Creating Green Building and Sustainable Habitat

To me architecture is the use of space. Architecture is not made with brain. It is made with emotion. The secret of architectural excellence is to translate the proportions of space into bricks and mortar. Architecture has to blend with the Environ.

Here is my statement on Creating Green Building and Sustainable Habitat: Architecture appears for the first time when the sunlight hits a wall. The sunlight did not know what it was before it hit a wall. The wall did not have the appreciation.

Architecture is like any other design. From a Safety pin to a Rocket. When I started building Swabhumi for Harsh Neotia I had no knowledge of Architecture. I compared it with the Design of a Newspaper.

Regarding Architecture and Environment it was the forests were the first big architectural structures came up. Devoted to the Gods of the Forests were the first temples of God was created and in forests men grasped their first idea of architecture. These were Green and Sustainable.

Do you know which is the largest built architect monument in the world?

It is Angkor Wat a temple complex in Cambodia and the largest religious monument in the world, with the site measuring 402 acres. Build in the forest. It was originally constructed as a Hindu temple of god Vishnu for the Khmer Empire, gradually transforming into a Buddhist temple towards the end of the 12th century. It was built by the Khmer King Suryavarman II. The temple is at the top of the high classical style of Khmer architecture. It has become a symbol of Cambodia appearing on its national flag, and it is the country's prime attraction for visitors.

How has it become the single largest structure. Myth has it that the construction of Angkor Wat was ordered That the temple was constructed in a single night by a divine architect. However the architect must have had emotion.

Architecture is shaped by human emotions and desires, and then becomes a setting for further emotions and desires. It goes from the animate and inanimate and back again. It is this that gives validity to Green Building and Sustainable Habitat.

The popular belief is that the Architect draws the plan. Wrong. That is the work of a drafter, draughtsman. A drafting technician is a person who makes detailed technical drawings or plans for buildings, infrastructure etc. Drafters use software and manual sketches to convert the designs, plans, and layouts of engineers and architects into a set of technical drawings. Drafters operate as the supporting developers and sketch engineering designs and drawings from preliminary design ideas and concepts.

Architects should have a vision. Should be able to use the space just like a painter using the canvas.

One of worst designed space in Kolkata is the Telephone Bhavan opposite the water body facing the Writer’s Building. Located towards the south of BBD Bag it is designed by Ballardie, Thompson, and Matthews, this built space houses the headquarters of BSNL, Kolkata.But how could this be with an open water body and surrounded by Buildings like that of Standard Insurance, The General post Office , The Writer’s Building and Stephen Court.

The other is Chatterjee International Centre. Originally known as Chatterjee Polk. It was built by the firm Stein, Chatterjee and Polk with civil engineer Binoy K. Chatterjee.

Both are far from being Green Buildings or Sustainable Habitat even in context of being an office space.

What a Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

It is the same with Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City Lacks Vision. In 1959 the global tender for the reclamation of the salt water lakes was and was won by Invest Import Company of Yugoslavia. In November 1945 monarchy was abolished from Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was renamed the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946, a communist government was established. It is this communist outlook that laid out the country planning of Salt Lake City. Lean, Mean and Hungry. Gaunt to say the least. Lacks vision. On both sides of the road you see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession. A large ego.

When they first built the University of Calcutta where I teach at College Street they had the buildings surrounded by green. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The decades past and they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Green is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Green is those sidewalks in the grass.

In the same way as Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to it in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational. Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other. A great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.

The new architecture and urban design demands Creating Green Buildings & Sustainable Habitat. Green Environment has profound impact on human as well as environmental health. Buildings and community spaces can be used as protection from diseases promoting health. Building material, designs, location and maintenance are key aspects of safety of people living in them.

The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly Green Buildings with Sustainable Habitat. Architect should have the confidence and the kindness to adhere to this.

The architect, like other workers in our endeavor, is facing the inevitability of a change of profession: he will no longer be a builder of forms alone, but a builder of complete ambiances.

When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into architecture. Our buildings show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which was once to be found in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any attitude, device, or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and context of Creating Green Buildings & Sustainable Habitat.

We used to build temples, and universities are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it). This to me is creating Green Buildings & Sustainable Habitat.

Architecture is so important today that in near future I can see an Architecture of Listening.

Thank You.