Choose your own green?

There has always been some suspicion about whether various rating schemes actually delivered reliable guidance about the sustainability credentials of buildings.  

The three major such tools, LEED from the US, BREAM from the UK and GreenStar from Australia are all spawned by the 'property industry' with perhaps three dominant objectives:

• To incorporate as far as possible a comprehensive set of 'indicators' of sustainability;
• To foster 'industry transformation' by creating the incentives for a greater proportion of developments to adopt better standards than the minimum compliance mandated by local authorities; and 
• To maintain self-regulation in the face of likely and imminent government requirements.

Actually, it would be hard to get the industry bodies such as the Green Building Council to publicly admit to the last objective.  But the two other objectives seem reasonable enough, nay, even praiseworthy.  And indeed, there is undeniable evidence that the schemes have had some success.  The chief success, arguably, has been that the ubiquitous 'star ratings' have become the headline marketing tool for premium office buildings as they compete for tenants.

The reliability of these 'points accumulation schemes' in reflecting actual enhanced performance, is worthy of several separate posts, and I won't attempt that discussion here.  Let's just say that whatever may be dodgy in the detail, these ratings only really work if they retain some authoritative comparability between buildings submitted to them.  You have to be at least able to say that you expect Building A to be 'better' than Building B, because it has a higher score using the same criteria.

So it is with some bemusement that in the one week, I have come across two announcements that publicize the credentials of buildings, seemingly flouting that principle.

Australia’s first Green Star hotel on the horizon utilised custom-built rating tool is the heading of an article in Architecture & Design.  At first pass that doesn't seem so problematic, especially if you are aware of the steady rate at which the Green Building Council of Australia has been introducing the building type specific variations of its core rating tool.  The sting for me is buried further into the article, where it points out that "GEOCON (the developer)now has exclusive use of this Green Star rating tool, and Abode Woden has been registered to achieve Green Star certification"  Eh?  So to what is this building being compared?

Once riled, I couldn't help reflect that the thinly editorialised press release also fails to mention the Green Globe rating system, which is the global certification for sustainable tourism. That scheme has been in place for a good ten years. The buildings component of the ratings tool was developed by the then Centre for Sustainable Built Environments at UNSW, but certification requires more than just building ratings, and commits operators to a 'continuous improvement' cycle to maintain the initial ratings for a facility and its operation.

The second announcement was in Sourceable, touting "the first residential building of its size to be certified under a ‘six-leaf’ sustainability rating by the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA)".

Who?  What?  The UDIA turns out to be “Australia’s peak representative body for all segments of the urban development industry”.  In other words a lobby group.  Their EnviroDevelopment certification turns out to be, in their own words, “a scientifically-based branding system designed to make it easier for purchasers to recognise and, thereby, select more environmentally sustainable homes and lifestyles”.  Digging further  yields “An EnviroDevelopment license is valid for a period of 12 months from the date of approval by the EnviroDevelopment Board of Management. However, certification and use of the logo suite is only granted after the licencing agreement and statutory declaration has been signed by both parties and all fees have been paid”. 

Of course, I downloaded the EnviroDevelopment Technical Standards .  I found a very nice checklist template under six useful categories, which referred sporadically to earning points……but nowhere did I find any indication of the number of points you have to earn to gain certification.  I guess the kindest interpretation is that if there isn’t a minimum score for compliance, unlike with LEED or GreenStar, a developer can’t be accused of chasing the easiest points.  All-in-all, I couldn’t quite work out why this scheme is really needed, given that its general thrust and detailed checklists are so hauntingly similar to GreenStar.

I have felt for some time that established ratings had lost any meaningful influence on the design process.  But these two announcements seem to suggest we had reached the point where you can either find at will a whole new ratings scheme to credential yourself under, as long as you pay the license fee, or, I suspect, invent one to suit yourself.  I am now waiting for a breathless announcement about a project, ‘branded’ with some sustainability certification to which I can’t even find any google search links. 

the first residential building of its size to be certified under a ‘six-leaf’ sustainability rating by the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA). - See more at: http://sourceable.net/brisbanes-sustainable-residential-tower-set-commence-two-week-sell/#sthash.8umYOciA.dpuf

the first residential building of its size to be certified under a ‘six-leaf’ sustainability rating by the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA). - See more at: http://sourceable.net/brisbanes-sustainable-residential-tower-set-commence-two-week-sell/#sthash.8umYOciA.dpuf

the first residential building of its size to be certified under a ‘six-leaf’ sustainability rating by the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA). - See more at: http://sourceable.net/brisbanes-sustainable-residential-tower-set-commence-two-week-sell/#sthash.8umYOciA.dpuf

Roofs in black and white

The current issue of  the Australian on-line magazine The Fifth Estate features a Special report: the case for white roofs by Cameron Jewell, and the byline:

With externalities including an increase in the urban heat island effect, peak electricity demand and climate change, is it time to ban black roofs?

