Singaporeans readily acknowledge that they have three kinds of weather: hot, hotter and tropical. In the Philippines, we have only two kinds: dry and wet. During the dry season, temperatures and humidity go up. During the wet season, people deal with torrential rains and destructive floods.
As we learn to adopt green design, whether driven by legislation, corporate policy or well-intentioned environmentalism, there is one aspect in the building industry that seems to be a disconnected issue—fire safety.
Voluntary green building measures continue to be increasingly popular in many countries for the past decades. Starting with the most elementary strategies like providing insulation and window overhangs, many countries have moved on to more sophisticated green measures.
Many building owners invest heavily on impressive entrances and lobbies by installing very expensive floor finishes to attract tenants and buyers to patronize their buildings.
THE IMAGES are all too familiar on television and the newspapers. Clusters of shanties with many dirty, starving children playing; scavengers digging in garbage dumpsites scrounging for trash convertible to cash; traffic-congested roads with all types of smoke-belching vehicles and many high-rise buildings here and there.
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.
