What Green Buildings can learn from Mobile Telephony in India

What is the similarity between Green Buildings and mobile phones?

If you are my age, you lived more than half your life without a mobile phone. Yet, today, can you imagine life without it? No way. On the other hand, do you think you would live in a green building in your lifetime? Hand-on-heart – No, correct?

So, what is the similarity?

I am going to try and explain, and by the end of this blog I hope you will have the answer. I am also going a make a case that it is very likely that you will live in a green building in your lifetime.  Not because you would have converted to a save-the-world greenie. But because that’s how buildings will be.

Remember Maslow? He established a hierarchy of needs for humans that move to a higher order as the person evolves. The same hierarchy applies to buildings too. As society evolves, our expectations from buildings mature to the next level.

Here is a hierarchy of needs for buildings.

Stage 1 – Shelter . At the beginning of civilization, Man took shelter in caves to keep him dry. Needs were basic – protection from the harsh sun, rain or from the biting cold. 

Stage 2 – Security.  With evolution, there developed a need for security from animals and theft and violence from others. Individual dwellings for family units with a secured entry - a simple village hut, shanties in a megapolis, they all answer this simple need.

Stage 3 – Comfort. A leap of innovation came when buildings started to be designed for comfort – in response to the need to have private space, and to control the internal environment – heat, humidity and noise. These are probably the kind of spaces you and I live and work in – our townhouses and apartment blocks.

Stage 4 – Inspirational Design. Buildings then became a measure of achievement and accomplishment. Now, not only were buildings comfortable, their design said something about the owner, or the society. Think of the Empire State Building, the World Trade Centre, the  Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai – invariably, every major economy has heralded its arrival on world stage by creating “The World’s Tallest Building.” China’s great coming-out party was characterized by distinctive architecture created for the Beijing Olympics.  

Stage 5 – Socially Conscious.  Variously called Green, or Sustainable, or Eco-friendly, or Energy-efficient – these buildings represent the highest order of needs in the hierarchy of buildings -- --- the parallel of the “self-actualized” individual.

In developed societies, buildings went through the first three stages -- as a result, there is a large base of buildings that are in stage 3 and 4 – inspirationally designed and comfortable – but, have a large environmental footprint. Every middle-class house in the US will have climate-control and running hot water. Every tall commercial building in Manhattan or downtown Chicago is a design statement --- but each of them is an energy guzzler.

In India, on the other hand, buildings are currently transiting from stage 2 to stage 3 – from Security to Comfort. We have a great opportunity – we can skip a couple of stages and go directly to responsible construction.

Think of telephony. The developed world spent enormous amounts of money laying down the infrastructure for fixed telephony. We in India started late – but jumped the evolution stages in communication and went straight away to mobile telephony -- saving ourselves a lot of money we would have otherwise spent wiring up the entire country.

When mobile phones first started in India, they were very expensive, and thought to be for the elite niche. But today, they are the communication devices of choice for the vast majority.

India has the opportunity to repeat the same successful formula in construction. Today, “green construction” may be seen by some as a niche segment. With the right interventions from all stakeholders, this has the potential to become the construction method of choice. We don’t have to first create a large base of energy guzzlers stuck in stage 3 and 4 before we start to think of evolving to stage 5.

The western society has, in the last hundred years, consistently stopped at asking its buildings to deliver comfort and inspirational design. Green Building movement in the US is a very recent phenomenon and lags the transition to the Comfort and Inspiration phases by decades, if not centuries. Contrast that with India, where through most of the twentieth century, society focused on putting a roof over the head and a lock at the door --- and the recent transition to the Comfort phase has very nearly coincided with the growth of the Green Building movement.

Some will say that traditional Indian architectural concepts have always been “green” – the jharoka that prevents excessive solar heat gain but allows use of natural sunlight, the courtyard in the middle that serves the same function, trees around the house that shade, rather than vast manicured lawns that guzzle water – the list goes on. Be that as it may, there has been a revival of these concepts in the context of contemporary construction.

