THE LIGHTWAVE BLOG

Going beyond green star – strategies for eco design

Below are notes from Ken Yeang’s recent lecture at Griffith University’s  new architecture school on the Gold Coast Campus.

Ken Yeang – Malaysian based architect and academic has been working in the eco building arena for many years and developed his own eco design strategies well before the emergence of green building councils around the world.  While Yeang obviously asserts his support of the rise of the green frameworks and the accreditation process of green star, BREAM and LEED, he highlights that these frameworks are still quite limited and are not in the truest sense complete eco design.

The frameworks developed focus on Energy Consumption/Efficiency, Indoor Environment Quality and Site Selection.  He demonstrates how the various weighted indexing of the above criteria varies significantly between the regions, questioning what the true principals of what green design is.

Yeang highlights the emergence of the engineered approach that is: through complex engineered systems we are developing responses to our impact on climate change.  Over many years he has developed his design strategies so they take a more ecological approach… so his theoretical construct commences at the biosphere and he considers ecosystems as a unit of nature.

Yeang’s strategies for green design:

Bio Integration

This concept commences questioning on how our the built environment is placed within in our biosphere.

Yeang uses the metaphor of human body and the addition of prosthetic devices, with the human body being the host organism.  The built environment’s relationship (in our current thinking and approach) to the biosphere is similar with the biosphere as the host organism and the built environment the artificial devices connected.

• Physical – integrate with existing features
• Systemic – processes that mimic nature
• Temporal

Eco mimesis

An approach to design of the built environment that echos the functions of echo systems.

• Structure – organic – Yeang examines how a building may incorporate green spaces… are they in a lump together, are they scattered through the building, a spiral path up a highrise building?
  
• What habitats can be created?
  
• Use of wind walls to catch breeze, filtered through green walls and then distributed into the buildings HVAC system
  
• Demonstrated this framework in the Solaris Building under construction in Singapore
  

Integration of 4 infrastructures

• Blue – water
• Grey – engineering solutions, carbon neutral, power generation
• Red – blood, the human dimension, hardscapes, products, lifestyles
• Green – nature, has its own engineering systems

Yeang went on to demonstate the application of the principals in a new urban masterplan site in India.  Through a complex process of site investigation and site mappings, the ecology of the site was explored and then a layering system created by the mapping is used as the reference point for the design of the urban environment.   For instance, the first layer explored was the discovery of adjacent ecosystems surrounding the site, and how this could be used as a “green threads” to infiltrate the master plan of the suburb design and provide the basis for the creation of future habitats.  Other layers would include topography, water flows, pedestrian connections etc.

Yeang likes to use the layers created by the mapping process and rotate them 90° to create the skeleton framework that might drive the design of highrise building.

Restoration

Yeang’s final investigation involves how built environments can grow ecologies beyond their existing site conditions and influence further habitat restoration to the localities in which they exist.

The image below is Istanbul and Yeangs solution for the connection of two built environments through the use of eco threads, bridges and corridors.