Over the past 60 years, architects and engineers have surrendered to industrial construction solutions, with buildings designed to be built faster and faster and at very low cost.
Over the past 60 years, architects and engineers have surrendered to industrial construction solutions, with buildings designed to be built faster and faster and at very low cost. As a more standardized and cheaper international approach to building emerged throughout the 20th century, many professionals abandoned the vernacular traditions of their ancestral cultures, which were developed over thousands of years, to fight the climatic extremes of different regions.
Uniformity x Heat
Standardized buildings are increasingly common in different capitals of the world, no matter if they were built in London or Bangkok, cities with completely opposite climates and geographical position. The shady balconies, brise-soleils and thick insulating walls have been replaced by a modern, square style.
Tropical climate countries such as India, Thailand and Brazil were flooded by glazed facades and concrete slabs, which dominated city skylines thanks to increasingly efficient air conditioning systems that allowed the regulation of temperatures inside these buildings.
But these glass boxes have always brought environmental problems. For example, office buildings in Manhattan built between 1965 and 1969 consumed twice as much energy per unit of floor space as those built between 1950 and 1954.
Another problem with glazed facades is the intense lighting that enters the interior of the buildings, which causes blinds and curtains to be used, blocking the external view and increasing the dependence on artificial lighting, which, in turn, increases energy consumption even further.
In the age of climate change, this uniformity seems like a mistake. Large parts of India, for example, are being smothered by a heat wave with temperatures approaching 50 ºC. Growing demand for cooling energy has helped trigger daily blackouts in cities, worsening the urban heat island effect.
When air conditioning units are turned on to help people sleep at night, they release heat into the streets, which can raise the local temperature by about 5 ºC, according to a study published in 2014 in AGU – Advancing Earth and Space Science.
How It All Began
The architecture of tropical cities began to change rapidly in the 1990s, when countries of the so-called third world began to make a transition to a market-based economy. As construction grew, western or globalized styles became the standard. The change was partly aesthetic; developers favored the glassy skyscrapers and straight lines considered prestigious in the US or Europe, and young architects brought home ideas they had learned while studying abroad.
Economic considerations have also played a role. As land became more expensive in cities, there was pressure to expand physical space, eliminating thick walls and patios that minimized heat. And it was quicker and easier to raise tall structures using steel and concrete, rather than using traditional compressed earth blocks that are suitable for low-rise structures.
The consequence of this approach was to make buildings less resistant to high temperatures. The impact seemed minimal: it could easily be fixed by electric fans and air conditioning, and cooling energy costs were not a problem for developers when they sold their buildings.
Even the most artisanal construction teams adopted modern, patterned styles. These teams rarely have a trained architect or designer. “They build what they see. They can build traditional elements in their village houses, but when they arrive in the city, they are driven by the imperatives of the city, by the city's imaginaries. And then international style is aspiration.”, says Aromar Revi, director of IHSS (Indian Institute for Human Settlements) in an interview with Time magazine.
Similar changes have taken place in developing countries across the world, with cities from the Middle East to Latin America taking up the copy-paste idea of globalized architecture. As the global construction industry has embraced concrete and steel, local materials, designs and technologies have been replaced – with lasting consequences.
For Dr. Sandra Piesk, architect and author of the book “Habitat: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet”, some of these traditional methods have not gone through the technological revolution they needed to make them more durable and easier to use on a large urban scale, so the builders simply focused on perfecting the use of concrete and steel.
The Return of Vernacular Construction?
A movement to revive more region-specific styles of architecture – and combine them with modern technologies – is underway in India. In the last decade, thousands of architects, mainly in the city of Auroville, have promoted the use of rammed earth in walls and roofs. It absorbs heat and moisture and can now be used to build larger and more complex structures thanks to the development of more stable compacted blocks.
Universities are teaching students to build in a climate-specific way, while nonprofits and craft construction companies are holding workshops teaching this approach to small-scale architects and builders.
Wider adoption of climate-sensitive architecture would greatly reduce the energy required to cool buildings. This could be crucial for the planet for years to come. There are currently 3.6 billion refrigeration appliances in use worldwide, and that number is growing by up to 10 appliances every second, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Program and the International Energy Agency. By 2050, experts predict that we will need 14 billion units to meet everyone's needs.
Increasing the use of traditional materials in the construction sector would also affect CO2 emissions on the planet. Vernacular architecture tends to use more natural, locally sourced substances like earth or wood rather than concrete and steel, which are created through carbon-intensive industrial processes and transported thousands of miles away. A 2020 paper published by researchers in the International Journal of Architecture found that producing vernacular materials required between 0.11 MJ and 18 MJ of energy per kilogram, compared to 2.6 MJ to 360 MJ per kilogram for modern materials.
The future of architecture will not be simply going back to how things were 70 years ago in tropical countries before the arrival of the Modern Movement. The way forward is to channel the locally rooted problem-solving strategies of traditional architects, incorporating contemporary techniques – finding a balance between ancestry and modernity in the fight against heat.
Perhaps this way, we will be able to try to correct the negative impacts caused by the exacerbated and ferocious acceleration of construction in the last century, especially in the Global South, the biggest victim of warming and pollution in the world.
Via Tabulla
