Sharanam, India

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Doug King

Last week I had the privilege of working with a couple of architects in India who have given up a substantial portion of their professional lives to work voluntarily for an NGO, the Sri Aurobindo Society, on a new centre for village development and education.

Jateen Lad and his assistant, Trupti Doshi, have constructed a building of great beauty and power which will act as a focus for education and enabling activities by the Society, but they have done so much more than simply designing a building. Sharanam, as the building is known, is a village development project in its own right. Over the last seven years Jateen and the team from the Society have used the construction project as a vehicle to train and empower local villagers.

Sharanam has been made by hand by the villagers who will use it.

Men that would previously have only been able to get work on building sites as unskilled labourers have become masons with valuable skills to sell. They have used hand made, compressed earth bricks to create an expression of architecture far removed from the vernacular from which the brick making evolved. The bricks manufactured at Sharanam actually exceed the strength of conventional kiln fired bricks in India (which admittedly are of very poor quality). Jateen has also taught the masons how to design and make pre-cast concrete elements which, being hand finished have a quality we cannot find in the UK.

I was in India as I had been commissioned to work with Jateen and his team on a sustainable masterplan for a residential management training centre, to be located on a farm far from conventional services and facilities, and so would need to be virtually self sufficient in energy, water and waste management. However, whilst I was there, I was also able to make the next step in revitalising indigenous construction skills and prepare the Sharanam masons to contribute to future construction projects. With a design for a precast T section beam I demonstrated what we in the UK know as a beam and block floor and the local masons totally got it. This method of construction is unknown in modern India where all construction is now in-situ concrete and therefore dominated by large contractors.

Making a beam and block floor Sharanam style.

However, a beam and block floor of this design can be manufactured and installed largely using manual labour, not machines. This gives the underemployed villagers of Southern India a method of constructing high quality buildings for themselves with local skills and materials as well as a new found self esteem and employment opportunities.

Imagine the Solutions

Posted on June 15, 2010 by Doug King

I’ve been thinking a lot about the benefit of design & imagination in construction education recently.

In my opinion the role of an engineering education is not only to teach graduates to think, but to inspire them with the endless possibilities of design. There are many sources of inspiration and whilst students usually reference cultural precedent in their design, resource efficiency is a key issue that can also inspire the imagination. If we equip students with knowledge of the issues and some basic techniques for resource efficient design we can leave it to their imagination to come up with designs that will enable society to solve the problems it faces.

We must however, teach sustainable design in an interdisciplinary manner as no single construction discipline has all the skills necessary to solve all the problems. Designing the buildings of the future will involve all the disciplines from the outset and we need to reflect this in education. I believe that it will become essential for architectural schools to build close relationships with engineering departments. Interdisciplinary teaching with experiential and peer promoted learning will raise the performance of architectural and engineering students alike.

Sustainable design is a philosophy, not a set of rules to stifle individual expression. Sustainability has to be integrated at every level of society from simple changes in individual behaviour to the large scale re-planning of our urban centres to cope with fuel depletion. I am confident that if we inspire future generations of students to think creatively about the problems that confront society, the solutions that they come up with will surprise us all.

Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Doug King

A design review this afternoon brought home just how critical the low carbon knowledge gap really is. Two architects presented schemes for projects with high sustainability ambitions. Both were labouring under misapprehensions about daylight and natural ventilation because both had been advised by their engineers that everything would be fine. Unfortunately neither architect had sufficient knowledge to challenge their engineers’ assertions.

It transpired that the ventilation would be fine because the engineers, in both cases, were planning to add fans, so the systems would work when natural ventilation failed. A quick examination of the buildings in question revealed these fans would have to be relied on for ventilation about 95% of the time – hardly natural ventilation.

The daylight issues were also similar; deep plan buildings with fully glazed facades in compensation to let enough light in! Once again, an engineer had calculated the average daylight factor and assured the architect that everything would be OK. I estimated that the light would vary by about 60:1. With such high contrast the interiors will appear deeply gloomy against the over-lit perimeters and result in excessive use of electric light.

Neither building was engineered to achieve the architectural ambition. Both displayed classic mistakes which we teach architectural students to avoid. However, a practicing architect has to deal with many conflicting issues and must be able to rely on their engineer. Yet, engineers are taught to design with fans and electric lights, not to manipulate the building form to promote natural airflow and light.

How many buildings fail by falling between architects and engineers who lack a common language? We must not only join up architectural and engineering education, but we must do it urgently.