Nader Ardalan, president of Ardalan Associates of Boston, is an architect with over four decades of award-winning international experience. He has served as principal-in-charge of international design and operations at Jung-Brannen Associates of Boston from 1983 to 1994.
This was followed from 1994 to 2006 as senior vice-president and director of design at KEO International Consultants, a leading multi-disciplinary firm of over 1,600 staff located in the Middle East. He was a founding member of the steering committee of the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture, continuing to serve as a jury member on many international design competitions.
Ardalan is also an author and teacher who has been written about in professional journals and publications including Newsweek, Architectural Review, National Geographic, Contemporary Architects and Who’s Who in the World. He’s a registered consultant with the World Bank and a member of a number of professional international societies. The architect is also a research fellow of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, where he’s completed first-year academic research on identifying the principles of sustainable design for built environments of the United Arab Emirates, sponsored by its Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. In an exclusive interview with Earthwitness, he provides an insight into the profound understanding he has on the subject of sustainability.
How do we best understand sustainability?
To understand sustainability, we ought to begin with the broadest context and then deal with it in both a macro- and micro-dimension. Today, truly, we’re involved in a cosmic understanding of human existence so we have to begin at that level. And, truly, it’s a miracle that this thing called life exists on planet Earth.
As you’d know, there have been many studies by scientists who’ve written about the miracle of existence and life in its total form on Earth. James Lovelock in his book called Gaia – which is the Greek word for “mother” – puts forward a compelling understanding of life. All that exists on Earth are part of a living organism: human beings, plants, water… everything that lives, breathes and contributes are parts of what is called Gaia. Therefore, the interconnectedness of the living is the context in which you begin to think about sustainability. If all these living patterns, what are called systemic systems, were not to work with one another, there’d be no life at all.
How vital is it for our species to truly absorb the essence of sustainability?
At no time in human history that we know of have we had a population of 6.5 billion Homo sapiens. In the near future that population will touch a staggering 9 billion. The human population exploded in the 20th century. Over the last 100 years, our numbers have increased from a little over one billion to what it is now.
Another interesting aspect is that most organisms have an adaptive capacity. They don’t over-extend themselves because they don’t eat up their habitat as it provides the essential food supply. Except when it comes to Homo sapiens, perhaps due to the development of our brain, we have developed a capacity for hijacking other habitat’s resources so that we can survive in our own.
The phenomena of Industrialisation in the 18th and 19th centuries allowed humans to live and survive, expanding at exponential rates. As a result, our capability and appetite for growth became mind boggling. To put things in perspective, let’s say the USA has five per cent of the world’s population but it can easily consume 25-30 per cent of the world’s resources.
How dangerous is this mindless gargantuan appetite of our species?
Uneven consumption of the earth’s resources is now being emulated by other countries. China in the last 25 years has done that while the UAE, which aspires to be a modern state, also has been emulating the consumptive model due to its new found oil wealth. It’s human nature to pattern oneself on the apparent success of another.
This isn’t to become disparaging about any society. It’d be OK if that pattern were sustainable. However, there’s now a preponderance of scientific investigations and knowledge showing that we can’t consume the Earth’s resources and pollute it in the mode we’re doing, and there’s an urgent need for change.
In a way, we’re at the threshold or tipping point of essentially reaching a crisis that would endanger the survival of the Earth. So, within that context it makes an enormous amount of sense that achieving sustainability becomes the predominant, overriding focus of world and local attention.
Isn’t one of the major concerns the exponential rise in energy consumption?
Let’s take a look at the statistics of typical Western cities: nearly half of the energy used is in buildings, about one-fourth is in transport and another 25 per cent is used in industries. Three-quarters of energy consumption is a direct result of our lifestyle choices in the urban built environment which also means 75 per cent of carbon emissions is a result of our consumption patterns.
A typical UAE city will probably show a greater per cent in buildings and transport and less in industry. We use a great deal of fossil fuel for our energy requirements which results in substantial carbon emissions, adding to the global warming phenomenon.
So, how we build our cities and buildings, and how we live and move in these cities are critical in the fight against global warming. City planners, architects and government officials are becoming aware of the sustainability challenges we face today. This brings us specifically to the UAE: Dubai and Abu Dhabi. In the last year or so, the decision makers of these two great cities have mandated that we must become green conscious. In Abu Dhabi we now have the beginning of the Estidama standards, the voluntary, sustainable-design guidelines which are now in the preparation stages. These are all steps in the right direction.
Do you think the current fuel crisis would fuel growth of sustainable practices?
