GREEN BUILDING

Today I am going to write about “Bhutan Green Building Design Guidelines” that is being published by one of the Divisions in my office. The reason why I am going to discuss this here in my blog is because I am a huge supporter of Sustainability (one of the pillars of GNH) and Green Design. I want to spread this knowledge to as many people as possible so I thought why not start from my blog.

To start off, I think it’s safe to say that green buildings are still a little immature in my country; people are still learning about it and exploring the concept. And anything new is always scrutinized hard, but that’s really normal I guess. I am really hoping I can help people learn more about green building or atleast make them wanna research on it. But before I start writing I want to let all of the readers know that this is my idea and thoughts about green buildings, doesn’t mean that it’s the only way to look at green buildings (I am no expert on green buildings).

The first thing I want to clear is, “rammed earth buildings are green buildings but green buildings are not rammed earth” this one is quite tricky (I know because I was confused too). There are similar misconceptions about energy efficient building and green building. Green building is basically about “thinking holistically”

The Environmental Protection Agency of the US states that: “Green building is the process of creating structures and using processes that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building‟s life cycle from siting to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation and deconstruction.”

And that pretty much sums everything up, it clearly means green building simply means greener way, which includes what materials you are using while constructions, how you are using it and why you are using it. It can also be as simple as how you orient your structure using the nature (position of the sun and direction of the winds). But I would suggest you all to google more on it for better information: I will suggest few terms here and please google it J

1.      Passive solar design

2.      Rain/Storm water harvesting

3.      Green roofs

4.      Insulation

5.      Rammed earth buildings

6.      Bottle house/ Earth-bag house

Some of these are really cheap green buildings, worth looking at. Here are the pictures of few

http://www.iatcan.org/photos_enlarged/Earthbag_house.JPG 

http://www.inspirationgreen.com/glassbottlewalls.html

http://earthbagbuilding.com/projects/haiti.htm

I really hope to see all the Bhutanese building green buildings and keep spreading the knowledge, if you implant even the tiniest idea about green building, then you should know that the job is well done.