Architectural services for Industrial, Logistic Parks, Warehousing’s, Residential, Commercial, Interiors, Hospitality, Religious, & Urban Infrastructure Development

GREEN BUILDING & SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

GREEN BUILDING & SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

At Shilpkaar Architects, we are passionate about sustainable architecture and feel that design solutions that yield genuine, verifiable effects are more important than green certificates for a building.

Instead of airy-fairy architectural ideals, we believe in intelligent design based on scientific rationale. Our design objectives are as follows:

  • To lower the building’s energy use.
  • To make the building comfortable for humans without the need of huge, energy-intensive air-conditioning or heating systems. Remember that every time you turn on your air conditioner, a coal power station somewhere is dumping tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere!

To ensure that building materials are derived from natural resources in the building’s location.

GREEN BUILDING and SUSTAINABLE DESIGN2

How we go about doing it

We accomplish this in a variety of ways.

A scientific grasp of the building’s energy balance is essential to everything. If a structure is seen as a self-contained system,

Building energy state = energy entering the system – energy leaving the system

To determine a building’s energy balance, one must first identify all of the ways energy enters the system, add them up, and then compare that to the overall energy loss of the structure. It’s worth noting that energy is transferred in a variety of methods – for most structures, over 25!

The next step is to have a solid grasp of thermodynamics. The study of how heat moves is known as thermodynamics. This is crucial for maintaining human comfort in a structure.

A detailed thermodynamic analysis can be used to design a building envelope, which is a fancy architect’s term for a building facade, that performs optimally. In a hot climate, this means an envelope that prevents heat from entering the building, and in a cold climate, it means the opposite. Of course, in a climate like New Delhi, where it is cold in the winter and hot in the summer, things get complicated.

We must emphasise that modern concrete and masonry structures perform poorly in hot weather. This is due to concrete’s high specific heat capacity, which means it absorbs and retains heat like a sponge. One could argue that modern Indian structures made of concrete, brick, and plaster are built to absorb rather than reject heat! As a result, the energy balance of these structures is skewed.