The best thing about the article is that it draws together in one place most of the conflicting considerations in choice of roof colour, and even to some extent, roof material. The worst thing is that it is missing perhaps the most important variable: the construction of the roof.

The issue with roof colour is the absorption of solar radiation. In any climate where summer overheating is an issue, the solar radiation absorbed rather than reflected has the same effect as raising the outside temperature, and therefore the temperature difference between outside and inside with which any insulation under the roof then has to deal.  The equivalent rise in temperature is known as the SolAir fraction, and can be very significant in the total cooling loads.

But this is only true if the roof is mainly relying on reducing the heat flow by conduction. It becomes less important if the roof system has low emissivity cavities which are effectively ventilated to the outside.  In an ideal version of such a roof, the ‘inside’ face of the cavity would be barely warmer than the temperature of the ventilating air, and therefore the effect of the solar radiation would be effectively neutralised, regardless of the roof colour.

In some other countries, such ventilated roofs are commonplace, even usual. It is important to understand that we are not talking about a ventilated attic of the kind to be found on a typical Australian pitched roofed house. Rather, the ventilated cavity is directly under the roofing material, with the low emissivity achieved by a downward facing foil faced membrane. The cavity is then formed by a rigid sheet lining, supporting the second of the ‘double sarking’ layers, this time with upward facing foil. The secret to the arrangement is to leave an unobstructed air path that will turn into an efficient buoyancy driven air stream, inducing intake at the low point and exhausting hot air at the ridge. This is achieved by the primary battens supporting the roofing running up the slope of the roof, rather than across the slope.  And of course it works best with roofs that are simple gable shape.

Anyone who has followed the description so far will realise that the system, ironically, works best if the roof sheeting is dark, because that will provide the necessary heat to drive the ventilation.
So what about winter, when it would be good to benefit from the extra heat absorbed by the dark roof? An additional elaboration of the system switches over to capturing the warm air in the cavity, and pulls it into the house interior. Admittedly, this may require a fan, but the fan power is small compared to the heating obtained.

OM Solar system Japan

In case anyone thinks the description is fancifully theoretical, it is in fact essentially the type of roof construction employed in Japan, parts of Europe, and of North America. Only the last bit, the winter heat capture is a relatively recent development, as exemplified by the Japanese OM Solar system, which gathers so much heat from a typically small Japanese house roof, that it also puts a heat exchanger in the loop to provide the prodigious amounts of hot water needed to support traditional Japanese bathing habits.

Summer daytime operation

So why don’t we build such roofs in Oz? Because we traditionally used to think it’s for those wankers overseas, while we can save heaps doing away with the plywood sheeting, and even sarking under the tiles. Well, the time has come to look again at what those wankers are doing, why they are doing it, and to spend a little more on building energy efficient smaller houses, rather than the world’s biggest poorly built homes.

Oh yes. And then you can have your black roof and feel good about it.

Inconvenient women

The issue of the participation and fate of women in architecture just doesn't seem to want to calm down.  That it is a reflection of the greater societal problem is hardly an explanation, nor a consolation.  In my opinion, it is actually a special case, and all the more a disgrace.

I say this because in Architecture, unlike in most other endeavours, there is the the added and all-important consideration of attribution, of authorship of projects that were in any case always collaborative.  Where a female judge, if she fought her way to that eminence, will always have her name tied to her judgements used as precedent, an important female architect can have her contributions erased from history in favour of her husband or male partners, by the persistent misogyny of the profession.  And it is willingly aided and abetted by the populist media.

All this was just now brought to mind by the controversy around the BBC using a group photograph from which Patty Hopkins was literally airbrushed, to make a more cosy image of Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Nicholas Grimshaw, Terry Farrell and her husband, Michael Hopkins, and thereby to appropriate exclusively for these 'boys' the credit for initiating the most influential movements in post-WW2 British Architecture.

It is better to read the coverage by the Architects Journal, including comments by a number of contemporary women architects, than for me to attempt a summary.  I comment rather from my position as someone who has taught literally thousands of architecture students, and not irrelevantly, as the father of cherished daughters. 

