GREEN BY NATURE: GREEN BY RATINGS

India House Pune

I had a wonderful conversation with Christopher Benninger at his breathtaking office and residence, India House, at Pune. ~ Isabelle, Inspired to be GREEN

Prof. Christopher Charles Benninger

Isabelle: Sir you have designed many sustainable buildings and most recently the Suzlon One Earth campus that is LEED Platinum rated and also received the Five Star rating from TERI-Griha what is the secret behind your sustainable design?
CCB: We are applying a lot of thought when we design a building; we are using the given conditions of the place to our advantage to save energy and save resources. For example, here in India House, the orientation was chosen to maximize natural ventilation. The open courtyard allows the wind to enter and cool down the building in a passive way. Louvers in front of the windows are designed to block direct sunlight, allowing tempered natural light to enter deep into the rooms. Since they are operable we can control the light throughout the day and in different seasons. We have selected a good reflective color that bounces the light deep within the rooms. We have used a thermo-isolative material on the roofs that cuts temperatures by five percent and the light reflective tiles on them reflect the sunlight and further cool the roofs. It is easiest to start the battle at the envelope edge than to bring it inside the structure. Green design is not only the concern of architects. It is the task of the entire project team and the owner who must bring a passion for green design in to the building process. A good deal of the approach deals with the location selection, the site development and the day to day management of the earth works, vehicles, and the attitude toward the people working on the site. You cant just put the whole responsibility to the architect, thinking that by sitting in his studio he will just specify and design the solutions. The leadership and the sense of mission, and the passion for a sustainable world must emanate from the client. We all need to bring ideas on to the design table. This is the only way we create a green community and build sustainable structures.

Director, Christopher Charles Benninger Architects Pvt.Ltd

Isabelle: You are talking about a green community, what status will green buildings have in the future?
CCB: Buildings in themselves are microcosms of cities and we should start to treat buildings like that, as a micro unit of a bigger system. Green buildings are micro models of sustainable systems that must be amplified to the macro scale. While the number of rated green buildings is expanding, it will always be a miniscule share of the total built fabric of urban form. We now have to think of Sustainable Cities of which these individual structures are just like the biological cells of the city, or small parts of urban fabric. Their roles are to demonstrate and to show the way. They are not the solution. There is a natural way of building. We all used to do that by nature several decades back. It was just the way we worked that made us design buildings that had cross ventilation, thick walls for insulation and plenty of light off of the verandahs. Here were vents at the top of the ceilings to release the hot air that rose up. Maybe ten years back we had just ten building materials on our pallet and they all came from nearby areas. Suddenly we had a plethora of complicated, new and composite materials. We started to air condition everything. Aluminum Composite Panels cladding everything became the in thing. Hermetically sealed, stuffy and dark rooms became the norm. From green by nature we started designing bad, irresponsible and rude buildings that insulted ones sense of good manners. Now that we switched from designing in a green by habit manner, we started designing just plain bad buildings that guzzled energy, polluted the air, wasted water and required artificial lighting. We were specifying toxic materials that required a huge carbon footprint to produce and to transport. Then the idea of making us learn by numbers came on the scene. Giving us points for doing the wrong thing a little bit better caught everyones imagine. We are all basically children. We are anal-retentive seekers of attention. So Hey, look at me, I have more green

points than you, was a very good idea. I think the green rating systems are trying to make bad things a little bit better. This teaching tool and game is a good beginning. But it is not the way to solve the worlds environmental problems. I would like to start at Point 0 and outline the picture. If you look at the pattern of early human civilization you can see that villages always developed around a micro-watershed catchment area, with dense vegetation and forests housing flora and fauna and a wide variety of biomass. The insect and bird life was intermixed into an ecologically balanced system, of which mankind was just a small part. As villages grew people required more and more land for agriculture and firewood . . . and here the problem starts. More land for agriculture means that forests, and the supporting biomass were cut and burned and transformed into fields. During the monsoon, after the biomass is removed through harvesting, the topsoil of the gets washed into streams, rivulets, rivers, lakes and oceans. The rainfall in the catchment areas remains within the same volume and the carrying capacity of the drainage systems are reduced through siltation. Filling in from the bottom the streamsides erode and widen, collecting more silt making the rivers shallower! This results in flooding and the powerful flood currents erode more and more land. Meanwhile the cutting and burning of the hill slopes and tops continues unabated. The forested hilltops are denuded of their firewood! Goats and other domestic animals graze over the barren lands, eating the biomass coverage and chewing away even the roots of protective plants leaving the hills unprotected. What soil is left is blown away in the hot, dry summer winds covering the countryside with dusty polluted air. Dense forests with wildlife and fish filled streams became desolate wastelands. At the same time our population continues growing. We try to solve this problem by using chemical fertilizers and pesticides to grow hybrid plants that promise abundant harvests. These weak crossbreed plants cannot survive without chemical treatments. The treatments are toxic and these poisons deteriorate very slowly, nesting into aquifer systems and poisoning the subsoil layers.

