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Of Eco Cells, Green Jackets and Biodiversity Corridors
The future of construction is already upon us with the spectre of shortages forcing new inventions, says Chandrashekar Hariharan
In times when I have been confronted with a challenge that is into the far future and seemingly daunting, I have always gone back to the simplicity of old wisdom. When the venerable Editor of this journal invited me to set on paper some expressions of what I envisage to be the contours of the future of construction, and of buildings, I thought of the stilling voice of John Ruskin. "When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be known for present delight, nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think as we lay stone on stone that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor, 'See! This our father did for us.' "
So what is the reality that is before us in an India that is moving as rapidly, and is as aspirational? Let us consider two grim facts. The Union Tourism Secretary, Mr Banerjee, says that there are about 100,000 hotel rooms that are likely to be constructed in under ten years from now... The entire population of hotel rooms in India today, built over 50 years, is about the same number!
Consider the other fact. India is set to build about the same quantum of buildings - residential and commercial - in the next ten years that the country created in all of post-Independent India.
The math of building is set to change. The way we look at numbers that make up the sum total of the building scenario will undergo a change that is beyond our current recognition. Energy figures will be crunched so differently into the future that there are no precedents from the past we can seek to learn from.
The Crunch Ahead
So what is, or what should be, the future of construction? Do we anticipate an alarming 'run' on materials into this future? Do we see ourselves running out of limestone for cement -- at the current rate of extraction, limestone will exhaust in about 40 years. What are the options for achieving bonding dimensional stability for all building materials if cement is not a viable option into the far future? Do we see ourselves securing as much steel as we did in the last 50-60 years, and as comfortably--in price and supply terms?
A morning's ride to any city's edge in India will offer you the ugly sight of rows of trucks of sand that are imported from riverbeds in the outflanks. Builders don't have a choice, for sand is intrinsic to ‘gluing’ building materials together to make for the boxes we live in. But those rivers are dying a quick death, after millennia of coursing through the healthy veins of our ecosystems.
There is authentic data to attest the fact that about 50 pc of all energy generated in India [or on Earth], goes toward construction - of buildings, bridges, and roads and such.
You could generate a list of at least a couple of dozen more such items that help you build your home, or apartment block, or buildings that serve as our workplaces and malls and megastores, and fret over the shortages and inevitable price spirals that you'd be faced with.
How do we address other concerns that go beyond materials, but are increasingly desired in an affluent world of comfort and convenience? From air-conditioning to special lighting needs? From the need for essentials like water and electricity which are outstripping supply almost always, to handling the enormous amount of wastes that our houses, or smokestacks, or offices belch out every hour, of every day.
These Stark Futures
It seems defeating. One is forced to admit, that at the end of 25 years' devotion to concerns such as these, that this writer and many other such concerned planners were never made for it. These some of us have been born condemned to be among those who have to see all sides of a question. When you are damned like that, the questions multiply for you, until in the end it is all questions and no answer.
So what does one do in the face of such stark futures? Like most engineers in the building industry today, and policy-makers and planners, quite apart from architects and consultants who work on the essential services that plug in to, or plug out, of every building that is created, we can wear blinders like a horse, and see only straight in front of us. We can see only all that is black, and only all that is white. Or we can look beyond.
When the celebrated idea of a Blue Ocean Strategy, hit the market, a new crop of managers saw wisdom in the proposition that the writers had made to win in the future. They said, the only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.
They are today pushing a new dimension to a point where they see social legitimacy being a must for business. It means, simply, that any business would lose its ability to succeed as well as its effectiveness when it ceases to be socially responsible. If profits have to come at great cost to society, the business will eventually die. One could say that of the building industry, too, if it does not know how to go beyond the belief that the responsibility of a business is only to increase its profit. And this will not draw a yawn, if you see the threat of your business dying, if you flout this basic tenet.
A New Expression
There is a seamless blend that the language of architecture has begun to assume in recent times with some of the seminal design work of architects across the world. A new expression is manifest in buildings across the urban world, with the emphasis turning deeply upon ‘ecological cells’ and ‘biodiversity corridors’ across city sprawls, civic developments of the kind that Seoul has achieved with conversion of its sanitation waters into pretty fresh water canals that course through the city, ‘green jackets’ that sheathe buildings in a way that there is greater shaping of the destinies of microregions that house home or work settlements. One of New Delhi's own architects has drawn up one such masterplan for cleaning up the city's dirty waters. There are other ingenuous business initiatives across the world that blend compatibly green and greenbacks see box on Panama Canal and what a London-based company has come up with.
