ORGANIC BUILDINGS ARE THE CHIC, NEW TREND.

Article in Civic Society Sept-Oct 2008

Architects are altering the lexicon of construction world wide. Eco Cells and Natural Air-Conditioning are no longer science fiction. India’s current building boom will have a huge impact on the environment unless more sustainable practices are made the norm.
CHANDRA SEKHAR HARIHARAN.

“When we build, let us think we build for ever. Let it not be known for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as are descendants will tank 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 labour, see! This our father did for us”. John Ruskin.

So what is the reality before us in an India that is moving rapidly and has ambitious aspirations? Let us ponder two grim facts. The Union Tourism Secretary, Silabhadra Banerjee, says that about 1,00,000 hotel rooms are likely to be constructed in India within the next ten years. Consider this: the number of hotel rooms we have today, built over the past 50 years, is about the same number! Consider another fact: in the next 10 years, India is set to construct roughly the same quantum of residential and commercial buildings it has built in all of post-independent India.

The maths of building is on the threshold of big change. The way we look at numbers that make up the sum total of the building scenario in India will undergo a transformation that will be beyond our current recognition. Energy figures will be crunched so differently in the future that we will have no precedence from the past that we can seek to learn from.

What is, or what should be, the future of construction? Do we see huge shortages of basic building materials? Are we likely to, for instance, run out of limestone for cement? At the current rate of extraction, limestone will be exhausted in about 40 years. What are the options for achieving bonding dimensional stability for all building materials if cement is not a viable option in future? Do we see ourselves securing as much steel as we did in the past 50 to 60 years, as as comfortably in price and supply terms?

A morning’s ride to the edge of any city in India will yield the ugly sight of rows of trucks laden with sand imported from river bed in the outflanks. Builders don’t have a choice because sand is intrinsic to ‘gluing’ building materials together to make the boxes we live in. But those rivers are dying a quick death after coursing through the once healthier veins of our eco systems for several centuries.

There is authentic data to indicate that about 50% of all energy generated in India (or on Earth) goes towards construction of buildings, bridges, roads and other infrastructures. Apart from sand, you could draw a list of over a dozen items you need to build your home, apartment block, work place, mall, or mega store, and fret over the shortages and inevitable price spirals that you will be faced with.

Building debris constitutes 26% of the waste generated by cities. Buildings use up to 48% of all non-renewable energy generated in the world. To produce the cement, steel, glass, building blocks, wood, floors and metal fabrications that make a home or an office, tons of energy and materials are used. The production process discharges huge amounts of energy, apart from polluting waste materials into the natural environment.

With the quantum of buildings already on earth, and the need for twice as much in the next 50 years, the earth’s natural system can take only this much, beyond this, there will be irreparable damage to the natural system – unless we wake up to bringing some fundamental and radical changes in the way we build.

The natural environment consists of abiotic and biotic components which act together to form complex eco systems. Yet, most of our shelters are essentially inorganic. By building more shelters to accommodate are increasing population we are, in effect, making the world more inorganic and synthetic.

Can we bear the massive loss of biodiversity that all this entails?

How do we address other concerns that go beyond materials but are increasingly desired by an affluent world for comfort and convenience? From air-conditioning to special lighting needs? From essentials like water and electricity which are outstripping supply? How do we handle the enormous amount of wastes that our houses, or smokestacks, or offices belch every hour, every day?

THINK AFRESH

It seems defeating one is forced to admit that at the end of 25 years of devotion to such concerns, that this writer and other concern planners shrug their helplessness, at times, at handling such formidable challenges. Some of us have been condemned to see all sides of each problem. When you are damned like that, questions multiply unless it is all questions and no answers.

The emphasis is on ecological cells and biodiversity corridors across cities sprawls. Take, for example, Seoul’s conversion of its sewage water into pretty fresh water canals.

What does one do in the face of such a stark future? Like most engineers, policy makers, planners, architects and consultants in the building industry who work on the essential services that plug in or plug out of every building constructed, we can wear blinkers like a horse and see only what is straight in front of us. We can see things in black and 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 its inventors had made. They had said the only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.

Porponents of the Blue Ocean Strategy are publishing a new dimension which sees social legitimacy as a must for business. The strategy means, simply, that any business will lose its ability to succeed and its effectiveness if it ceases to be socially responsible. If prophets come at great cost to society, the business will eventually die. One could say that of the building industry, to, if it continues to bury its head in the sand, if it does not go beyond the belief that the responsibility of a business is to merely increase profit, the building industry will begin to fade away. If you flout social responsibility and then see your business dying, you will not yawn.

FORGACH’S MODEL

There is a seemless blend that the language of architecture has begun to assume in recent times with some seminal design work by architects across the world. A new expression is manifest in buildings with the emphasis on ‘ecological cells’ and ‘biodiversity corridors’ across city sprawls. Take, for example, Seoul’s conversion of its sewage water into pretty fresh water canals that course through the city. Or ‘green jackets’ that sheathe buildings in a way that there is greater shaping of the destinies of the micro regions that house home or work settlements. One of New Delhi’s own architects has drawn up one such master plan for cleaning up the city’s dirty wasters.

There are other ingenious business initiatives across the world that blend green and green backs. One notable example is forester, a London forestry insurance business in Panama, started four years ago.

