But after multiple references, I gave up and made my way to Boo’s pages.

Boo has restricted her book entirely to a suburban slum that adjoins the ever-expanding Mumbai International Airport, Annawadi. Annawadi is a community that started settling circa 1990 and now faces threat from enterprising ‘shining India’ that needs luxury hotels and world-class airport. But what is ambitious as development means displacement for the residents of Annawadi, for where will they really go when their land is taken in by an expanding airport and its luxurious expectations? Katherine Boo focuses her ethnographic study on this single urban slum, which she calls ‘undercity’ – undercity that is discretely placed as a bitter side dish under the complicated layers of urbanization and this world that cannot be taken along with forward-marching India. And hence as she puts the matter in her words: “In every community, the details differ, and matter.” Certainly. So yes, her book is a detailed one, tirelessly descriptive but not pioneering one so to speak. But Boo is not claiming it to be that, only the media is.

The book portrays closely-observed inhabitants of Annawadi, which range from garbage-pickers, garbage-sorters, and garbage-stealers, primarily scavengers of the city. With that Boo weaves this intricate story of envy-driven Fatima Shaikh who somehow manages a vengeance plot against a young boy named Abdul, a rag picker, who she has accused of a gruesome crime. The story does not end with anything definitive except for this complex multi-layered tale, rich with detailed portrayals.

This is perhaps the most striking feature, where Boo never gets pedantic offering sympathy and pity and most importantly any good-intentioned patronizing solutions. Her strength lies in honest penetrative invisible eyes, which are grasping every detail of events and texture of Annawadi. Presenting the larger issue of organic urban settlements and exclusion perils that it comes with for those who miss hopping the development train. One may call it heartless and cruel but Boo doesn’t do that. She is busy describing endlessly the layers of this complex settlement, which is a microcosm of change, through urbanization that is looming large on Mumbai’s head.

There are difficult issues with extremely uncomfortable questions to be raised. Perhaps it’s not about poverty-surviving martyrs anymore but a collective failure of policies that were ineffective or more importantly which never existed.

Katherine’s painstaking portrayal of lives of Annawadians shatters the myth of upward progressing financial capital of India and it hints unglamorously at what lays in its broken system. Corrupt system, which somehow fails only the poor and their poverty. Their lives are an embarrassment to this modernizing City of Mumbai. Will they be left behind and crushed to anonymity or confined and hidden accurately behind the walls away like the trash they collect and sort for this other India?

If we continue to aim for the UK government target of reducing CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050 we will have to collectively retrofit our housing stock at a rate of over 500,000 properties a year for the next 38 years…and that doesn’t include the millions of gas guzzling non-domestic properties; offices, factories, schools, shopping malls etc, that also require a green overhaul. Some properties will be demolished of course, but the UK tends to preserve its older residential buildings to such an extent that we expect to have 80% of our current housing stock to be around in 2050.

So our future ‘Eco Towns’ are in reality our current towns and cities. Building new Eco Towns will not help reduce our collective carbon/ ecological footprint at all. At best they may act as an exemplar for construction techniques and design. The responsibility of working in harmony with our natural world lies squarely with improving and nurturing existing systems, places and behaviour patterns.

What I am most interested in is ideas and projects that demonstrate how we can work with existing situations to develop them cleverly to meet current and future demands without simply/ dumbly wiping the slate clean and demolishing buildings/ infrastructure/ communities as we have often done in the past.

Existing Brighton Tower by Unplugged Student Stuart Paine: Creating Energy from Green Algae/ Reusing existing building but adding hotel and spa while enhancing existing low cost apartments. Image by Stuart Paine

Over the last 5 years or so my design partner and I have run a post-graduate studio ‘Unplugged’ at the University of Brighton considering just this design scenario: “How do you work with existing urban places and transform them so that they create their own energy, deal with their own waste, perhaps grow their own food, drastically reduce their carbon footprint, look good and support sustainable communities?”

