Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

McLean’s Nuggets
Learning from the Locals
The end of 2006 saw the publication of the Stern Review,
the British government’s long-awaited report on the
economics of climate change. Solar panels and wind turbines
go on sale in Europe’s biggest DIY chain. A frenzy of
excitement/opportunism grows around renewables strategies.
Impending puritanical tax initiatives are mooted, ready to
punish you for that big car or sun-seeking holiday via lowcost
airlines, and the mayor of London considers outlawing
the incandescent light bulb. Meanwhile, prominent
environmental campaigner George Monbiot writes what
seems a less than useful article about the nonbenefits of
small-scale renewable power generation. In an article
entitled ‘Low-wattage thinking’, in New Scientist magazine,
he states: ‘In almost all circumstances, micro wind turbines
are a waste of time and money.’ His chief concern appears
to be that such homespun solutions are actually a distraction
rather than a solution to our future energy needs.
Within the context of this mix-messaged environmental
age, the usefulness of the comprehensive (I struggle to
include the rather ‘new-age’ holistic) thinker/designer seems
increasingly useful. John-Paul Frazer is able to span the
unhelpful distinctions between architect and environmental
designer. In an ongoing research and embryonic construction
project, ’Mrittikalaya’ (Abode of Earth), Frazer is proposing
a new kind of highly tunable architecture situated in the
extreme climate of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, India. For
six years he has undertaken a study of desert organisms,
revealing a diverse range of extreme heat adaptation that
can be harnessed in ‘human technological or behavioural
analogues such as seeking shade and shelter underground’.
In a recent lecture at the University of Westminster, Frazer
described this process as ‘learning from the locals’. Like
Bernard Rudofsky in his seminal book of 1964, Architecture
without Architects, Frazer does not make a distinction
between the evolved disposition of an organism and the
evolved disposition of the artefacts of that organism. We
have evidently as much to learn from local clothing,
vernacular architecture and behaviour (customs) as we do
from local flora and fauna, insect and animal life.
Working with Andy Ensor, Yonca Ersen and Jyrki Romo,
Frazer has recently designed a two-bedroom house for a
research scientist couple in this extreme environment,
utilising some of his empirical research. The building is
largely buried underground, using the temperature
stability that a subterranean (below 3 metres/9 2 / 3 feet)
environment can afford you: 27°C (80°F) in this instance,
which is considerably less than summer highs of 50°C
(122°F) – (surface air temperature) – and considerably more
than the freezing winter nights. Other design strategies
include additional Shade-Scoop-Sails (or ‘Chiks’), the
‘fissured morphology’ of the self-shading Cactus Render, a
Wind-Scoop Tower with evaporative cooling ‘Mist
Chandelier’, and a substantial network of Coolth storage
tanks, cooled by a night-time radiative cooling system. This
cooling system comprises a series of radiators on the roof,
covered with deployable insulated petals, opened and
closed by novel actuators/pistons made of bamboo and
mustard oil mix. Add a Suck-Stack chimney over the central
core of the building and the innovation of the insideoutside-rotating-thermal
mass of the Eco-Orifice wall
completes the new palette of environmental control
mechanisms for the ‘Sailable-restorative’ architectures that
John-Paul Frazer is so keen to promote.
John-Paul Frazer, Andy Ensor, Yonca Ersen and Jyrki Romo, Detail of a
deployable insulated-petal actuator mechanism, Mrittikalaya project, Thar
Desert, Rajasthan, India, 2006.
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