The Ice Box Challenge Consortium is delighted to announce that after making many stops around the globe, the Ice Box Challenge will next land at the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), 6-Block B, Mahatma Gandhi Rd, Balmiki Basti, New Delhi, from March 1-10, 2024 for the first-ever Indian designed and built Ice Box Challenge.

Check out the detailed schedule of all events HERE!

What is the Ice Box Challenge?

The Ice Box Challenge for India received one of the 5 Awards for the LiFE Global Call for Ideas and Proposals as part of Mission LiFE, which was created by the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi to promote environmentally friendly lifestyles.

It is a fun and interactive public installation and contest demonstrating the advantages of high performance buildings such as Passive House buildings. Four boxes are filled with an equal amount of ice and displayed for public viewing on the SPA campus in Delhi for 9 days. Two boxes will be constructed according to standard current building practice (with a variation in material thickness), the third one will be built to Ec0-Niwas Samhita (ENS) standard while the fourth one will be built to the international Passive House Standard, a highly energy-efficient building performance standard. Each box is filled with an equal amount of ice at the beginning of the experiment, and after 9 days the amount of ice left in each box will be measured, with the level of ice remaining used to demonstrate how well each ice box passively kept out the heat.

A competition was held in December 2023 to select which design would be built for the exhibition. The winning submission displayed below was designed by the team at VK:e environmental. Learn more about their design and the jury members, as well as about the submissions of the other finalists LEAD Consultancy and Engineering Services, BIOME, Monk Spaces and other participants here.

What’s on at the event?

Visitors can learn how high performance buildings offer a high level of comfort, can help meet climate protection goals, and make significant energy savings.  Please join us at SPA to view the boxes and network with the project participants, including the members of the Ice Box Challenge Consortium, the design team, SPA students and teachers. Check out high-performance building industry sponsors, attend the opening and closing ceremonies – and enter the contest with your best guess of how much ice will remain in each box after 9 days. We hope to see you there!

The Ice Box Challenge Consortium

The high-performance building industry sponsors