We took our inspiration from many sources. Ironically one of the richest was the Alabama-based practice & school of architecture Rural Studio who have run their $20k house project for nearly a decade. $20k comes from the idea that it would be the realistic mortgage a person on social security could maintain. Obviously this is no budget at all to work with. Rural Studio students have to work with existing stuff and scrounge materials, re-appropriate things normally thrown away, whether it is car windscreens, carpet tiles or whatever to create new structures.

Another inspiration was Cuba’s ‘Special Period’ that started in 1990 when the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba immediately lost 50% of their imported oil supply and 80% of their imported food. The people of Cuba were incredibly resourceful and survived their own ‘Peak Oil’ crisis by growing their own food and creating their own local (often passive solar) energy. Currently they are the only country to be subjected to such a situation. However many people believe that we could all find ourselves in a similar situation over the next 50 years or so unless we find ways of reducing our addiction to fossil fuels and other resources.

Looking nearer to where I am based, I am often struck at the clever ideas immerging from Parisian-based architects such as Lacaton & Vassal, and Jakob & Macfarlane.

Keeping the concrete structure of the 'Docks of Paris' Building from 1907 Jakob & Macfarlane's new French Fashion Institute (IFM) building Paris. Image by DBB

Lacaton & Vassal first came to my attention when they took over the refurbishment of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris that was first built in 1937. The original refurbishment project was abandoned in 1997 after much of the interior fabric was stripped out and too much of the original budget used up. Lacaton & Vassal picked up the project and using a minimal budget made the best of what they had to create a careful and witty centre for ‘contemporary creation’. Famously when they received the commission to transform a triangular town square in Bordeaux Lacaton & Vassal decided that the square was fine as it was and that the ‘existing life there made the square already pretty’.

Current projects include the elegant refurbishment and clever extension of a 16-storey, 96-apartment tower block in Paris, Tour Bois le Prêtre-Druot. Again Lacaton & Vassal have worked with existing stuff and not thrown it away (and that includes existing successful communities). The net result is a hugely reduced carbon footprint associated with this development both during construction as well as in use. Building a new ‘green eco tower’ on the site would have required far more resources.

The greening of our cities will require many ideas from a diverse range of sources. It is my opinion that simply increasing fabric insulation and adding on solar panels, while crucial, will not do the job on its own. We need clever, holistic and visionary design solutions. No change there then.

Duncan Baker-Brown is co-director of one of the UK’s leading award winning green architectural practices: BBM Sustainable Design. He is also an academic and campaigner focusing on issues of sustainable development, holding the position of Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Brighton. Duncan has spent a long time designing buildings that utilise locally sourced, ‘replenishable’ material such hemp, straw, timber, grass etc. His practice designed the first public building using straw bales (Romney Warren Visitors Centre), as well as the first prefabricated house made entirely of these materials; The House That Kevin Built in 2008.

The exhibition spans a wide range of contemporary photographers’ work, yet these two artists have an interesting level of homogeneity; with a ‘neo-romantic’ approach, both are led by an enquiry into – and subordination to – the rocky, tempestuous landscape of the United States, yet with very different results.

David Benjamin Sherry: Hyperborealis, 2011, C-print, 182.9 x 232.4 cm. Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London. © David Benjamin Sherry, 2011

Born in Woodstock, New York and now working in New York City, Sherry has created a series of large-scale analogue photographs that depict natural areas of the American West: mountain lakes, misty forests, caves and mountains, which he has saturated in filters of red, blue, yellow, acidic green and powdery violet. The hue, which is chosen depending on the artist’s mood, is imbued during exposure or afterwards in the printing process.

The titles of Sherry’s works indicate his primary concern with colour and its synthesis with cognition and spiritual meaning. For instance, a piece depicting a rough, tree-strewn beach bathed in a soft violet light is given the title All Matterings of Mind Equal One Violet, while a mountain-top steeped in faded, technicolour green is named Holy Holy, reminiscent of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s violently dreamy, mind-altering 1973 film Holy Mountain.

