Category Archives: News

The Changing Face of Lighting

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LEDs are changing the face of lighting

LEDs are changing the face of lighting

My first encounter with LEDs was for a school project where I wanted to use one as a little red indicator. In those days, they were simply Light-Emitting Diodes, nothing more. The though that they would, one day, be used as a source of light didn’t even remotely cross my mind.

In the last few years, however, LED technology has taken giant strides and the early problems like inaccurate colour rendition and a limited light-cone have been, to a great extent, sorted out. Added to that, the costs–which used to be very high–have come down to relatively affordable levels. While they are not, still, competitive with fluorescent lights, the day is probably not far when LEDs will replace them.  Even at today’s prices, they are already more economical in the long term.

With their small size and favourable physical properties—they run cool, have a long life and are able to vary their colour—LEDs have made it possible for lighting designers to come up with some very original creations.

Image derived from | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:On-state_off-state_white_LEDs.jpg

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Micro Houses

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A photo feature on unconventional tiny houses got me thinking about why we never hear of architects designing them in India.  Is it because a very small house is much too readily associated with poverty that we, as a country, are trying to leave behind? Or do we insist on big weekend houses on the off-chance that extended family and friends will come visiting and need to be accommodated?

tiny footprint

Micro houses have a tiny footprint

Whatever the reason, the concept of micro-houses is rarely considered seriously here–although it should be–because because they costs a lot less to build or maintain and, more importantly, they reduce our carbon footprint in a very big way.

We have a long tradition of frugal construction and it’s about time we rediscovered it. Maybe one day, hopefully in the near future, someone will ask me to design one. Or a bunch of them.

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The Bottle Light

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bottle light refractionSometimes, a simple idea can be immensely powerful. Maybe the bottle light is not something that makes a huge difference to your life or mine but, for those who live in shanties with little or no electricity, this is a godsend.

screencap from a BBC featureEssentially, one fills a used, transparent, plastic bottle with water and a little bleach (to prevent algae) and sticks it into a hole in the roof.  That’s it. Oh, and don’t forget to seal the edges of the hole.

The light that it produces is equivalent to a 50 or 60W bulb. Of course it won’t work at night but when you think of the dark homes that some of our less fortunate citizens live in, this can—at the very least—brighten up their day.

More:
BBC News Magazine
Instructables
A Liter of Light

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The Gaming of LEED Ratings

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We all know that the LEED system can be gamed but that it could be turned so completely on its head was news to me.

greenwashThe Bank of America building at One, Bryant Park, New York has a LEED Platinum rating and was the first skyscraper to ever be awarded this but now, it turns out, it uses more energy per square foot than other building of similar size in all of Manhattan. Wow.

It was hailed as a major achievement by none other than Al Gore who set up his offices there. The basic problem is that LEED is largely based on computerised energy models and “intent”. This makes it open to abuse because it’s easy to purportedly intend something at the design stage and then change the goalposts later on.

Coincidentally, just this morning, I was speaking to a couple of marketing guys who were trying to convince me to attend a “green summit” next month and one of their selling points was LEED. I declined, telling them exactly what I thought of LEED but I wish I’d seen this article just a few hours earlier:

Bank of America Tower and the LEED Ratings Racket via: ArchRecord

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Conditional Formatting

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Yesterday, a contractor submitted his bill for some work that had been carried out and, not surprisingly, it was a little different from the original estimate. I often make an extra set of columns in the spreadsheet to show the bill and estimate alongside each other. This way the client can easily see what has changed.

On this occasion, I decided to do a little more; I decided to colour-code the changes in the bill vis-a-vis the estimate. It could be done manually, of course but this can quickly become tedious if you have anything more than a handful of cells to format.  Instead, we can let the spreadsheet do the grunt work.  After all, that’s what it’s there for.

Here is a brief outline of how it is done so anybody (my future self included) can see how to do it.  The instructions are for LibreOffice but they couldn’t be that different for Excel.

Here are the steps in brief.

Three Styles

Set up the styles using the style manager (F11). I created three with different colours.

Style Formatting

Modify the font, colour and background to suit your requirements

Menu

Click the cell where you want to format to be applied (K3 in this example) then go to Format>Conditional Formatting>Condition…

Conditions for K3

And add the three conditions

TIP: If the cell for comparison is listed as $F$3 that means it is an absolute value. If, however, you remove the $ signs, it will refer to a cell placed relative to the one where the condition is applied.

Format Paintbrush

Format Paintbrush

Once you have a cell set up the way you want, simply use the format paintbrush to apply it to other cells.

The Output

And finally, here is a sample of the output

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Visit to ecobuild India 2013

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ecobuild 2013Yesterday was my day to visit Bombay Exhibition Centre at Goregaon for this year’s ecobuild India 2013.

I was a bit surprised to see some of the participating vendors because there was nothing remotely connected to sustainable architecture in their products.  Others, however, showcased more appropriate stuff.

