we will start speaking to the government authorities about further installation,” Amit told CNN on a video call from New Delhi.
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The largest part of the development process was ensuring that air didn’t swirl around the tower, but that every puff was pulled inside, which they accomplished by studying a variety of aerodynamic designs, from car spoilers to aircraft.
The filters, made by the German firm Mann+Hummels, need to be changed every 9 months while the noise generated by the mechanical parts generates the same level of sound as a kitchen blender, which would presumably be fine with city-goers looking for a bit of tranquility in the park as long as each green space was limited to a single tower.
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Studio Symbiosis believes that 100 of the towers could clean the whole of central New Delhi, but has also heard from companies in the US who want to use the towers to filter the air in construction sites, as well as potential buyers from France, New Zealand, and Uzbekistan.
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