David Benjamin Sherry: All Matterings Of Mind Equal One Violet, 2011, C-print, 182.9 x 232.4 cm. Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London. © David Benjamin Sherry, 2011

The vivid, transcendent colours draw the viewer into these deep expanses of natural land with their intense beauty, yet their appeal is meshed uneasily together with the seduction of artifice and sensation that dominates our post-industrial culture.

Originally from Panorama City in California, Jackson currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Led by a preoccupation with the potency of the Earth, the artist spent four months driving through the United States in search of land formations that, at certain angles, give the suggestion of anthropomorphic faces. He describes these perceptions as ‘Mother Nature’s Land Soldiers’; the hostile manifestations of a post-apocalyptic future, surfacing to reclaim the Earth after its destructive human occupation.

Matthew Day Jackson: The Lower 48 – Alabama, 2006, 48 C-prints. Each: 39 x 56 cm Overall: 312 x 336 cm. Image courtesy of the Saatchi Gallery, London. © Matthew Day Jackson, 2006

Jackson’s exhibited work consists of 48 large photographs, each depicting an historic region of the continent. As with Sherry’s photographs, their size and positioning on the gallery walls – towering over the viewer that stands before them – add to the sense of high Romantic deference to the immense force of Nature that these two artists are simultaneously confronting.

On 28 April 2012, a quiet Saturday afternoon in the Surry Hills Library, inner city Sydney, is vitalized by the talk ‘Small Spaces/Big Ideas’, delivered by architects Christopher Polly and Sam Crawford, organized by the City of Sydney and presented with the Australian Institute of Architects (represented by Andrew Burns). The premise of the talk as noted by the City of Sydney is: “In a period of diminishing land availability, living small becomes a necessary and logical way of life”. The talk is also pertinent for other reasons/trends such as the shift towards designing and delivering compact cities in Australia; reducing the ecological footprint; domestic downsizing by empty-nester Australians; and the demand for affordable (and rental) housing for a wider demographic in Sydney.

Sam Crawford noted that Australia has largest house size in the world (243 sq m, a figure sourced from Simon Johanson’s article in Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Australian homes still the World’s biggest’, August 22, 2011). Crawford mentioned examples of people experimenting with reducing house sizes in the US, Denmark and Japan, to foreground the key distinction between expectation and need. Using examples of his own projects, he demonstrated that more space could be achieved on small lots and within older existing houses, like his own house built within the existing shell of a Queen Anne house.

Elliott Ripper House/ Haines House, Christopher Polly Architect. Photos: Brett Boardman

The key design principles of this approach were identified as spilt levels to create different spaces creating the feeling of more space; the use of different materials to create the effect of spaciousness; designing multi-functional spaces like the staircase landing at ground level that is extended into a seating space, or the low window sill of a large south facing window used as a kids play area, or the integration of bookshelves and storage spaces along staircase walls. It was also noted that the smallness of the house demands a careful consideration of acoustical buffers.

Christopher Polly discussed Elliott Ripper House (161 sq m), Haines House (115 sq m), and Darling Point Penthouse (100 sq m) – all small dwellings, which explore design strategies like the use of elements stretching across one space to another; creating adaptable spaces, through the use of internal building elements such as folding metal panels that can be folded back or folded out to increase or decrease room sizes. Central to creating the impression of space was light, both artificial and natural. Polly noted that this was achieved through a choreographed arrangement of strip windows on the exterior wall and on the internal walls to allow light to flow between rooms – an experience further augmented through the use of reflective white surfaces.

A short and an interesting talk, Small Spaces/Big Ideas was attended by built environment enthusiasts, most of them not even architects, and complemented by the presenters’ enthusiasm in responding to ‘lay’ queries as well as more searching, discipline specific questions. This, I think, was a very positive outcome of the profession’s recent consciousness of communicating ethical and urban concerns informing practice to seek and sustain legitimacy and meaningfulness of architectural practice against the needs and expectations of multiple stakeholders in the built environment.