Building management systems have seen a sea-change at the turn of this new century with companies quickly seeing the importance and the need in the marketplace for systems, services, techniques, and tools that can bring operational efficiencies in a broad spectrum of Utilities ranging from energy [See box on Negawatts] to water, from air-conditioning to waste water, to efficient sanitation systems, and water-efficient toilets. It has gone ahead with research and commercial applications which bring cost savings to businesses that are into buildings and building management.
Design is the Key
An important realisation that this shift in BMS and the approach to such systems and construction, is the renewed thinking that has taken planners and architects as well as builders, to thinking of what the Japanese learnt to do so well in the 1970s: do it right the first time.
This has meant that businesses into construction are changing the quality and content of their design briefs to building professionals the world over. Design today has become so much more demanding of life-cycle cost and of maintenance of the building or the envelope.
The compelling drives of economic growth excite leaders, but the dangers of mass scale destruction that creation of projects entail, are not being recognized, not as yet. Developers are still rushing headlong into the Manhattan mode forgetting that the science of building has to seek change in the very way we think.
Skyscrapers will now turn to ground-scrapers and sub-scrapers. These will allow light, air and plant growth deep inside the developments. One architect calls these ‘eco-cells’ which are developed as a means of integrating the inorganic mass of the built components with the organic ecoscaping.
We will soon see algae sewage treatment water tanks that offer you 100% fresh water. Nuwater in Singapore heralds another dimension that the future of buildings will necessarily integrate. A city like Mumbai with 4,500 million litres of fresh water needed every day can comfortably manage with 50 per cent that volume, if only every development responds to water treatment needs proactively – this will drop fresh water need to just 2,000 million litres, or about the level that Mumbai needed in 1980!
It is hard to judge urban lifestyles. Do you battle consumption? Or do you promote sustainability? And where is the line that blurs between the two challenges.
The world is showcasing answers to such questions. Kowloon in Hong Kong now sports a building that offers links to key green spaces in the district with a biodiversity corridor that has left derelict a long stretch of land that winds through the island, and is home for many endemic species of the island.
Architects are today designing green jackets with buildings placed on top, below or sandwiched between such jackets that cut into the building and slice down through all floors from the uppermost to the basement.
Design solutions will soon seek to provide an environmentally sustainable urban eco-system. This seems very do-able. Specially, if you consider that if builders and users join hands to ensure--either by legislation or voluntarily--to implement these new building technologies, for water and energy, cities will become far more habitable: sewage water canals will become fresh water parks while also generating energy: landfills will morph into parks: consumers will become prosumers with consumption being a problem that the consumer will himself resolve with his own production.
A city like Mumbai which consumes about 2000 megawatts can clash its energy use by half if only it implemented some very basic principles at the end-use level, with greater consumer understanding, and with energy schemes that allow home-owners to ‘sell’ energy to the grid when they are ‘energy-positive’. To get a perspective on what such a saving on energy in one Mumbai means, remember that India produces just about 1,25,000 megawatts today.
They cost less to run
The future of these new buildings clearly show that there will be greater sensitivity to what comes after people have moved into these buildings. A simple set of installations, for example, for waste water can bring about post-occupancy cost reduction of as much as 20 pc on maintenance of such a building. These new buildings of the next generation will cost less to run, regardless of whether they are residential, commercial or any other kind.
If one extended many of the old principles of air management and responded to them in terms of construction design with appropriate building blocks that either retain heat or reduce heat gain, depending on the latitude you belong to, they can bring about a saving of a high 30 per cent on air-conditioning bills alone, let alone lighting and pumps. [See box on This Much and No More]
A typical 20,000 sq ft envelope that is centrally air-conditioned can cost you as much as 200 kWh of power in a regular building. This can cost you as much Rs 1,000 an hour of its functioning. At 12 hrs a day, this will mean about Rs 3.5 million a month on just the AC cost! And the carbon emission per annum on just one such building will run into thousands of tones.
