Buildings and environment: Making the relation work

We celebrated “Earth Day” a few days back and when we contemplate over the past existence of earth, we come across too many questions. Resembling can we preserve the earth’s greenery the way it used to be till a few hundred years back. The rapid growth and revolutions in the building industry is every day affecting the earth’s beautiful natural and climatic conditions. Because construction of buildings and highways always ends up clearing forests, cutting road side tress, exploitation of natural land and thus it lessens the natural air that every human needs for existence.                                                                                                                                           But a new revolution in the building industry has been brought into existence, which is called as “Green Building.” Green building or green construction refers to a structure and by means of process that is environmentally responsible and resource efficient throughout the life cycle of a building. These designs were initially executed during medieval period by emperors in their own fort. It includes taking care of everything keeping in mind about natural resources and how we can utilize them to get our comfort in a natural way. It requires everything from sitting to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation and demolition. Simply we can say green buildings involvefinding the design between homebuilding and the sustainable environment, which entails a cooperation of the design team, engineers, builders, architects and all clients at different project stages.

The Green building concept includes: 

• Avoid cutting trees while constructing roads and highways.
• Utilizing natural resources by using wood in different sort of constructions.
• By making roof top gardens in hotels and residential constructions.
• By efficiently using energy, water and other resources.
• Reducing waste, pollution and environment degradation.
• By leaving blanks in walls for natural lights, this results in less consumption of electric bulb or tube-light.

The United States have deployed a council called Leadership in Energy and Environment Design, LEED which is a green building certification program which recognizes best-in-class building strategies and practices across the world. This Green building revolution would give buildings a new name called “Natural Buildings.”