This is my first blog and an opportunity to set out my stall as far as where my current thoughts are around all things green within the world of architecture and design.

During the last decade or so there has quite rightly been a huge focus on how we can reduce the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases associated with the construction and inhabitation of our build environment. During this time Building Regulations and other governing codes and advisory institutions have worked extremely hard publishing design guidelines that have enabled the construction industry make some sense of the countless definitions of what it is to develop in a sustainable, low carbon manner.

However, is there not a possible problem with being so carbon-centric with our analysis? By focussing on creating new buildings (and now the retrofitting of existing ones) that are extremely well sealed and insulated so that they perform amazingly efficiently in-use, perhaps we are setting ourselves up for a bit of a fall?

Firstly these buildings cost an awful lot to construct and they also rely heavily upon very high standards of construction to perform properly. To be clear I’m talking about buildings that meet PassivHaus standards and/or Code for Sustainable Homes Levels 5 and 6. Therefore there is a worst-case scenario I can imagine where we get a decade or so ahead of us of poorly built under-achieving buildings that have cost us a lot of money.

So I suggest that while we continue our research as above we also consider genuinely holistic and creative alternative ideas that consider the whole Ecological Footprint of a development, not just the CO2 element of it. We need bright ideas that are cost-effective and therefore inclusive as well, otherwise low impact design will be like organic food an alternative to consider only in prosperous times. Remember (how could we forget!) we live in a time of cut backs and austerity.

I read a book earlier this year ‘Urban Green’ by Manhattan-based Architect Neil B. Chambers. To quote from it Neil states: “If you have a project and your team tells you that doing a green building is going to be more complicated or cost more money, fire your team. Green building should never be more expensive.”

I completely agree with Neil’s position here. It has been my experience that green buildings can be cost-effective to build. However when it is an afterthought or when one is asked to ‘green up’ an existing design, i.e. add a green layer to an outmoded gas guzzler, of course the result costs more.

What we really need is more and better ideas, so that we don’t put all our eggs in the PassivHaus low Carbon-focussed basket. We also need to adapt our existing cities/ places/ homes/ offices whatever to achieve this, and we need to do it without demolishing them and throwing them away. Retrofitting our cities so that they work in harmonious way with the natural environment will takes lots more than the installation of solar panels and solid wall insulation… But that is a start.

My next blog will consider ways we can achieve COOL CHEAP GREEN places. However in the meantime you will have to satisfy yourselves with this lovely image of the Graduation Pavilion built by students from the University of Brighton School of Architecture and Design. The pavilion was built using only waste material from a nearby building site.

Duncan Baker-Brown is co-director of one of the UK’s leading award winning green architectural practices: BBM Sustainable Design. He is also an academic and campaigner focusing on issues of sustainable development, holding the position of Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Brighton. Duncan has spent a long time designing buildings that utilise locally sourced, ‘replenishable’ material such hemp, straw, timber, grass etc. His practice designed the first public building using straw bales (Romney Warren Visitors Centre), as well as the first prefabricated house made entirely of these materials; The House That Kevin Built in 2008.

Façade designers incorporate creativity and engineering to optimize to best respond to project needs. They carefully consider each building for its historical significance, local climatic conditions and design engineer the envelope and façade, thus offering the best of material suggestions, thermal modelling and efficiency and optimized access which gives best of the front access and least hindering building maintenance once the building is completed and occupied.

Mumbai is seeing a considerable rise in demand for upgraded buildings which are not just glossy but have more intrinsic efficiency offered to its owners and tenants. Thus in a project which is high-end, demand to incorporate more sophisticated technology is seeing adoption by many builders and developers. And rightly so. In a long run, if this ensures a building’s longevity and improved healthy built environment to its inhabitants, it’s worth the extra investment.

