About Event

Hinges is the annual technical symposium of School of Civil Engineering at SASTRA. Over the past years, Hinges has been nurtured by students and professors alike and has been immensely successful due to their very personal and deep involvement with it. The passion and micro-management shown during the previous Hinges ’12 has helped Hinges carve a niche for itself, as the biggest and most successful departmental symposium SASTRA has ever witnessed. With a whopping 300+ internal participants and over 200 external participants, Hinges ’12 wasn’t just a success, but a phenomenon. The theme for Hinges ’12 was ‘Water Matters’. Water, being a crucial compound that could decide the fate of humanity, was dealt with in great detail. In all, there were 3 flagship events, paper presentations, poster presentations, technical quizzes and debates. A whole day was dedicated to a workshop by one of the best in the field, IGBC. Team Hinges, has always chosen themes that address humanity’s core issues and bring out the innovator within. This time, for Hinges ’14, we will travel back in time, and learn from our ancestors. The theme for this year will be ‘Learning from the Past’. We will have experts from ONGC, Survey of India and Archaeological Survey of India sharing their knowledge of traditional building techniques used by our ancestors. LEARNING FROM THE PAST Have we not wondered? Why do buildings have to be renovated every 10 years? Why are 50 year old buildings collapsing? After all, we have monuments from the Vedic age still standing strong, not requiring any more than a coat of paint every 10 years. We have the ruins of Harappa that still paint a very clear picture of life in 4000 BCE, the Big Temple in Thanjavur from the Chola period, and the Taj Mahal from the Mughal period; none of which have shown signs of fatigue. How is it that these old structures have endured for eons, under onslaught of nature while advanced scientific research and modern techniques has failed us in in this respect? To find the answer, we need not look at the Japanese, Chinese, Germans or the Americans. We only need to look back in to our past and observe keenly, the materials and techniques used by our forefathers. Our quest to create the best building material lies in our heritage; something we have for so long failed to notice. It will show us how even the most advanced concrete ever developed pales in comparison to the durability of several millennia old stone and lime masonry. Perhaps, future of construction needs to be relooked from the day when Rajaraja Cholan decided to build a mega structure in his capital city. Let us relearn civil engineering from the original masters of construction. Let us learn from the past, to create a bright future.