The business of the energy crisis really comes about due to the high price of oil. We’ve had such a crisis in the past: in 1973, through OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries), the oil price jumped from USD3.50 a barrel to USD23.
If you equate the current numbers to that of ’73, it’d be equivalent to the stress we’re feeling now. In the ‘70s, therefore, many of us were asked, as practising architects, to already think green and to be involved with buildings that were sustainable.
Traditionally, architects have always had to deal with a balance of energy use, energy spent and energy demand because there was a very close relationship between how you tread on this earth and how you used the resources of the planet. Here, in desert countries, the nomad has traditionally been the most ecological. He essentially treads lightly on this earth. He leaves almost no trace.
The traditions in Arab countries were all the same: we really had a great consciousness ingrained in us, both physically and metaphysically. Because we had limited resources, we really made it a habit to reuse and recycle.
At a spiritual level, too, the indigenous Islamic tradition emphasised that humans really should be the caretaker of this earth. Earth is given to you as a gift, and you’re responsible for it, and, consequently, that duty is something which I believe morally has also pervaded in our forefathers.
Whether that morality and ethic carries over to us today depends on the person and our social consciousness. Apparently, we have moved into new and transitional societal paradigms in which these former spiritual traditions have become somewhat diluted. What I’m alluding to is that we’ve had a history of environmental consciousness.
If we’ve been environmentally conscious up to the time of our grandfathers, then something’s happened between then and now. So only in the last two generations, in this part of the world, something dramatic has happened.
That’s due to the greater prosperity and globalisation we’ve modelled our cities to, our architecture and way of life on another society pattern. This trend has characterised most countries of the world. We’ve already understood that the other society pattern as being over-consumptive.
That society is becoming conscious and is changing. But the interesting thing about emulation of other societies is that it takes 10-20 years for the real message from one society to get to another. America, which was very conscious in the 1970s about solar energy and other renewable forms, led the scientific domain of sustainable design.
At that time I had the privilege of both teaching at Harvard and also being commissioned to do one of the world’s first solar-energy cities. We had a project in Isfahan, Iran, called Nuran (“the city of light”) designed for 100,000 people. At that time I had an office in Boston.
Working with the leading solar-energy consultants, we designed one of the first totally solar energy-based cities of the world. Regrettably, the project was aborted and never was realised due to regime change in Iran.
Nevertheless, we became conscious of the need and value of sustainable design. With the reduction in oil prices in the ‘80s and ‘90s, interest in sustainable design disappeared in the USA. But it didn’t disappear from the world.
It went to Europe: northern Europe, England, Germany and Holland. These countries were always in need of importing oil and other resources so they had to maintain certain efficiency. Sustainable technology was kept alive in Europe, and now it’s making big waves here in the UAE. However, it took 10-20 years to reach here.
Masdar is the mascot when it comes to renewable energy in the Middle East. What brings you back to Abu Dhabi?
We’re right now here in Abu Dhabi, commissioned by one of the leading development companies of this emirate to design a modern, sustainable community. Of course, Masdar has already started with its master plans, and in many ways is setting the pace. We’re all going through a learning phase.
One of the lessons we’re learning about is how to proceed to design sustainably in this particular environment. What we’re also trying to learn is sort of amusing. The first thing that’s being mentioned is to look at what the grandfathers in this domain did to survive.
We aren’t looking at any newfangled technology but learning from the wisdom of the past. I’ve researched for most of my life about how our grandfathers lived and also wrote a book called The Sense of Unity which dealt with the traditions of architecture in the Middle East.
What are those traditions in architecture?
Sustainable traditions in architecture are those incorporating good, passive design principles. That means designing with nature, learning what local climatic conditions are and adapting to them through the optimum orientation of buildings, proper sizing of openings, creating self-shading buildings and well-insulated skins to reduce heat gains, essentially reducing energy use and minimising the impact on the environment.
To build a low-carbon community, of all the strategies of design – more than three-fifths is going to depend on good, passive design; exactly how you relate to your environment, your climate, wind, sun and the proper use of building materials and alternative energy production technologies. By the way, we regard using the term “zero-carbon emission” as a metaphor for energy-efficient design because it’s practically impossible to document a “zero-carbon birth certificate” in this highly inter-related world of complex building-material production, transport and labour. Correct, passive design is no great magic.
It’s just common sense: how you adaptively best organise and orient your buildings with regards to the sun as it moves from east to west and how you minimise your openings in the east and the west. You shade the south and open more towards the north. If winds are basically coming from the north west, you orient your streets to be able to catch the breeze.
How do you create shade?