I started studying at University of Sydney in 1966, with eight women out of the sixty seven commencing architecture students.  I started teaching there five years later in 1971, just a year or two before the proportion of women in the intake first exceeded 50%.  With the exception of a couple of years at the then newly founded architecture program in Canberra, every year for the last forty four of my academic life, I have taught more women than I have men.  I can testify that (reflecting the general trends in secondary and tertiary education) the girls outperformed the guys most of that time.  I sent entries to formal student competitions, and turned many studios into live projects that were less formally, but still externally judged.  Over the years, the women were over-represented in the premiated projects.  Experiencing all this, it's been doubly hurtful for me to watch the demoralisation and the loss to the profession of most of these talented individuals, as their numbers thinned quickly after graduation. But this is all old news.

Where my personal experience comes to bear on the events that triggered this post, is that I started teaching at the height of the feminist push.  Its towering figures like Germaine Greer and Anne Sommers were barely older than I, and had not long left Sydney.  Other women of fearsome intelligence, who happened not to have turned their PhDs into foundational feminist manifestos, argued and partied and for a brief time tolerated my presence in their midst. As a consequence, I can say with my hand on my heart that I took the principles of equality very seriously, and always pedantically referred to the iconic architectural couples and partnerships by both names.  Denise and Robert, Peter and Alison or Maxwell and Jane may as well have been siamese twins joined at the hips.  Admittedly, we knew less of Wendy or Patsy, but had we known, we would have been just as careful.

We did this because we recognised that if we did not, or female students would have to fight their battles all over again.  Along the way, it even appeared to become fashionable to accuse the big boys of ruthless appropriated authorship, most scurrilously that Wendy rather than Norman Foster was responsible for the seminal ideas of the Willis Faber and Dumas Building in Ipswich, or the Sainsbury Centre.......

So I don't quite know where things went wrong again.  Perhaps it would have been possible for Robert Venturi to refuse the Pritzker unless the award committee also inscribed Denise Scott Brown.  Those kinds of awards don't happen by opening an envelope on the night (He would have been a brave man gambling quarter of a million dollars).  But the real point is that the award committee didn't think of it themselves.

And so here we are today, where we not only erase from history the contributions of women architects, we are actually willing to erase them physically?!?

Are trees good for you?

Of course they are.  I firmly believe that.  Obviously, so do advocates of urban forests. Oh, yes, I am one of those.

Advocacy for increased attention to tree scale planting in cities, for the establishment of viable urban forests, is at least a generation old.  And even though rarely adopted as a coherent policy by cities during that time, there has nevertheless been a distinct trend for the public and private domains to acquire significantly more green fuzz.

Paddington, Sydney 2012

It is quite enlightening to compare old aerial photographs of 'inner ring' suburbs of a city like Sydney, with recent images.  It becomes clear how little greenery featured in these places when they were a dense matrix of unregulated industry and predominantly worker housing, strung together by tramways and above ground electricity and telephone wiring.  In contrast, gentrification also seems to bring a commitment to transforming bare streets to treed, and small gardens to intensely planted havens.  In particular, not so many people these days seem to share the former suburban phobias about gutters blocked by leaf litter, so they don't maintain personal vendettas against trees taller than three meters.

Paddington, Sydney, 1947

But lately there also seems to be a more concerted push towards urban forests, driven by a loose conception that greening the city will help do away with the so-called 'urban heat island effect'.

The latest such initiative I have come across is from Melbourne, Australia, already one of the worlds most livable cities.  The article is on Sourceable.net, and may very well have some of the usual baggage of journalistic oversimplification, but I suspect that the point I am about to tease apart is not one of them.

Thermal image of inner Melbourne

As almost always, the key image in the argument for the putative benefits of a green canopy is an aerial view as a 'false colour' thermal photograph.  The image supporting the Melbourne press releases is the prettily coloured one I reproduce in this post.  What you are meant to see is that all the parklands show up as reassuringly blue-green cool, in contrast to the warm yellow-reds of all the concrete and asphalt of buildings and roads.
 
But now look more carefully.  Look for all the coolest surfaces, the ones in the most intense blues.  I am not really familiar with Melbourne, but I can tell by the shapes that the coolest surfaces are in fact the metal roofs of the sporting venues, and indeed of the large industrial and warehouse sheds.  Now, I don't know too much more about the total heat balance over time, of these lightweight roofs as opposed to the grass and canopies of the areas of vegetation.  But I am sure my reading of the pretty picture is not going to be popular with the people who would like it to be self-evident, that literally greening the city will by itself make the urban heat islands go away.

Most readers of my blog would be familiar with my obsession with looking more carefully at data and imagery, particularly when looking for evidence of technical performance.  Well, this is one more example.  In fact, US research suggests that simply extending green surfaces by way of street planting and vegetated roofs makes far less impact on the city's average albedo than we would hope.

