 Towers of Glass:A Story in Two Parts As the mercury soars, do you find yourself running to lifestyle stores to stock up on new appliances to keep your house or office cool? And do you find the high-end, trendy ones, particularly air-conditioners, pinching on your pocket? Well, a lot of us do. Gobar Times took an exclusive peek into this summer – Ms Never-been Green and Ms Made-over Green, to see what they were doing to beat the heat. Ms Never-been Green sits in her corporate office, a glass-fronted skyscraper in Mumbai, with high-powered airconditioning. It all sounds and looks good but the glare from her window makes her wish she was somewhere else, home maybe, but oh, there is no electricity back-up there if there is a power-cut. She shudders at the thought, or is it really cold in her cubicle? But she has remembered to carry a shawl with her today. Good for her. But how good is it really? Now let us see what Ms Made-over Green is up to. She lives in Greater Noida, a ‘fast-developing’ zone of the National Capital Region. She need not carry a shawl to work, she thinks proudly. Her office has a glass façade too, but it is not just any glass. No sirree, these reflect the heat instead of drawing it in. It does require more than a few air-conditioners to cool the west-facing building, but they are the power-saving sorts, not the usual, cheap variety. If
only Ms Never-been Green had asked her for ‘greening’ tips, she thinks, as she draws her shades and switches on her CFL lights. Though they belong to two different climatic zones of the country, the two buildings look practically identical. Do you get the feeling there is something wrong with that? Well, we sure do. And just to confirm our suspicions, we looked around buildings, old and new, across the country, and made an astonishing discovery. This mind-boggling variety of design has become increasingly important to re-focus on, especially with the concept of ‘green building’ becoming the most popular buzzword in architecture. With advertisements shouting ‘eco-friendly’ to describe a host of residential and office complex in every new ‘developing’ area, green building is possibly the most sale-able tagline for builders today.
Green Building?
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Bengali Bake Consider the traditional village home in West Bengal, a hut with mud walls and a thatched roof. The skin of the building protects its interiors from the heat of the sun in summer while the roof, with deep overhangs and sharp slope or slopes (the ekchala sport one, do-chala with two and so on) that protect it from heavy rains. Mud and thatch, usually rice straw, are both locally available from paddy fields. Maintenance is only required by way of cowdung coatings, which plays the dual role of binding the mud and acting as a natural insecticide. |
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The Cool Carvings of Rajasthan Now let us travel westward, to Rajasthan. The traditional houses are built of stone, with rough-cut stone available in most parts of the state. Their walls are much thicker, preventing the penetration of solar radiation, while the windows are decidedly smaller, to control the inflow of hot air. Indeed, the movement of air determined another feature in the larger houses of Rajasthan – courtyards. In addition, intricate jaalis and jaafris, or stone trellis and latticework, have a cooling effect on air, as its flow is regulated, while deep chhajas or eaves avert harsh daylight and chhatris, or covered balconies, provide comfortable sit-outs for the evening. Carvings, too, played a role in enhancing function and not just aesthetic appeal, as they increased the building’s surface area to radiate more heat. |
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Wood-wise Kerala In Kerala, wood was always amply available for construction and widely used for decorative brackets and doors. Abundant though it was, yet recycling wood was the common, local building practice. It still is in rural Kerala. |
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| In the not-too-distant past, you could go on finding regional differences, with the stilted bamboo houses of the Northeastern states, built to withstand waterlogging, looking nothing like the stone kothis of Himachal. And if you took any of these buildings out of their respective states and put them in, say, the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya in Bhopal, you would still know where they originally belonged. | |||||
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Looking back to look ahead
