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Jutting Out Parking Lot May Mar Heritage Plan,Underground Parking Will Not Exactly Be Underground

By siddharth22, Section Transportation
Posted on Thu Apr 03, 2008 at 10:23:49 PM EST

The underground parking plaza at BBD Bag will not exactly be underground after all. The two-tier parking lot will literally hold its head high and just be a metre above the ground leading to a major aesthetic malfunction.

The protrusion will also jeopardise the heritage square-cum-pedestrian plaza project aimed at rejuvenating Dalhousie Square to make it one of the best-known squares in the world. Once the nerve centre of the colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent, BBD Bag had been declared one of the 100-endangered cultural heritage sites by the New York-based World Monuments Fund. The state government decided to rejuvenate the square after addressing this central business district's parking woes.

The parking plaza will accommodate 700 cars.
Project cost: Rs 36 crore.
The plaza will be completed by 2009.
The plaza will be 200 metre in length and 50 metre wide.
The state government is funding the project.
Mackintosh Burn is implementing the project.

When chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee laid the foundation stone of the underground parking plaza in June last year, there was no plan to raise the construction to a metre above the ground. Public works department minister Kshiti Goswami told TOI: "We'll have to raise the construction for technical reasons." He reasoned, "Not that it will matter much. Because the protrusion will only be a metre high. We'll cover the entire area with greenery. Don't worry, we'll create a slope around the construction so that it doesn't jut out."

PWD engineers at Writers' Buildings explained why the protrusion was "absolutely necessary". An engineer said: "The entire construction would be seven-metre high. But as per the feasibility report, we could only dig six metre. Hence, the remaining one metre remained above the ground."

The engineer added: "We can use the protrusion to fit in the ventilators for the parking plaza." Sources at Writers' said when Bhattacharjee had inquired about why the protrusion was necessary, he was given the same logic. The plaza's foundation should be 7 metre, while space for the two floors reserved for car parking would be 2.8 metre-high each. Another 3 metre would be needed for the concretisation between the two floors. Another 4 metre of concretisation was needed on the top floor.

Since the dug-up area is only 6 metre, the extra one metre would have to jut out.

Not everyone is ready to buy the logic. An official said: "Dalhousie Square will probably be the world's only square which will continue to look ugly even after beautification."

Source:The Times Of India,04-04-08

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