John Forgach, ForestRe’s Chairman and an entrepreneur-banker headquartered in Paris, saw the huge business deficit that producers of consumer goods like China, Japan and Korea, or Walmart on the west coast of the US would face in the long term if the Panama Canal was forced to close due to massive silting caused by deforestation.

These ships would have to make a two to three week detour around South America. That would have a significant effect on the price of goods around much of the world.

Forgach talked to these companies about what it could mean to them over 50 years if the canal were to close. Companies quickly saw reason to invest in the forest bonds that Fortgach offered them.

He lost no time in going to the Smithsonian Institute’s biodiversity research wing to get an environment impact assessment of the entire region flanking the canal carried out by their researchers.

He found that a project for afforesting the entire region and for desilting the canal in phases would cost him anything upward a quarter billion dollars. The forest bonds were meant to ensure that these costs were recovered and his company would profit from the economic value he was offering these companies on the Pacific which wanted to get their commodities across to the eastern seaboard.

Business into the future will be much the same as they have been in the past, with this one quality shift that will spell sensitivity to the plants impending threats. As Kofi Annan said, “do the same businesses, do them differently.” Such change will be far more discernible in the building sector in future.

The important thing to recognize in such models – as this one of Forgach – is that the entire business seems out of concern for Earth, and secures a business model that bankers will love to work on.

DOING IT RIGHT

Building management systems (BMS) have seen a sea change at the turn of the century with companies quickly seeing the importance and need in the marketplace for systems, services, techniques, and tools that can bring operational efficiencies in a broad spectrum of utilities ranging from energy to water, from airconditioning to waste water, to efficient sanitation systems, and water efficient toilets. Companies have gone ahead with research and invented commercial applications which bring cost savings to businesses into buildings and building management.

More than ever, this shift in BMS has got planners, architects and builders to think of what the Japanese learnt to do so well in the 1970’s; do it right the first time.

This has meant that construction businesses 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 maintenance of the building or the envelope which will lead to great sensitivity on natural resources while cutting running costs of buildings.

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 for getting that the silence 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 ‘ecocells’ 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. Nu water in Singapore heralds another dimension that the future of building will necessarily integrate. A city like Mumbai which requires 4500 million litres of fresh water every day can comfortably manage with 50% of that volume. If every real estate development responds to water treatment needs proactively – this will drop fresh water needs 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 the two challenges?
The world is showcasing answers to such questions. Kowloon in Hong Kong sports a building that offers links to key dream spaces in the district with a biodiversity corridors that winds through the island, and is home for many endemic species.

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 environmentally sustainable urban eco-systems. This seems very do-able, especially if builders and users join hands to ensure – either by legislation or voluntarily – implementation of new building technologies for water and energy.

Cities will then 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.

Mumbai, which consumes about 2,000 megawatts, can slash its energy use by half if it implemented some very basic principles at end-use level, with greater consumer understanding, and with energy schemes that allow home-owners to sell energy to the great 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 megawatt today.

THEY COST LESS TO RUN

The future of these new buildings clearly shows 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% on maintenance. These new buildings of the next generation will cost less to run regardless of weather they are residential, commercial or any other king.

If one extended many of the old principles of air management and responded to them terms of construction, design with appropriate building blocks that either retain heat or reduce heat gain, depending on the latitude you belong to, such technologies can bring about a saving of high 30% on air-conditioning bills alone, let alone lighting and pumps.

You may want to take a pause on this one: a typical 20,000 square feet 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 as Rs.1,000/- an hour of its functioning. At 12 hours a day, this will mean about 3.5 million a month on just the AC cost! What’s more the carbon emission per annum on just one building will run into thousands of tons.

Are there ways of creating the building so that the total tonnage of designed air-conditioning is brought down 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, in fact near certainty, that the world has reached some kind of tripping point when it comes 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 saving for businesses.

There is a new surge of interest in green buildings: India will have in the next three years nearly 100 million square feet of such certified green residential buildings. There are, of course, challenges in execution and in securing certification for builders who want to take to these options but don’t know how – to’s.

Builders, the world over, are quickly seeing the savings and added business value that such green buildings or buildings of the future bring. That is enough incentive for the construction business to take to these values.

In a feature that discuses the future of construction we cannot omit the realty that there is dismaying damage to many ecosystems across India, and to the world beyond cities. In the urban world, our cities occupy less than two percent of the world’s landmass, have 55 per cent of us living in the small sliver of land, with 75 per cent of the world’s natural resources being consumed by us. The real bad news is that this tiny land mass of urban India and its population produces over 60% of the country’s GDP.

WILL WE CHANGE?

Our city dweller needs air-conditioned home spaces, offices and shelters. He wants to drives SUVs that emit green house 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 eco-systems.

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 action.

In January 1937, after a visit to Birbhum in West Bengal, Gandhiji defined his ideal village settlement. He wrote in Harijan: “It will have cottages with sufficient light and ventilation, built of a material obtainable within a radius of five miles. 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 a 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 a return to the past that we should reflect on, while bracing ourselves for the future!

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 can never be restored once spent.

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 move challenging task that architects and builders have before them: their relationship has so far been fundamentally exploitative of 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 and 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.

Chandrasekhar Hariharan heads Bangalore-based BCIL, a pioneer in green buildings. The company was recently conferred the distinguished RyutaroHashimoto Asia-Pacific Award for ‘mainstreaming sustainability.’