Was disgusted by a company–which shall remain unnamed–that was promoting artificial thatch imported all the way from Thailand. Can greenwashing get more brazen than this?

On a positive note, I was impressed by products from Corvi and K-lite — coincidentally both are manufacturers of LED lights.  The former have a limited catalogue but all their fittings are dimmable with standard dimmers which is a major plus point in my book.

The show wasn’t very large but I presume it will grow over the years. I just think they should vet the products or else the show, as a whole, will soon lose credibility.

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Glaring mistakes

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conventional v/s curtain wall

In hot climates, the overall energy usage rises as you increase the glazed area. Curtain walls, therefore, are highly inappropriate.

I have ranted about glass façades for a long time and this editorial by Sunita Narain of DTE has inspired me to add a couple of paragraphs to the original one.  Among other things, she has written about a recent study by IIT-Delhi which found that, in our hot climate, the manufacturers’ claims of special coated glass or double/triple glazing being able to reduce heat gain are rather hollow.

One of the other specious arguments put forth in an attempt to portray glass curtain walls as green systems is to say that it reduces the electricity consumed for lighting. This is a half-truth. Leave aside the uncomfortable glare that people working inside such buildings have to put up with, let us make a simple comparison.

Consider a 10m² conventionally designed space. Assuming that we don’t take passive cooling techniques into account, the air-conditioning load will be in the region of 3,500W (1 ton).  Lighting the same space, on the other hand, will need just 50W with fluorescents or 40W if we’re using LED fittings.

Now, imagine a similar sized curtain-walled space. The maximum saving that can be achieved by reducing lighting is a puny 50W. However–and this is the big problem–air-conditioning requirements will probably have risen to a whopping 5,000W.  Even with all the specially coated and multi-layered of glass in the world, the total requirement is unlikely to be anything less than 4,500W.

So yes, we may not use as much electricity for lighting but, I’m afraid, the energy usage for cooling will go right through the roof and no amount of marketing spin can get around this simple fact.

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Building walls with the rat trap bond

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Just in case I’ve got you visualising rodents scurrying about where they’re not wanted, ease your mind; the rat trap bond I’m talking about is simply a method of laying bricks when building a wall.  It’s similar to the common “Flemish” bond but instead of putting the bricks on their face, they are placed on their edges. This leads to cost savings because less bricks and cement are needed which, in turn, reduces the embodied energy of the wall.

The Rat Trap Bond

Bricks are laid on edge to create an air gap between two layers

Laurie Baker took every opportunity to try and make people realise the value of this method but, by and large, the 20-25% saving in brick doesn’t seem to have been appealing enough.  The rat trap method of construction was popular in England until the start of the 20th century but sustained lobbying by the brick-making industry convinced people that that it was not strong enough to build load-bearing walls.

That is rubbish of course; it’s strong enough for one and two storey buildings as has been proven over and over again by Laurie Baker’s lasting work. But masons too are not usually happy about adopting this system and come up with all sorts of excuses to try and avoid it. I have to admit that, till date, I have not pushed hard enough against their inertia but now I’ve just got one more reason to do so.

For the ShKo bungalow at Karjat, I plan to use the rat trap walls and wanted to know just how much difference they would make thermally. Nobody seems to have done a calculation of the difference — at least there was none that I could find. So, armed with some data from thermal calc and the energy evaluation component of ArchiCAD, I tried to do just that.

Taking just a simple 3m x 3m structure with no openings, I ran a calculation for both types of wall. Result: average U-value of the structure’s outer shell dropped about 15% compared to conventional walls and the energy required for cooling also fell by about 8%. The difference was exaggerated because the model had good roof overhangs to shade the walls.

Still, when you think about it, 8% is nothing to scoff at.  In addition, the embodied energy is reduced quite dramatically and, of course, Laurie Baker’s original reason for using the rat-trap bond still stands — the wall is simply cheaper to build.

Now, I just have to go and steam-roll the masons into learning a new technique.

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The Architect and the Plantsman

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This Wall Street Journal article on the collaboration between reclusive Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and ascetic Dutch landscaper Piet Oudolf made me think about my own (much less famous) interaction with A.Y. Retiwalla for the Karjat Resort a decade ago. Unlike the collaborators here, neither of us had heard of the other before and were brought together by the client, Dr. Beramji. Still, the mutual respect and acceptance of ideas was similar and it ultimately led to something that was appreciated by all.

The restaurant, shortly after construction

The restaurant, shortly after construction

The restaurant about five years later

The restaurant about five years later

No egos were bruised during our meetings — they were left outside

Mr. Retiwalla was already well established in his line and it is to his credit that he discussed things with a relative youngster like myself, purely on merit. Ideas flowed freely between us and, with Dr. Beramji taking a keen interest in every aspect of the project, the tripartite meetings were very enjoyable.

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