Which is not to say that a lot of the other benefits of trees in cities are not worth it for their own sakes.  I'd rather a shaded street sidewalk to walk along than to bake in the merciless sun of a Melbourne summer, I'd rather the leaves overhead cooling and humidifying by transpiration the microclimate under them.  But to capture that correct depiction of what happens, you need to show thermal images of the street at pedestrian level.  It would be just as compelling as the misinformation of the thoughtlessly chosen and misleading aerial.

Read the Sourceable.net article here.

To see another similar aerial thermal image, with exactly the same issues, see the ones of Sydney, here.  But if the reader is interested, this page also links to other microclimate monitoring by the City of Sydney.  If really, truly interested, take the trouble to go to the UNSW link and download the full report of the pilot project
Micro-Urban-ClimaticThermal Emissions: in a Medium-Density Residential Precinct.  Don't be put off by the poorly written report itself, and spend your time instead on the comprehensive literature and methodology review in Appendix 1.

Micro-Urban-Climatic Thermal Emissions: in a Medium-Density Residential Precinct - See more at: http://www.be.unsw.edu.au/sustainability-and-climate-change-adaptation/projects/thermal-impact-designed-environment-urban-heat#sthash.Y6relWBT.dpuf

Thermal Impact of the Designed Environment on the Urban Heat Island - See more at: http://www.be.unsw.edu.au/sustainability-and-climate-change-adaptation/projects/thermal-impact-designed-environment-urban-heat#sthash.Y6relWBT.dpuf

It wasn't me too: Deaths in Qatar

Some time back, I used the Bart Simpson trademark denial of responsibility as the headline of my post about Rafael Viñoly and his apparently disingenuous attitude to the infamous 'Walkie Talkie building' in London, which has been wreaking havoc with its surroundings.  My beef in that post was first the recurring incompetence apparently considered acceptable in the architectural profession, and second the unconscionably cavalier attitude of that particular star architect.

I didn't expect to have to return to the second of those themes quite so soon, and with quite such a grim reason.  But recently Zaha Hadid managed to rile me and sadden me, far beyond the usual, as the general plight of migrant workers in the Gulf came into dramatic focus around deaths in Qatar's building industry.

In brief, the deaths of Indian and Nepali workers in the metaphorically and literally overheated construction frenzy of that small country are running at several hundred a year, made worse by the build-up to the World Cup football tournament in 2022.  As reported by Dezeen, Zaha Hadid appears to have declared herself not responsible in any way, a declaration apparently made necessary in her mind by the very high visibility of her signature stadium for that event:

"It's not my duty as an architect to look at it," Hadid said yesterday at the reopening for her Olympic aquatics centre in London. "I cannot do anything about it because I have no power to do anything about it. I think it's a problem anywhere in the world. But, as I said, I think there are discrepancies all over the world."

It would be silly to over-simplify the issue.  Hadid might be driven by some clarity of thought, useful to make clear the attribution of blame between professional consultants involved in the design and documentation of a major project, and unscrupulous construction contractors operating in a politically corrupt environment made worse by culturally entrenched dehumanizing attitudes. It is almost tempting to give her credit for that, and to see her statements as helping to highlight the necessary, if difficult reforms.  But only almost tempting.  Because she is wrong on at least two counts.

The first is ethical, if subjective.  If the reporting is to be taken as accurate, Hadid comes across as crass and callous.  Her attitude reinforces in the public mind the more general perception of architects as arrogant and uncaring.

The second is objective.  Architects are responsible in common law for the buildability of their designs.  The London Olympics proudly claims that there was not a single fatality on any of its building sites, and that can be achieved only within regulatory frameworks where there cannot be a disconnect between the design and the construction practices necessary to realize it.  This concept has progressed so far in developed nations that in New South Wales, Australia, 'projects have to meet safe design requirements including provision of a safe design report and/or information on how the designer has designed the structure to be without risk to health and safety'. 

In Qatar, the deaths are not all from site accidents, they include other causes like heart attacks caused by over-exposure to the extremely hot conditions, and even factors related to insanitary worker accommodation. Commentators have also pointed to the role of governments of the workers' home countries, in as much as the attitudes to worker safety and welfare may be no better back home.  The problem is complex, and no single architect should be asked to shoulder the blame, even symbolically.  But an estimated 4000 likely deaths by the time the first ball is kicked in 2022 is a horrifying prospect, and one to which there should be more compassionate and proactive responses by architects.  As Dezeen reports:

Other well-known architects have previously spoken out over conditions for workers in foreign nations. Richard Rogers says that “architects have a responsibility to society“, while Daniel Libeskind called on architects to consider whether their projects are “legitimate.”