The relatively new science of biomimicry, which has excited the international community of architects, is astonishingly also the closest parallel to our vernacular tradition. Just as a flower is rooted to the earth, drawing its sustenance form both the soil and air around, biomimetic architecture holds that a building can be built to be a like a living organism, specifically adapted to its physical environment, drawing all of its requirements for energy and water from the sun, wind and rain available to it. Sounds familiar, right? But the rich, vernacular tradition of India, is, quite visibly, on the wane. Have you, say, recently taken a ride on the highway from Delhi to Jaipur? If you have, then you know that all the buildings on the left face west yet are glass-fronted. According to two texts that outline traditional Vaastu principles of architecture – Manasara and Mayamatam, the very placement of a building and the orientation of its spaces determined its energy use. For instance, the east or north walls must be more open to light and air as the west is the heat gaining side in the warm, humid climes of India. The Konarak Sun Temple in Orissa is an unmatched example of Vaastu, with the sun’s rays falling at the feet of the deity in the sanctum sanctorum every morning since its construction in the 13th century. However, office buildings in today’s corporate parks, it seems, use expensive, coated glass to hide basic essential architectural flaws. The office itself is a rather recent phenomenon, as compared to centuries-old vernacular building traditions. Population rise and commercial constraints meant accommodating many individuals under a single roof to sit and work together. The concept of “siting” or determining the placement of the building could no longer be controlled. “Yet, if a building had to face west, a ‘green’ idea would be to place a kitchen or toilet to that side,” says Roy, who feels that the blind aping of the west has been most detrimental to our architectural practices. Keeping Cool, Desert Style... Now, to continiue with our journey, when you reach Jaipur, you need not look far to see that the buildings sourced their key component – stone – from the abundant quarries in the vicinity. This set aside the energy-intensive requirement for carting bricks. Though now used as a universal building material, bricks are made in firing kilns that require coal, which is not indigenously available to a vast portion of the country. A lot of the buildings in Rajasthan, such as the Deegh Palace near Bharatpur, still make use of movable screens made of the vetiver plant or khus. When water is sprinkled on the screens, it evaporates, causing the khus to cool its environment, besides infusing it with a sweet scent. Incidentally, the root of the vetiver plant is also used along riverbanks to prevent soil erosion. Another energy efficient mode of cooling that was available to the public, in this region in days of yore, were baolis or step wells. Step wells consisted of two parts: a vertical shaft from which water would be drawn and the surrounding, inclined, subterranean passage ways, chambers and steps which provide access to the well. The galleries and chambers surrounding the wells were often carved profusely with elaborate details and became cool, quiet retreats during the hot summers. Step wells also served as popular sites for social gatherings. Where baolis were less abundant, like Shahjahanabad in Delhi, the active use of buildings would be restricted to only those areas that were most comfortable at that time, sparing the inhabitants the need for taking off or putting on clothes. They spent hot summer days in the lower floors of buildings but soaked in the cool night sky on their rooftops and vice versa in winters. They also used the humble roll-up bamboo screen or chik which provided correct shading keeping excessive or inadequate sun penetration at bay. |
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Rain-conditioned Forts Arguably one of the most talked-of methods of going green today is water harvesting. This involves collecting rainwater and storing it in tanks for direct use or in a pit to recharge groundwater, while minimising losses through evaporation and seepage But people have been using the technology in India much before it was formally defined or even made a by-law for building in most parts of India. At its peak, the Chittor Fort in Rajasthan could harvest three billion litres of water! There were 84 water bodies within the fort (only 22 exist today) in which 30,000 people lived, along with their elephants, horses and cattle, and all could be taken care of for four years without rain. Upstream water bodies were utilised for drinking purposes and downstream for bathing. Cattle were not allowed to graze in catchment areas. Even the risk of contamination from human waste from latrines was eliminated as it was disposed off by scavengers or flushed out from buildings with a gravity waste disposal system. In fact, the night soil was used as manure for trees and plants that grew in abundance. |
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Many corporate bigwigs, including the Confederation of Indian Industries and ITC, have installed ‘green technologies’ to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a ‘voluntary sustainability and green certification programme under the aegis of the United States Green Building Council,’ also backed by government incentives. Having said that, these new technologies and the guidelines that are used to rate them as green, are not necessarily tackling problems of energy or water efficiency at the root, or the start. 
But, says Siva Kishan Nandyala, Programme Director, Sustainable Buildings Programme at the Centre for Science and Environment, “While it is a healthy trend that corporates are getting green labels, whether they maintain the performance of their buildings in the long-run is more important. Currently green rating agencies do not monitor the practices of such rated buildings.”