Urban Ooru

Green Buildings or Sustainable Buildings is the latest fad that all of us have caught on to. This is now being bandied about as the latest “it” thing to be done – by property developers, by home owners, by hotel operators, by hospitals, by industries and by anyone else who may have any connection with the building industry. As on date more than 40 Crores sft (400 Million Sft) is under Green Rating. As in any mass movement there is the complete spectrum of followers. On the one end are people who truly are passionate about the entire philosophy behind sustainability and on the other end are people who are just joining the bandwagon because it’s the “in” thing to do. In the absence of a well-researched and well-thought of mandatory system that defines what it means to be sustainable, numerous versions of sustainable practice have emerged. Along with a whole lot of good measures there are also some misconceptions of what Sustainability constitutes. If one were to go by modern definiti...

I am in Mangalore as I write this. It’s a beautiful early summer morning. The air is light, the light is soft and the twin brothers of heat and humidity are yet to sink in. I write this from the balcony of my friend’s 10 th storey apartment. When I look east wards, I see a series of rolling valleys one after the other, the ridges punctuating these. The development on the ridges stand out – a motley of independent homes and some very tall apartments. Tall apartments are more common here than in other places in the state probably because of the non-availability of relatively flat land and the higher costs of going horizontal in a highly contoured topography. The valleys are more interesting – the sign of developments here are typically Mangalore tiled roofs nicely camouflaged by the greenery with the odd wood fire smoke wafting out that always reminds me of my own ancestral home in Kerala. Now it is the valleys that interest me. To an untrained eye with a tilt towards understanding ...