See the Dezeen article here.
Much of the investigative reporting and commentary has been in the Guardian newspaper.  Start here.
For a range of careful but formulaic responses from other UK based major consultants, see this article in Building magazine.

No shit!

Jaisalmer Fort, India

Apologies for the provocative title.  I’m not trying to be rude.  I’ve been in India for the last five weeks, which may account for the conspicuous lack of up-to-date posts in my blog.  Notwithstanding all the remarkable changes in that remarkable country during the 40 years over which I have visited it, excrement of various kinds has dominated my daily life all that time.  And unfortunately it has been a concrete analogy to my professional frustrations as well.  I fell in love with India as a traveller in 1974, but for the last 22 years I have also been drawn back there by work in heritage conservation.

I have had the privilege of counting amongst my friends some of the most passionate advocates of heritage conservation in the country, in particular Nimish Patel and Parul Zaveri of the Ahmedabad architectural firm Abhikram.  For most of their entire professional careers, Patel and Zaveri have championed not only conservation as a vital component of sustainable cultural tourism, but also as a vehicle for keeping alive the traditional building skills and craftsmanship which can so enrich contemporary building practice.  

One of the long-term frustrations with India has been the profound distrust of top-down processes.  Which is a nice way of saying that corruption is so endemic, top-down funding rarely reaches its intended target programs.  For that reason the focus of much of Patel and Zaveri’s work has been to demonstrate that conservation initiative can also be driven from the grassroots.  And while they express a certain satisfaction from keeping these issues on the agenda long enough to see some increasing acceptance, like me, they lament the continuing cultural indifference to the quality of the public domain, and all the opportunities lost.

So it came as an extraordinarily pleasant surprise to visit Jaisalmer recently, and to be confronted by what appears to be a runaway success in claiming back that remarkable desert city.  One of the reasons I included Jaisalmer in my family’s itinerary was that I wanted to see the outcomes of work implemented by INTACH (the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage), which had been widely reported in conservation circles.

At the risk of oversimplifying, the key projects undertaken by the named agencies (including UNESCO and World Monuments Fund USA) were the installation of a drainage system throughout the ‘city in the fort’, and the restoration of Har Raj Ji Ka Mahal, the maharajah’s palace. The former, augmenting drainage and installing toilets in the individual households, is supported by the compelling analogy of a sandcastle under threat of unforeseen quantities of water.

What we found instead was a much more typical Indian story, though with far from typical results.  The truly inspiring project of the last twelve months appears to have been the coming together of Jaisalmer residents in a voluntary organisation called 'I love Jaisalmer'.  In talking to some of its leading lights, a darker side of the ‘establishment’ projects emerged.  Several members of the residents' association told me that not all was as reported with the INTACH led project.  I have to be careful, because I could not check some of the facts for myself, but it's worth opening up the residents' allegations:

• The much vaunted drainage project apparently failed outright, because the contractor used 3" pipes for the mains - not only do such pipes not have adequate capacity, but you cannot connect to them with the standard 4" outlets of toilet pans.  It seems that most of the working toilets one now sees in the fort area have been built and installed by the residents themselves.  
• Sounding even more like a conspiracy theory, the danger supposedly posed by poor drainage is itself described as a 'beat-up', energetically pushed in order to more effectively attract foreign donors.  The residents have engaged their own engineers, who have verified their views.  
• The palace project was widely characterised as a diversion of money, with the best chance of arranging kickbacks.  Certainly, the quality of the visible restoration work is relatively poor, but that may be explained by disproportionate expense of hidden structural work.

Whatever the unvarnished truth, ‘I love Jaisalmer’ is inspiring evidence that enlightened self-interest can achieve great things, even in India.  The group was founded hardly a year ago, with the overriding objective of simply removing all the garbage and excrement from the fort, its ramparts, and from parts of the newer city at the fort’s feet.  And this objective appears to have been met with spectacular success.  Regular turnouts of volunteers have cleared literally hundreds of tonnes of malodorous rubbish that had been thoughtlessly discarded over decades. The simple expedient of providing rubbish bins and publicizing the fact that foreign tourists actually use them, also appears to inspire not only the residents, but even the notoriously thoughtless Indian tourists.  The streets of the fort are now remarkably clean. 

Which only highlights the fact that the cows are still not cooperating.  My post title is in fact a rallying cry rather than a statement of fact.

For an overview of the Jaisalmer conservation projects, jou can start with

http://www.jaisalmer-in-jeopardy.org/projects.html

There are several articles on 'I love Jaisalmer', but if you don't mind the usual breathless style of Indian newspapers, read this:

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-03-20/jaipur/37871500_1_sonar-fort-cleanliness-campaign-jaisalmer-resident