Designing for a sustainable habitat: A challenge to the architects

Dr. Ranjith Dayaratne

The 2007 annual conference on Architecture being organized in February 2007 by the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects is focused on the issues of architecture, sustainability and building. This paper is a preamble to this event and is aimed at preparing the ground for a fruitful discussion on the subject. As the architects' desire is to have their ideas and dreams built, it is imperative that sustainability becomes an underlying principle of all buildings.

Interestingly, if not for our desire to build, and build in ever increasing large scale and sophisticated technologies, the earth after human occupation of millennia would not have become what it is now. However, it is indisputable that in the process, we have transformed the beautiful natural jungle of the earth to an ugly and alarming jungle of buildings of unimaginable toxicity.

In addition, we have also transformed the rich multi-vegetation land to poor uni-vegetations for agricultural purposes in a massive scale. Much has been consumed as building materials and much has also been created as junk; ruins of buildings, used building materials and other components.

Moreover, the buildings being occupied by ever increasing populations of the world in ever dense areas are also producing waste, gases, polluted water, and other toxics in alarming concentrations that natural processes are totally unable to process. Added to these are our transport machines that keep roaming around in both land and air creating carbon monoxide concentrations in space.

Habitat uninhabitable

The end result, unfortunately discovered recently has been a habitat that is becoming increasingly uninhabitable except by means of insulating each person from these unbearable pollution. We have come to make our habitat, the cities, poisonous; high style, high-tech, high-density, and also highly toxic. We have been putting our Air Conditioners in our cars and our buildings on and have forgotten about what happens outside !

Architect not to be blamed

Architects of course are neither going to be blamed nor going to accept full responsibility for this situation, although building is supposed to be their prerogative. The reason of course is clear. On the one hand, only 5% of the total built-environment is ever under the hands of qualified architects.

There is a lot; a 95% of the built-environment being controlled by others. And then within the 5%, architects do not always have their way, even if they were genuinely interested in environment, sustainability and social responsibilities. Moreover also not all architects are interested in such issues but are dealing with the mundane, every day issues, having to get fascinating buildings built largely to satisfy the ego-centricities of their clients.

Leave those as they may be, it is undeniable that the way we build has now come to be placed under the microscope for being one of the most damaging professional acts that have threatened the future of the earth.

Surprisingly, there are no other professionals who are engaged in such practices that consume the earth and transform its bits and pieces to waste-machines; spaces enclosed in concrete glass and brick for the luxurious occupation of people who are on a consumption spree and toxic generation!

No matter how innocent we may claim ourselves to be and plead not guilty, the fact remains that many of the buildings, architects, designs these days; a multi-story structure for example consumes as much building materials, energy and house people as much as a small town and produces even more waste than a town does. Within a small site, this enormity is hard to be reconciled by natural means.

Even at the level of dwellings, there is an unusual exorbitance of consumption of materials and generation of toxics to keep few individuals comfortable. Indeed, our fascination with the most exotic materials, often having to be imported from another corner of the earth, sometimes at the detriment of a native forest or a mine has far reaching consequences than the enhanced self-esteem of the architect and the excitement of his paying clients.

Recent statistics point out that Architecture is responsible for about 45% of the carbon dioxide - greenhouse gas - emissions in many of the cities across the globe. Most materials employed in Building constructions such as Aluminium and timber lead to depletion of the resources and most buildings are designed as machines for exhaustive consumption of energy generated through mechanisms that drain the earth.

Given this scenario, it is inevitable that Architects and their architecture must take a new turn both at micro and macro scales, and in principles and practice.

The picture however is not as alarming as was being painted a decade ago and the signs are that the architects across the globe have taken up their social responsibilities in re-directing their practices.

The search is two fold: on the one hand, there is an increasing interest in the traditional vernacular settlements and practices to re-discover those valued and sensitive ideas and systems that had been at the core of the earth-bound people of the past.

On the other hand, there is tremendous development in the improvements to the contemporary systems of the sky-bound new society, informed and driven by sophisticated technologies. Without question, all approaches available at our disposal must be employed to get our acts together so that modernity and progress can continue to happen without sacrificing the earth and the future generations.

Opposite direction

Unfortunately however, most such developments are taking place in the developed world gyrated by Europe and very little is happening in the rest of the world. Worst, some of the developing countries like ours are going in the opposite direction creating more and more environmentally unfriendly buildings, settlements and cities.

Even the simplest things that can be done and were part of our by-gone culture are being overlooked in pursuance of a perceivably western model that the West itself has begun to reject. Sri Lankan architects must address these issues themselves instead of awaiting for foreigners to be brought in.

There is no doubt that the urgent need for sustainable development constitutes the ground for a renewed critical practice in architecture and urbanism that will humanly address the local issues in a more appropriate manner.

In fact, we cannot await the super-structural nature of architecture as we practice, however materialistically creative it may be, condemn itself to a marginal place in relation to global development. We have a serious challenge in front of us and there are many intriguing questions to be asked before, at and after this conference.

The writer, a fellow of the Sri Lankan Institute of Architects is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Bahrain. As a Visiting Research Scholar, he taught a course on Housing Sustainability at the University of Melbourne in Australia in 2005.