Seeing in the media the significant size of some of the proposal for development being discussed such as YIDA, has cause me to share the thoughts of an expert in the field advocating for critical thinking before action. We have become used to the idea that you can take an office tower and in an age of “cheap” energy you can just throw cooling and heating at it and you can put that building anywhere in the world. That I think is a bad interpretation of Globalization. I think what we had to do through very intensive research is say before you can throw a switch before there were air conditioners how did these extraordinary communities create settlements in hostile environments? Whether it’s an igloo in the frozen wastes or alpine buildings on mountain tops where it’s 30 degrees below or if it’s boiling hot in the deserts; how did they before they would throw a switch? So, learning from that and applying modern technology we were able to create buildings from those historic lessons. Also freed from the demands of the car by putting the car to lower levels where there is an electric robotic vehicle or a clean traditional vehicle going the way cars are going now so we have been able to demonstrate that simply by the power of the sun nothing else, this very energy intensive building because it is a research laboratory 24 hours I can’t think of a more energy intensive building than a research laboratory because the Masdar Institute is about research into renewable energy and it itself is an experiment so the amount of energy we have to inject to get the standards we are accustomed to is significantly less because we are working with nature. Now that philosophy has of coursed produced very intimate spaces quite narrow streets with shading because the orientation thick walls, high end insulations, grillages that will modify the light. So they are not large area of glass. In a way it rejects a lot that we associate with Modern Architecture. So it’s learning anew. If we were to apply this philosophy in say Siberia we would be designing to welcoming the sun, the sun would be your friend. You would then start to see the potential for a Global Architecture that which is truly of the place because it is generated in the first instance by the climate and also by the customs, so your energy top-up is relatively small compared to the conventional buildings THEN you can economically apply photovoltaic and fuel cells and other devises – Norman Foster, Creator of the Masdar City. https://youtube/watch?v=F3Wtze716QY
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 16:41:36 +0000
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