When the BPO boom began in India some 15 years ago, it was important for Indian businesses to demonstrate to their foreign clients that they had offices “just like theirs.” The glass-and-metal buildings in Gurgaon and Noida could have been anywhere in the world. In reality, they should have been anywhere – but in India. The large expanse of glass façade heats up the building and puts tremendous additional load on the cooling system. Since it is the tenants who pay the energy bills, there is little or no focus on part of the builder to invest in “higher specification.” So most curtain glazing in these buildings will be with plain float or annealed glass – not a double-glazed unit, which provides better heat insulation. Most building facades are not insulated, nor wrapped in air barriers to prevent air-conditioning leakage from the building.

Almost coinciding with the proliferation of these Gurgaon Glasshouse Gas Guzzlers has been the spread of the Green Building movement in India. Thanks to this movement, the glassy guzzlers are largely discredited, at least amongst the A-list builder community.  Today, outside of the US, India has the highest number of square feet under Green Building certification. Unlike in the US, the lag hasn’t been centuries or decades. There is a thriving community of architects who are experts at Green Building design. There are two rating agencies with well-developed certification systems in place. The Energy Conservation Building Code of India exists. Leading builders are active participants in the Green Building revolution.  Indians are not stopping at asking its buildings to look good and feel great. They are going ahead and demanding more, already. Our buildings can be comfortable, and inspirational, and responsible, all in one go.

There are likely to be three hurdles in the way of this big leap into the self-actualized level for buildings.

First. Despite the downturn, the real estate market in India remains a sellers’ market. As long as the construction specifications stay with the builder and the energy bill with the tenant, it is unlikely that the builder will increase upfront investment in energy-efficient construction materials because the payback will not go into the builder’s pocket. Legislation is the most obvious answer but probably not the correct one. The answer may lie in demanding from experts a clear “rupees per square foot” energy bill norm. So suppose that experts told you that for a centrally air-conditioned office building of over ten floors, the typical energy cost is Rs 25 per square foot per month, and an energy efficient building should be able to give you the same thermal comfort and indoor air quality for Rs 15 per square foot per month, these are clear, easy to understand benchmarks that tenants can use to negotiate with builders. Tenants are usually not experts at energy efficiency, and bodies such as the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, the Indian Green Building Council and TERI must work to educate the people about the lowest common denominator – practical and obvious results that tenants may be able to demand from builders. This also becomes a tangible, measurable differentiator between two otherwise similar building projects.

Second. Across the world, Green Building technology is still evolving, and even in the US, we have found insufficient understanding of building science. For example, codes that mandate the use of vapour barriers in building envelopes in cold climates have been copied and applied to buildings in warm or hot climate zones. Southern USA, with largely cooling or mixed climate, has seen severe moisture problems in its buildings due to this import of codes from Canada – which is a uniformly heating climate. Only in 2006, codes in the USA were modified to exempt Southern USA from the use of vapour barriers. The awareness of correct design principles for buildings that are air-conditioned and also energy efficient is evolving in India, and code makers must take care to adopt practices suitable for the Indian climate. We commonly see in India vapour barriers being wrongly specified to protect fibrous insulation, a practice imported from colder countries, whereas in most places the correct solution would be a vapour-open air barrier. Errors such as these may discredit the use of insulation, a very important green building practice, as a whole.

Third. Green Building construction requires newer products, newer construction materials. Most Green Building design still depends very heavily upon design – small recessed windows to prevent excessive sunlight from heating up the indoors, for example. But what if you wanted a glass curtain wall and still have minimal solar heat gain? An infra-red filter sandwiched between two layers of glass may give you that. Similar material interventions will be required in several other areas – to match Indian construction practices, and Indian budgets.

These challenges are not show-stoppers, and they will be overcome. Indian construction is poised to make an evolutionary leap – an inevitable leap. Just like telephony did, fifteen years ago.