Current status of TCG Financial Center: The Chatterjee Group

TCG Financial Center of The Chatterjee Group located at Bandra Kurla Complex is one such example. This commercial building is now complete and had its façade design done by Gregory H. Romine’s led Axis Façade Group. Axis Façade specializes in façade design and have completed extensive work all across the world. They have done extensive work in India as Façade Designers in Delhi and Mumbai.

For TCG Financial Center they were engaged for material applications, schematic design, design development, construction documents, unit cost estimate, quantity survey, procurement and construction administration for all façade elements including unitized curtain wall, glass vertical sunshades, metal cladding, integrated lighting and BMU/Façade Access design. The project features a horizontal pattern offset with vertical glass and embedded high definition metallic sunshades. Lighting is integrated into the curtain wall to enhance the stature of the building during the evening hours.

With that, façade design makes a stronger case and urges builders and developers to factor in life-cycle cost incurred in using improved engineered buildings methodologies. If built environments offer better value on investment through improved healthier and efficient spaces then it is not only cost effective but it also saves hidden costs incurred while using badly designed buildings through health perils, energy inefficiencies and steep maintenance costs.

Our friends at Open House New York (OHNY) are hosting another great event on Saturday, May 12, 2012.  As part of its openstudios series designed to give access to different architecture and design hubs thoughout New York, OHNY will be opening the Brookyn Navy Yard for the day.  The event is a rare opportunity to visit a wide range of creative industries in the sprawling waterfront complex including – architects, artists, custom furtniture designers, light fixture manufacturers, cabinet makers, metal fabricators and glass engravers.

OHNY’s openstudios Brooklyn Navy Yard is designed to be a self-guided tour that begins at the Navy Yard’s new exhibition and visitors center – BLDG 92, a former marine commandant’s house, built in 1857, that was adaptively reused by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners in collaboration with workshop/apd in 2011. Some of the Yard’s most interesting sites include a dry dock that’s been used since before the Civil War, the 24-acre former Navy hospital campus that is virtually frozen in time, and the nation’s first multi-story LEED Gold-certified industrial building, which is used for fine art storage and conservation.

Following the self-guided tour will be a reception at BLDG 92 where participants can also view “Brooklyn Navy Yard: Past, Present and Future,” an exhibit that illustrates the history of the site – from its early use by Native Americans, its role in the American Revolution and its history as a naval ship building facility, to its current transformation into an innovative, green-thinking industrial park.

The self guided tour is available from 12:00 – 5:00 pm with the reception immediately following.  Tickets are $30 in advance/$35 at the door.  Student tickets are $ 20 in advance/$ 25 at the door. Tickets can be purchased at http://www.ohnyopenstudiosbny.eventbrite.com

One of England’s most notorious landmarks, the ancient Stonehenge itself is a timeless mystery; nobody knows for what this piece of strange architecture was built, or by whom, and it belongs to nobody. It is perhaps this element that attracted Deller, whose previous work has consistently attempted to distract from the concept of the author or original and elevate the power of creative collectivism.

Just as Sacrilege merges the arcane with contemporary vernacular, its title pre-empts its critics, implying the artist’s intention that his appropriation be taken with more than a hint of irony and enjoyed by the public with a sense of unashamed, yet mischievous pleasure. He counters the suggestion that it is a particularly English landmark and disregards political segregation, stating that the symbol of Stonehenge itself is ‘pre-political’, and hence is just as relevant to Scotland as anywhere beneath the border.

Sacrilege, 2012, Jeremy Deller

In its artificial appeal Sacrilege may seem anodyne, but then Deller’s work has always been concerned with questioning the division between ‘high art’ and popular/folk culture, perhaps in part due to his early friendship with Andy Warhol, who took him under his wing before Deller emerged as an artist in the 1990s.