Are there ways of creating the building such that you have brought down the total tonnage of designed air-conditioning by about a third of the regular tonnage needed? The impact on financial cost alone is so dramatically positive that there is today more than hope, near certainty, that the world has reached some kind of tipping point when it comes to such buildings or construction of the future -- not because these technology directions are sensitive to the planet--that indeed they are--, but because these technologies are enabling and facilitating huge financial savings for businesses.
There is a new surge in interest in green buildings: India will have in the next 3 years nearly 100 million sq feet of such certified green residential buildings. There are of course challenges in execution and in securing of such certification, for builders who want to take to these options but don't know the how-to's.
The business of builders, the world over, are quickly seeing the savings and added business value that such green buildings or buildings of the future are bringing. That is enough incentive to business to take to these values.
In a feature that discusses the future of construction we cannot discuss, even if worrisome, the fact that there is a dismaying world of damage to millions of ecosystems people across India, and the world outside of cities. In the urban world, our cities occupy less than 3 pc of the world’s landmass, have 55% of us living in this small minority of land, with 75 pc of the world’s natural resources being consumed by this lot of us.
Will we change?
Our city-dweller needs air-conditioned shelters, office and home spaces, has to drive SUVs that emit greenhouse gases, fly around the world in ozone-depleting planes, consume power that comes from dams that submerge forests, and build houses of materials that originate in strip mines in distant and fragile ecosystems.
The other side of this is that as humans we mine soils, gut our forests, misplace our industry priorities, waste vast sums in needless transportation, congest our population in settlements that don’t reckon with damages and implications of the future, and lower the physical vitality of poorer communities in our villages, without immediately feeling the consequences of our actions.
It has suited us, in the urban world of the last 50 plus years, to ignore the basic realities of land, any land: its contours, and landscapes, its vegetation areas, its power and mineral resources.
The way we have built so far is doubly ruinous: we have steadily impoverished the earth, by hastily removing resources that are millions of years old, for the benefit of a few generations, those common resources which can never be restored once spent.
In our technique and approach, our habits, our processes, we forget to consider Earth as a human habitat, by our destruction of the beauty of the landscape, by the ruining of streams, pollution of drinking water, filling the air with finely divided carbon deposits which choke both life and vegetation over spans of 50 to 100 years. To man, this slow destruction is not discernible. To Earth it is just a flash of time.
There has been a turn in the tide of such consciousness in the last decade which offers a happy augury for the future. Architects are beginning to see that in each geographic area a certain balance of natural resources and human settlements is possible for the land and the people.
There is a more challenging task that architects and builders have before them: their relationship has so far been fundamentally exploitative with the rest of the world. The Indian consuming world, for instance, has taken for granted the continued supply of teakwood from our own dwindling forests and from countries like Malaysia; limestone and ores from Africa, laminate floors from Australia and Europe, tiles from Italy which imports its raw materials from Africa … All this without being in the slightest degree responsible for the environmental implications of their lifestyles.
The end of the last three centuries has shown us the stirrings of what the decades will show. First it was Watt’s steam engine in the 1790s. Then it was the phone and the bulb and diesel and cars in the 1890s. Now it is computers and sustainable technologies in the 1990s. If the world economy hurtles toward meeting its challenges and strengthens these streams of ‘sustainability thinking’, this century will unfold with less grief than the portends now show.
When Gandhiji wrote in Jan 1937 after a visit to Birbhum, in Bengal, in Harijan, it was as if he saw the shape of this future that is upon us now.
He defined his ideal settlement thus: "It will have cottages with sufficient light and ventilation,built of a material obtainable within a radius of five miles of it. The cottages will have courtyards enabling householders to plant vegetables for domestic use and to house their cattle. The village lanes and streets will be free of all avoidable dust. It will have wells according to its needs and accessible to all. It will have house of worship for all, also a common meeting place, a village common for grazing its cattle, a cooperative dairy, primary and secondary schools in which vocational education will be the central fact, and it will have Panchayats for settling disputes. It will produce its own grains, vegetables and fruit, and its own Khadi. This is roughly my idea of a model village."
Is there therefore a return to the past that we should reflect on, while bracing ourselves for the future before us?
-Chandrashekar Hariharan.
The writer is an economist-turned entrepreneur, heading
the Bangalore-based BCIL, a pioneer in green buildings.
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