Worm’s eye view

Here’s a worm’s view of what urban planners, architects, and engineers should be doing to shape our cities, suburbs, and homes and offer an altogether different definition.

Sustainable architecture and design is now perhaps the fastest growing industrial segment worldwide. More and more monographs on sustainability urge us to rethink how products are designed and manufactured. This will trigger an intense greening of the supply chain for nearly every new and old material that goes into construction.

There is enough evidence of such a new language gaining currency: local economy, “prosumption”, regional typologies, bioregionalism, renewable, post-consumer, environmentally sourced – all of them are words and phrases not recognized to be part of the building lexicon until the turn of this century.

Shift in building patterns

Ahead of us lies a shift in construction patterns that will define new practices: prefabrication and assembly architecture that will promote scale and affordability. It will spell new dimensions of sustainability on use of building materials: reduced use of limestone for cement and riverbed sand for concrete—all based on renewable resources as against extracted resources. This will improve building performance, durability, and structural strength for materials.

Similarly, new technologies for air management are also finding currency. Ozone-depleting substances for air-conditioning and refrigeration are slowly being phased out. Next on the cards is creation of a new green skin through urban agriculture to reduce our dependence on ecosystem lands. Such encouraging urban farming practices are already going on in Havana, Curitiba, Barcelona, and Seoul.

In the business of architecture and engineering, you will see a new competition at every level which has captured public interest and generated a momentum towards making sustainability the norm.

Buildings with character vs. faceless ‘boxes’

India’s challenge over this decade and the next is vastly different from the sensibilities and growth approaches that the West could afford to adopt and adapt over the last half century. They enjoyed the luxury of blissful ignorance, of a complete lack of knowledge of what was befalling the planet. All that changed with the discovery of the Ozone hole in 1984 and the steady rise in the earth’s temperatures over the next quarter century to 2010.

A good building is not just a neutral vessel, blandly waiting for human activity to occur within its walls. This has happened in the West over the last 50 years in many buildings, particularly commercial; and over the last 20 years in particular in India. Such unseemly hurry to meet the demand for these faceless ‘boxes’ that give us either place to work out of, or live within, is not something the earth can afford.

A good building possesses character, or more precisely, emotional resonance—the capacity to inspire thought and feeling among its occupants. Whether you are a builder of an office space or a home, you seek out professionals whose work resonates with your aspirations. Designing buildings that connect emotionally with owners is something that will happen with far greater conscious actions and decision in future. There can’t be a more opportune time and exciting decades for architects or engineers if only they know how to seize with both hands this rare challenge ahead of us.

How do you figure out how buildings stir imagination? With increasing premium on lands in every city, particularly the top-20 of them in India, you will see a conscious effort being made by every professional on how to collaborate with land. Altering the land and the landscape is easy. You can mow down a small forest or old vegetation and rearrange a hillside in a few days. Solid rock that is seemingly unsuitable for building upon is a nuisance for builders and architects if they are unwilling to be sensitive and take on either additional time or expenses to protect them and work around them.