What’s the color of your roof?
By Amado de Jesus
Whenever I ask people, “What’s the color of your roof?” the most popular answers I get are red, brown, green, blue or orange. It’s very seldom that I get to hear white.
Whenever I ask people, “What’s the color of your roof?” the most popular answers I get are red, brown, green, blue or orange. It’s very seldom that I get to hear white.
Metro Manila is not a pedestrian-friendly city. Jeepneys, buses, trucks, cars, tricycles and recently motorcycles swirl uncontrollably through the streets with no regard for lanes or signals. Pedestrians risk their lives as drivers often disregard pedestrian lanes—all these amid the blowing of horns and smoke belching of poorly maintained engines.
Better and more permanent living conditions have enticed humans to move to urban settlements for thousands of years now. After reaching a particular size, these settlements engaged in collective activities including control over planning and development.
Many countries have built nuclear power reactors in their pursuit of energy security. Thus they become less dependent on imported sources of energy.
It can be quite intimidating. As more and more buildings turn out to be green, or at least try to be green, as you have seen in clever and creative advertising, you wonder how your conventional building can ever keep up with this rapid pace of technical development.
Many of us are quick to blame many factors that caused the flooding. This includes erratic, severe, extreme weather conditions caused by climate change.
IMAGINE IF developing countries occupying almost two-thirds of the world’s total population will follow the lead of the developed countries in terms of consumption and carbon emissions.
Melbourne has outpaced Vancouver as the most liveable city in the world, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Survey. It was given a score of 97.5 percent after evaluating 140 cities around the world.
Scarcity of water in the time of King Herod nearly a hundred years BC dictated the whole vocabulary of the built form in that area. Rainfall was collected in cisterns on mountain slopes and exploited to supply water by force of gravity to three levels of his masterpiece of planning, the Masada on a mountaintop.
Our cavemen and hunter human ancestors showed almost no increase in number from just a few millions over hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years.
What exactly do we mean when we say “better performing buildings”? Is this what many developers are claiming or implying when they market their houses and condo units? Many projects promote their public facilities such as their clubhouses, swimming pools and green spaces. While these are obviously good features, are they enough to qualify the building as a better performing building?
A few years ago, I wrote about designing for the elderly and the disabled. Both the elderly and the disabled and those who assist them are benefited when homes are designed with their special needs in mind.