If you’re thinking of designing for shadows, there are two types of shadow to create: hard and soft shadow. Soft shadows are from trees and vegetation, hard shadow from buildings. Streets casting their own shadow so you can travel in the shade–narrow streets of old villages are beautiful.
Bastakiya in Dubai exhibits many of these domains. The traditional Arabian courtyard houses are great examples. In the morning there’s an area in which you sit because it has shade, and then as the shade moves … your house has another porch so that in the afternoon and evening you’re cool sitting there.
The idea of wind-catchers as well … is all part of traditional, good passive designs. The sadness is that those people who begin to follow good, passive principles of traditional architecture end up taking photographs of old buildings and parroting them as “pastiche” Disneyland imitations. The “new creation” based on innovative application of essential principles should be the quest.
Don’t we need sound technology improvements to go further with the ‘good, passive design’…?
We need to look at the efficiency of materials and systems we use in our buildings. You’d be shocked to discover that most of the apparatus we use in our homes are only 20-25 per cent efficient. That’s a waste of 75 per cent energy.
If we manage to specify toilets and showers that use less water, use LED lights and others that use less electricity, select products that use less energy and combine these with correct, passive designs, then you’ve achieved 80 per cent of sustainable strategy. To be sustainable, you don’t need a magic solution. It’s already here.
You don’t even have to try hard, four fifths is within our own reach through first principles of common sense decision making. We can also embrace new technologies in renewable energy, like solar and wind.
In the UAE, we’re looking at harnessing energy from the sun through various solar-based systems. One of the greatest problems we face, however, in the use of solar-energy systems in dusty and humid weather conditions, such as in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, is the issue of cleaning and maintenance of their surfaces to produce peak performance. This issue is being studied, and workable solutions have been proposed.
We’re investigating this issue in our projects in Abu Dhabi, and Masdar has 40 different photovoltaic panels set out in their yard, being tested. I believe in the valid and prudent use of solar technology in this highest radiant gain region of the world in the projects we’re designing.
You mentioned that buildings and transport form 75 per cent of our energy use. How do we address this burning energy issue?
We suddenly went from a tradition where doors and windows that opened for natural ventilation to buildings which are now totally sealed with 100 per cent air-conditioned 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Well, there’s no need for that. Climatically, the region enjoys at least four mild months of the year that can provide good human-comfort conditions.
We’ve just lost the ability to use the region’s adaptive traditional building forms, such as the porch–the transitional space between the outside and inside, which is a semi-covered shaded space. We know that a fully shaded space is about 10-15 degrees cooler than the outside condition. That’s why we’re promoting the idea of transitional spaces in architecture.
By providing shade to some of our streets and paths where people move, the transitional space can be created. There has to be a hierarchy of main-movement systems that can move large groups of people, and there has to be much smaller, narrower pathways shaded by buildings, trees and porches so that you can have pedestrians move more comfortably. Public transit has to be encouraged.
I live in the city of Boston, and half of us come and go to our activities of life by taking public transit. It’s really efficient and economical. Any growing city must invest into a robust and efficient public-transit system.
Recently, I participated in a Harvard seminar focused on advanced urban mobility. The use of automated people movers and personal rapid transit are important new domains of energy-efficient transport.
Again, Masdar is experimenting with their use, and their findings related to cost and functionality would be salient information to track. From a sustainability point of view, if we take care of the buildings and the mode of travel in the city, then all that remains is how the social adaptation to sustainable principles is adhered to by the populace.
Aren’t cultural aspirations important in achieving sustainability?
People have also become more and more adaptive to a consumptive way of life. We can’t necessarily afford that. Therefore, we have to train ourselves to become more sustainable, and, as we go through that, the issue of governance comes in.
We must embrace “Estidama” (sustainability) in our personal lives as well. We can build sustainable buildings; residents also need to follow sustainable practices.
Sustainable objectives will be lost if someone has the air-conditioning turned on for 24 hours throughout the year. We will also have to deal with personal life changes, and that will be more difficult because that will infringe on your personal freedom. Here the role of public education about the value of sustainability will be essential.
One important aspect of sustainability that’s deeply involved with human beings is the cultural, in what we build and in the signs and symbols of what we build. They have to adapt also to our cultural aspirations. Many of our buildings aren’t sustainable because of the way the building is designed, the shape it takes, the space and image it creates – buildings also need to reflect our cultural sensitivities.
The cultural aspect, even though a difficult subject, shouldn’t be ignored. The cultural relevance is also sustainable. I believe if we can bring in the cultural and social dimensions in economic and architectural planning, then we’ll achieve a holistic, sustainable way of life and urban habitats.
