Excerpt…
Dr. Suha Ozkan, past Secretary General of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, has spent much of his career exploring how tradition can inform architectural innovation. To Dr. Ozkan, today’s sustainable development techniques echo architectural practices of the past. He sites Saudi Arabia’s “Tuwaiq Palace,” as an example. There, in a hot and arid environment, traditional forms improve the energy efficiency of a complex, modern building.
Sustainability is not only for big budget projects though. The Aga Khan Award has also gone to relatively simple designs that save lives in the world’s poorer communities. Examples of that work include Nadar Khalili’s “Sandbag Shelters.” Khalili designs emergency habitations that do not require costly materials to build. Instead, they use simple cotton bags filled with sand. The sandbags are the basic building modules for traditional single and double curved walls held in place by wire mesh. The resulting shelters resist hurricane force winds, earthquakes, and floods. Simple. Cheap. Effective.
Ismailimail 