TSGBCA 2012

ARCHIDEX is perhaps the biggest event for the architecture community in the country. It assembles professionals from the architecture, interior design and the building industry and industry leaders - providing platform to keep them updated on the developments in the built environment, mingle and network with captains of the industry, besides sourcing for innovative products, designs and services.

ARCHIDEX 2012 was held from 4-7 July at Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. In conjunction with the event, Tropical and Sub-tropical Green Building Alliance Conference (TSGBC) 2012 was held at the same venue. This was the third conference of its kind since October 2009, which was hosted by China Green Building Council.

TSGBCA is an alliance of green building councils (GBC) with shared interests in the environmental characteristics of the tropical and sub-tropical region. The GBC’s in this alliance are China, Singapore, Malaysia, Philipines, India, Indonesia and Australia. This third edition of the TSGBA 2012 conference celebrates the natural tropical environment and its inspiration to truly innovative design for the built environment. The main theme of the event was "Naturally Tropical Truly Innovative".

I was priviliged to be sent by GEDS to participate in this conference. It's an event about green buildings - of course I'm excited about it!

The first speaker of the conference was Ar. Boon Che Wee, Chairman of Green Building Index (GBI) Accreditation Panel. He updated the audience on the latest GBI certification status in Malaysia. There are currently 70 GBI certified buildings in the country. 

GEDS have delivered 2 GBI projects: Puteri Harbour in Nusajaya (GBI RNC Gold) and ASR Padu in Melaka (GBI NREB Certified)!!

Jane Henley, CEO of World Green Building Council, was there as well. She presented on the green building trend developing all around the globe. Malaysia falls under the Asia Pacific Regional Network. LEED is leading all green building certification tools with the largest number of buildings certified. BREEAM, DGBC, SB Tool and Green Star are among the other popular assessment tools.

She also highlighted an interesting point that the purpose of green building certification is different between countries – and sometimes can be very contradictory. For example, South Africa developed their green building industry to create more jobs. Green Mark in Singapore, instead, is to improve efficiency in works and reduce manpower. 

The rest of the main speakers in the conference include the followings:

1. Li Congxiao, Director CSUS Green Building on Green Building Assessment in China
2. Ar Tai Lee Siang on Urban Forestation in Singapore
3. Naning Adiwoso from Indonesia Green Building Council on Networking and Transformation
4. Rod Leaver, CEO of Lend Lease Asia on Green Sense – Cost to Value Mindset Shift
5. Tsou Jin Yeu from University of Hong Kong on Urban Eco-landscape Formation
6. Ken Yeang from TR Hamzah & Yeang on Biomimicry
7. Michael Budig from ETH Centre Singapore on Design of Robotic Fabricated High Rises

This would have been a novel (or a very lengthy blog entry) if I thought I gonna write a review for all speakers. Nevertheless, my personal favourite was the talk given by Professor Tsou Jin Yeu. He talked about GIS Overlap Analysis and its application on sustainable urban development. Perhaps it reached to me more because his works involve surface thermal monitoring on urban scale and that can provide valuable data for any energy modelling geeks, like myself. 

For example, we all know that it's good to have some landscape around a building. But no one knows how much good it actually brings. In typical green building certification process, credits are awarded if we preserve 20-30% of the land area with green landscape. However, it is unclear to what extent does that help us in terms of reducing the heat island impact.

The above presented system, the surface thermal monitoring on urban scale, can tell us that if you preserve 30% of your land area with green landscape, the outdoor temperature can be reduced by 4 degrees Celcius (if my memory served correctly) compared to no landscape area provisioned. This information can help ESD geeks, again such as myself, to strategize our landscape design and its direct contribution to the energy efficiency measures of the building. How cool is that? (I know it's so exciting!)

I shall stop now because it's starting to turn into a technical lecture. Call me up for coffee if you're interested to discuss about it. :)

There are other several separate mini sessions available throughout the conference. I would love to go to them all but that is only possible if I master the art of “Shadow Clone Jutsu” (my apologies to non-manga readers – it just means that I can duplicate myself to be at many places at the same time).

For more information on the conference, you can find at http://www.tsgbc2012.org.my/en/.

I have been to quite a number of green building conferences, seminars, talks in Malaysia (well, in KL mostly). It's encouraging to see more local case studies are coming up compared to the yester years where most stuffs were about overseas information. These local data were presented in the mini sessions, i.e. local GBI case studies, government policies, IEQ solutions for our own local tropical climate.

Although I personally find that the amount of local data is considerably small - we need more local researches! But the future is bright in the green building industry in Malaysia. We hope that more local researches and data shall come up soon in future green building events. 

And GEDS will be there soon - and we'll definitely let you know!

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NJB

Efficiency Matters?

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

-Brundtland Report in 1987-

Kindly keep this inside your head while you keep on reading this entry. Do also remember that this is not an academic writing. Hence, I may not refer to any external knowledge anymore and thus, again, you may critic the credibility of this entry, take the knowledge you may get from it and ponder or critic, if you will.

One particular thing that is most commonly relates to sustainability is energy efficiency. This includes electricity, petrol, and all types of fuel – perhaps even your own, energy I mean. There are numerous perceptions on what efficiency really is. For the purpose of this entry, I will use one of them, which reference is ignored due to limitation of memory:

“Efficiency is when you can do more things with the same resource,”

-Anonymous-

In other words, for example, instead of flying to Istanbul to grab a kebab, now with the same amount of fuel with an efficient personal jet (assuming you own one), you can continue flying to Paris to grab an Escargot Bourguignon, then off to Madrid for a delicious Seafood Paella and a quick stop at Zurich for a warm Chocolate with Cheese Fondue.

To put simply, with efficiency, you can do more things with the same amount of resource you have, which goes back to the earlier stated simpler definition (which instead I chose to elaborate on with such a long and unnecessary description of famous international cuisines).

This concept tracks back to the time when steam engine was invented by James Watt around early 18th century. This perhaps may be the key point of human civilization when this particular innovation initiated the Industrial Revolution in UK during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture and many industries started to grow at a significant rate and remarkably changed the social economic in Europe, America and subsequently the rest of the world.

In other words, human activities grew rapidly. Consequently, human population increased at a much different rate than before. Thus, with more activities, and greater population growth, more resources are necessary. The initial idea of an efficient transportation envisioned by the genius invention of the steam engine created more potential human activities and consequently created more demand for more resources.

Instead of one kebab made with bread, meat, vegetables produced with a certain amount of electricity, gas, water, and so on, now with the idea of efficiency, we can also have an escargot, paella and a fondue made of more resources, i.e. more electricity, gas, water, and so on.

It's inevitable to summarize that at this time of human civilization, it doesn’t make that much difference if you buy a petrol efficient car, energy efficient buildings, or turn off your lights for one hour in a year. When you see a sale by the retail store, $10 for 3 pairs of Ted Baker’s jeans, if you believe that human, in general, will buy only one jean for a less than $4 instead of grabbing all 3 pairs of them, let’s start talking about saving the planet.

But with one low-wattage light bulb at a time, I'm sure we're working on towards the right direction.

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Hi, I am NJB. I am new here and hope the above entry is a good start for me to contribute more in this blog in the future. Cheers.