Green building ‘rises from the dead’

They would also put Nyerere’s development philosophy in a nutshell, referring to his Arusha Declaration-based Ujamaa policy motto of the people, land, appropriate policy and good governance as requisites for development.

Nyerere’s wording was dictated by political and social dynamics of the time. But had he lived in this era of climate change and global warming, he would have probably replaced the first aphorism with fighting impacts of climate change, and the later axiom with environmental policies in whose flacon would be everything for which he had been advocating.
He would have matched with modern-day progressive environmentalists who see a fight on ignorance, poverty and disease as an uncompromising war on climate change.

But, unlike the outdated techniques employed by the old generation of crusaders on hazardous environment, who regarded environment in isolation of other life-giving phenomena, the new generation of environmentalists believe that the war should be fought fully-fledged from all fronts of human life.

World environmentalists of the new generation who have set out to unite under the flagship of UN-Habitat believe that to win the equally hostile climate change, the people of the world should unite for battles right in their localities, with a firm belief that ‘charity begins at home.’

They have made a milestone by defining home as a place that goes beyond a shelter under the sun, but a scientific-based human habitat that generates income for its tenants, provides sound health, prevents them from drought and floods, from smoky and dusty air, from accidents and other tragedies and creates job opportunities, leaving some yet in store.

“It is a home to live in, not just a building to see,” says a Nairobi-based architect, environmentalist, design and acoustics expert Musau Kimeu, a staunch adherent to the UN Habitat’s Green Building philosophy he believes is typical of the 21st Century architecture of an environment-friendly building.

He says the architecture for the green building, or otherwise sustainable building design, is just as simple as a marriage between the traditional African way of designing houses and the modern technology adopted from the West.

It was a common trend of urban building architecture throughout East Africa prior to the 1980s, only to be later messed up with expensive, good-looking, tall, glass-cladded commerce-oriented buildings to please the onlookers, that are not only hazardous to the environment but also to their occupants, he said earlier in the month while presenting a paper in a training workshop on Sustainable Building Design for Journalists in East Africa held in Machakos, Kenya, as part of the UN Habitat’s Promoting Energy Efficiency in Buildings in East Africa.

“Environment-conscious buildings have never been more central to the welfare of our people. In olden days, despite the lack of training, our ancestors instinctively knew how to engage in a symbiotic dialogue with the natural forces of the environment, and subsequently we found the environment in a good condition,” he says, adding:

“If you examine architecture in tropical countries today, the best buildings were built between 1950s and 1980s, which coincided with the independence years of most former colonised nations in the tropics.”

Marking the origin of sustainable architecture as an agenda of the 21st Century, the 1950s witnessed particularly important developments related to the interrelationship between modern architecture, colonialism, the United Nations and the new architectural approach, the ‘Tropical Modern Architecture.’

Therefore, the call to rethink architecture with regard to environmental and social sustainability was made 61 years ago, long before the subject of sustainability reached the general public.

He cites several buildings in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Kampala as a reflection of the two antagonistic eras of architecture in East Africa. They include the environment-conscious State House building in Dar es Salaam, which was built in the 1920s as opposed to the environment-insensitive Hyatt Regency Hotel, formerly the Kilimanjaro Kempinski Hotel, in the city centre rebuilt in 2005; I & M non-green building erected in Nairobi in 2002 against the environment-friendly older ICEA building in the same city that was built in 1998.

But Hilton Hotel in Kampala, which was built in the 2000s, is quite the opposite of the environment-conscious Mapeera House built several years earlier.

Challenging his fellow architects, governments, non-governmental organisations and the public in general to a green building approach, implying sustainable and environment-conscious structures, architect Kimeu provides guidelines to the relatively new trend of architectural design.

He says a green building should be designed in such a way that it should be prevented from heat gain and provided with cooling strategies.
He suggests that the building should be narrow in plan to achieve maximum natural lighting penetration and good cross-ventilation and designed for their long axis to go along the east-west axis.

He says vertical and horizontal sun-shading elements, deep roof overhangs, balconies and perforated timber screens should be used for sun-shading glazed areas. Others to be applied include operable windows, thermal chimneys, metal/timber louvred fenestrations, perforated timber (mashrubiyya) screens on openings for natural ventilation to provide cooling, but building services including lifts, lobbies, toilets, stores and ducts should be located on the east and west facing facades.

It is also recommended that all buildings located within the tropics should have external walls of not less than 200mm thickness, minimal window openings on the north and south facing wall and smooth and light-coloured external finishes to reduce solar heat absorption.

But the choice of the building materials involving locally available ones with low embodied energy, with none or minimal maintenance that are sustainably harvested, but non-toxic with minimal internal pollution and damage to health and easy to recycle or to reuse, is equally important for an ideal green building.

A green building should also be equipped with a renewable energy system including solar power harvesting facility by using transparent photovoltaic panels mounted on the ground or used as roof cover, and hot water solar heating panels, so that the outdoor walkways could be lit using solar-powered streetlights.

Wind energy to generate electricity is also recommended in line with the use of biogas produced from biodegradable waste from farm produce or waste from an environment-friendly toilet or sewage system.

But rainwater can also be harvested from the building’s roof to be used for cleaning, flushing toilets and watering plants.

Other requisites of a green building include solid water management system, implying that the generated solid waste should be sorted out at source for the biodegradable organic waste to be used for production of biogas and the non-biodegradable dry waste, such as wood, metals and glass, to be recycled to minimise waste at damping grounds.

Recycling is a key component of modern waste reduction and is the third component of the ‘Reduce, Reuse and Recycle’ waste hierarchy.

The art of landscaping is equally important in the green building endeavour, according to the expert. He says a proposed development should be landscaped with well-chosen native trees and shrubs and that local plant materials are preferable to exotic ones as they require minimal watering and manure instead of fertilizers which have long-term side-effects.

However, Kimeu cries foul over lack of well coordinated efforts among the stakeholders in the East African region in achieving meaningful construction of green buildings, apart from sporadic individual efforts, saying “Lack of public awareness” on green building has to share the blame.

Despite the challenges, however, Rwanda has reportedly gone miles farther in greening her buildings.

It built a 438-unit green building village in the capital, Kigali, about a year ago thanks to a government’s 75 per cent grant to its project caretaker organization, FONERWA, to construct low-cost houses ranging between Fr15m and Fr25m. They would have cost between Fr25m and Fr45m had they been built using an environment-insensitive design, according to real-estate experts.

Though Kenya’s green building endeavour boasts enjoying wide media publicity in a country serving as a major platform for the UN-Habitat’s campaign, apparently a fountain for East African masterminds of the sustainable building design, the result on the ground is less impressive than neighbouring Rwanda.

While Uganda is yet to institutionalize a green building campaign, individual enthusiasts are well up in arms, advocating the policy in self-styled manner in their privately launched periodicals.

But Tanzania seems to hold the last but one position in the region next to troubled Burundi, whose report on green building is still murky. Experts say that at issue in Tanzania is lack of a defined coordination policy among its would-be major players, namely the Green Building Council (GBC) established in 2014, the state housing monopoly organization, the National Housing Corporation (NHC), and the government’s environment overseer organization - the National Environment Management Committee (NEMC).

However, against the background of all the challenges, Kimeu throws the hat on the table, outlining the benefits of green buildings as opposed to environment-insensitive structures, saying though they appear to cost slightly higher, the extra construction costs are likely to be recovered through reduced energy running and low maintenance costs, among others.

“If well designed, green or environment-friendly buildings need not necessarily cost more but poor non-green design can result in irrecoverable additional costs,” he says.