The inescapable summer heat, climate change, and the matter of energy transition – from a built environment perspective.
While the world is struggling with heat waves once again, staying indoors seems to be one obvious option, but it’s also a time to explore options we have to seek comfort through interventions in the built environment and time to reflect on what we might have been doing wrong in terms of built environment.
You ask anyone across the world and they will usually say they are experiencing more heat and discomfort every passing summer over the last one or two decades. While Solar irradiation (solar radiation received per unit area on earth) has remained more or less the same, there are obvious reasons heat seems to get more and more unbearable, while also witnessing the urban heat island effect (UHI). Some reasons for increased heat experiences in the urban context include increased built-up area, a higher percentage of paved area, depleting share of green, reduced waterbodies, heat exhaust from an increasing number of automobiles, mechanical cooling, and process heat generation, affinity to sanitized landscape compared to the urban wilderness, the seemingly forgotten or unexplored potential of regenerative urban micro-climate and outdated regulations around built environment among others. While these area-based interventions must be investigated, the basic thing to start with is to revisit regulations around the built environment, including urban design guidelines, design codes, and specifically the building bylaws.
If you apply a climatological perspective in architecture, what is required to be done in terms of the built environment to counter heat can be quite predictable. Say, years of collected meteorological data simply give predictable and specific solar irradiation at a specific geo-coordinate, even if you don’t find it for your specific city or coordinate, data from nearby places should work. Now, with this data and based on geo-location you can exactly calculate the heat gain on the building envelope from each direction. This means you have enough data to design your house or your neighborhood in a more heat-tolerant and climate-resilient manner. So, what is stopping us?
It makes sense to investigate, what may possibly have been wrong with the building regulations for instance. It’s not about building bylaws of any specific city, but architectural regulations in general, applicable to any part of the world. A couple of things to reflect on in terms of building bylaws. First, they are called “building bylaws” (law/ rules/ standards etc.) and not “your home comfort guideline” for a reason. When building bylaws might have been conceptualized for the first time, the intention must have been to curb the haphazard growth and bring order to the urban fabric. ?This notion of control and the nitty-gritty of proposed measures within the book of building bylaws/ building regulations haven’t changed since then. This means building bylaws never actually were built from the primary focus on comfort through the science of climatology. Yes, we do see some guidelines on fa?ade treatment for E-W-N-S orientation within building bylaws, but they might not suffice, because of unlimited building orientation possibilities, which may even leave seasoned architects puzzled about how to treat a building fa?ade that is oriented south of south-west for instance. It’s beyond human capacity to tailor building fa?ade wrt every degree of change in orientation, while every degree of orientation matters, to minimize heat gain and save every bit of mechanical energy spent otherwise for indoor cooling. Possibly AI and parametric design software will come to the rescue. ?Second, again from a climatological perspective, it makes no sense to design building walls of the same thickness in all directions, when the solar heat load is different in different directions. But we continue to do so because of deep standardization practices of mass production. Wall thickness which acts as an insulation layer must be reconceived for different orientations. ?Likewise having uniform dimensions of openings (like windows) in all directions again doesn’t make much sense, while what you ideally require is a wide opening on one side for direct light and possibly a sunken window with chamfered edges on the other side for diffused light and great ambiance. Third, solar-passive architecture still doesn’t enjoy a due place in building regulations, say for instance light shelves and daylight linking can cut down on energy bills just like that, but they are nowhere to be seen in modern commercial and office buildings. Lastly, these building regulations are not agile, leaving little room for architectural freedom and creativity.
The current approach to architecture based on building regulations seems to rely on doing whatever is permitted as per local building bylaws and then fixing the rest of the problems like heating and cooling through mechanical means. This also gives a reason to revisit bylaws, as if we are able to update regulations based on new age requirements and wisdom then that will not just help make buildings with more ambient comfort but also help reach faster energy transition.
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We need to move away from getting fixated on celebrating just a handful of buildings that are designed to provide unparallel thermal comfort and high energy efficiency, in time and budget; the learnings from these celebrated and sustainable pieces of work from the built environment in our cities and the wisdom of these commendable architects must go into the rethinking and revision of building regulations, so that not just a couple of buildings in our cities are celebrated, but each and every real estate property, commercial building, office, apartment, and individual houses in our city could provide the comfort and lower energy bills that their occupants deserve. Every architect knows what can further be done to design a building with better thermal and ambient comfort and lower energy bills, its just that sometimes building regulations won’t permit the architectural freedom and creativity that is required to do so. Also, it’s interesting to note that it’s usually an architect-client relationship, which is point-to-point, you get what you pay for, and only you get it, not others; we possibly need to move away from this model to a model where the architect-client relationship becomes more universal of a kind architect-to-city, where learnings, and climate-sensitive and climatologically sound good practices from these individual architects, learned and mastered through their individual projects, must trickle down to say a quarterly updated building design guideline, and further must translate to say annually updated building bylaws, for instance, that too in a local and hyperlocal context!
Author: Anoop Jha
Image: Author