Archive for category Sustainable Design
Slums in Cities | Providing Low-Cost Housing to End Slums
Posted by BenzuJK in Sustainable Design on February 20, 2010
In the last few decades, there had been a tremendous growth in emerging countries like India, Brazil, Mexico and China. This had been mainly due to a rapid expansion in the manufacturing sector.
Thus, there had been a massive immigration of workers to cities and production centers. These new workers cannot afford housing. This is what gives rise to slums, as the homeless make temporary shelters which get transformed rapidly into semi-permanent housing colonies. People migrate to cities because the comparative poverty and hardship involved in their alternatives (ie. subsistence farming) is worse.
Dharavi Slums, Mumbai, India
According to UN-HABITAT, a slum is defined as a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security. It is estimated that one billion humans live in shanty towns. One in every three people in the world will live in slums within 30 years unless governments control unprecedented urban growth, according to a UN report.
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Three dimensions of Sustainable Environmental Architecture
Posted by BenzuJK in Sustainable Design on December 13, 2009
Sustainable building involves considering the entire life-cycle of buildings, taking environmental quality, functional compatibility and future values into account. In the past, attention has been primarily focused on the size of the building stock. In many countries, quality issues have hardly played a significant role. However, in strict quantity terms, the building and housing market is now saturated in many countries, and the demand for quality is growing importance.
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Building Green Architecture | Sustainable Design
Posted by BenzuJK in Architecture, Sustainable Design on December 13, 2009
A green approach to the built environment involves a holistic approach to the design of buildings. All the resources that go into a building, include materials, fuel or the contribution of users need to be considered if a sustainable architecture is to be produced.
Producing green buildings involving resolving many conflicting issues and requirements. Each design decision has environmental implications. Measures for green buildings can be divided into four area:
1) Reducing energy in use
2) Minimizing external pollution and environmental damage
3) Reducing embodied energy and resource depletion
4) Minimizing internal pollution and damage to health.
One of the excellent examples of Green Architecture is “Aliens Space Station”.
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A New Dimension to Building Green Architecture
Posted by BenzuJK in Architecture, Sustainable Design on December 12, 2009
Dynamic Tower
The Dynamic tower, the first building in motion, takes the concept of green buildings to the next level where it will generate electricity for itself as well as other nearby buildings, making it the first sky-scraper designed to be self-powered.
The building generates electricity from wind turbines mounted horizontally on each floor, this eighty storey building will have seventy nine wind turbines, making it a true green power plant.
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