Much of Deller’s work directly engages with communities and celebrates the beauty in the prolific, and the sublime creations of the humble craftsperson. The gesture of Sacrilege is typical of his approach to community involvement and reflects his overarching aim as an artist to truly engage communities through his work, highlighting idiosyncratic cultural traditions, rituals and the omnipresent influence of the past on society.

Well-known for his interactive installations, documentaries and live performance art, Deller’s recent retrospective at the Hayward Gallery has already plunged him into the limelight for 2012, and the GIFVA is now showcasing Sacrilege alongside the work of over 130 other prominent artists across the city of Glasgow. The piece will eventually be moved to London for the Olympic Games.

The Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts runs until 7 May.

Today the building known as One World Trade Center, formerly the Freedom Tower, will achieve a major milestone, reaching 105 stories to become the tallest building in NYC.  The announcement was what New York Post reporter Josh Margolin called “an all out business war against its Midtown cousin” the 102 story Empire State Building.  The fanfare generated by the announcement is intended to draw new tenants to the building, including poaching some from the Empire State building, by promoting the building’s new observation decks and winning back broadcasters with its massive antenna.   “We’re looking to maximize revenue and maximize the reputation of 1 World Trade Center”, said Douglas Durst, who is building the tower in partnership with the Port Authority.  The New York Post estimates that the antenna alone could easily generate $10 million in revenue.  While estimates of how much income the building’s amenities will generate – like the gift shop, observation decks and concessions- are yet unknown, they will certainly be an improvement over those at the Empire State Building.  One World Trade Center will open in early 2015.

Mumbai is home to countless homeless people and the number stretches in staggering millions. And to see people living on the roadside, on railway tracks in squatters or a temporary makeshift arrangement are so common that it subverts the convoluted concept of a world-class city. The ratio to citizens living in a legal dwelling to illegal ones is massive and the City has lived with it for so long that there is a comfort that has set in. Something akin to living with shame: live with it for too long and it may turn perennial from temporary.

Image is intentionally blurred out

I see one such homeless woman almost every day on my walk to the gym. She appears to be a young woman, with an attractive demeanour. With deep black eyes and dark sunburnt glowing skin. She mostly wears shorts, short skirts and western attire; quite a departure from what one expects from a hopeless Indian woman living on the streets. I have often seen her solving crossword puzzles or reading newspapers sitting on that degraded sidewalk. But whatever the activity she is involved in, she is never distressed or looks visibly depressed. She looks comfortable and at peace.

After noticing her for few months, I have started to understand her presence and my initial reaction to it was ‘she is a woman, all by herself on the streets of Mumbai’. I had argued to myself that this must be fine in daytime because the streets are mostly crowded. My arrogant pity that usually comes with privileged understanding thought of deserted nighttime when she must be all by herself. She doesn’t look perturbed as I would have expected her to be; maybe she isn’t. Either way, the trouble I felt towards her was my own, generated in my head. I looked at her from my perspective and subconsciously judged her helplessness, because she is after all homeless. Maybe she is not helpless at all. Maybe I am the helpless one on the different side of the equation trying impatiently to judge her presence and find a solution earnestly.

And that brought me to a basic question: Where is a woman really safe? In her house, alone, with people, behind locks, in groups, during daytime, nighttime, public spaces, private dwellings? Or is there really a place and time where she cannot ever be violated or victimized?

Her calm defies all my mundane worries for her safety and survival. To me she looks like she either landed homeless and has made peace in her own way and appears in absolutely no need to be organized earnestly in a civil society of legal housing and help and be an actor in this modern world just like others, which is equally wretched if not more. The world that is roughly and brazenly defined by laws, systems, societies and its moral codes of conduct and yet never misses a chance to fail humanity. Who decides that the other side is misplaced with displaced ideas of organizing ourselves in a system?

And in that vein, please think about women’s safety more deeply beyond your pre-held notions regardless of her being at home or homeless, because I really wish you would.