YMCA campsite Pune Centre for Development Studies and

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Now we have solved our first problem of amplifying the food supply to feed the enlarged population, but we have created a new problem for the environment. All the chemicals and toxins are now washed into the subsoil, the subterranean water reserves and the aquifers that keep the water system vibrant. Many of the cash crops, like sugar cane, are water guzzlers. One acre of sugar cane requires enough water to irrigate seven acres of leafy green vegetables of food crops. It is more expensive to grow sugar cane in India than to import it from tropical rainforest areas like Cuba and Malaysia. So even the rural economy becomes dependent on an unsustainable mode of agricultural production. The Green Revolution is not so green after all. We have started the same vicious cycle with our buildings. First we made use of regionally available materials and tried to use the weather conditions to our advantage by designing buildings that allow natural ventilation to cool our buildings and daylight to illuminate our spaces. Slowly we started to move away from our traditions. We developed buildings that are very uncomfortable without the help of technologies like air conditioning, elevators and artificial lighting. We developed sanitary systems that demand huge per capita consumption of water. Here we are, right now, trying to We call the solution Green Buildings. That is actually the point where we are trying to make something bad a little bit better. We start with the wrong assumptions and we do the wrong thing better and better and better. We get points for doing the wrong thing better and better. We try to reduce energy consumption with new non-toxic materials and incorporate systems that are more energy efficient. But we have no idea about the ecological impact of production of those materials. New technologies come from all over the world to cut down on energy bills, but have we ever thought of how much energy is spent in transporting these materials, equipment, and their inputs around the world? Do we know what toxins

are emitted during production or are latent within the finished products? Yes, we are learning to do the wrong thing better and better, but we are doing it wrong from the beginning.

Isabelle: You are right, I have not thought about it this way.
I will give you another example that may open your eyes: The GREEN REVOLUTION involved the introduction of high-yield varieties of hybrid seeds after 1965 and requiring the increased use of fertilizers and irrigation. This scientific feat provided the increase in production required to make India self-sufficient in food grains, thus improving agriculture in India. This movement is now is blamed for the spread of land degradation in India due to excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides. It requires immense amounts of capital each year to purchase equipment and fertilizers. This may lead to a cycle of debt if a farmer is unable to repay the loans required each year. Additionally, the crops require so much water that water tables in some regions of India have dropped dramatically. This drop continues affecting negatively the process of desertification. Where cash crops demand high levels of irrigation the evaporating water creates salinization destroying the fertility of the land. Already, the low water is starting the process of salinization. If continued, this will leave vast land tracts infertile and spelling a disaster for India. Fifty years ago the Green Revolution was started for a good cause and saved millions of people from death and starvation. Now the environment must bear the cost, and we will be affected soon. I do not wish the same process to take place with our buildings. We should think about sustainable solutions without negatively effecting the environment.

solve the problem of our energy-guzzling buildings.

Let us design buildings with local resources, incorporate technologies carefully and pay a lot of attention to a balance with Mother Nature.
Mahindra United World College Pune

Centre for Development Studies and Activities Pune

About CCB:
Christopher Benningers early career was as a teacher at Harvard University and in India, where he founded the School of Planning at Ahmedabad and the Center for Development Studies and Activities under the University of Pune. Sixteen years ago, well past the age of fifty, he gave up a thriving academic and United Nations consulting career, starting an architectural studio nearly from scratch. Along with his partner, Akkisetti Ramprasad and senior colleagues Rahul Sathe, Daraius Choksi, Harsh Manrao and others, an architectural studio was quickly turned into an internationally acclaimed design house, winning the prestigious American Institute of Architects Award, Indias Designer of the Year Award amongst others. Their studios patrons have ranged from the King of Bhutan, Queen Noor of Jordan, Nelson Mandela, and the United Nations to corporates like the Kirloskars, Suzlon, the Bajaj Group, Cochin Refineries, the Taj Hotels, the Mahindras, Tata Technologies, Executive Ship Management (Singapore) and many more. They have served voluntary agencies like the SOS Childrens Villages, YMCA, Arthabod, the Good Sheppard Homes and the TGBMS. Their present focus is on the new campus of the Indian Institute of Management at Kolkata, the new National Capitol Complex in Bhutan and the Azim Premji University at Bangalore. (More information on projects and ideas at www.ccba.in/home.htm) Inspired to be Green thanks for this great conversation beyond green buildings and towards more sustainability. It was a pleasure to listen to the vast experience and knowledge of Architect Christopher Charles Benninger about the connections of our ecosystem.