Year: 2009

Personal work: Cindy Comprés

Project Title: Housing Units for the Tropics

Selected  project for a full-tuition Scholarship 2009‐10: Master in Sustainable Architecture 2010-11, School of Design, IED Turin.

 

Memory:

 

The tropics play an important role for the reduction of the Co2 emission that affects directly to the Global Warming issue. Inside the tropical zone, resides more than half of the biodiversity of the whole planet because of its forests. But what happens is that this green area is getting smaller because of the use of the land for industries, and mostly agriculture, in order to feed the people around the world. In agriculture, firstly, these food in order to grow needs water, secondly, pesticides that damage the land, then they grow and leave many left out. and on the other side, for the food, some are decomposed to be used for bio fuel, and finally, most of them travel wide ocean, in order to feed us in the cities. What this project is about is to make a design for living passively in this vulnerable zone of our planet by including indoor farming in order to little by little reduce global warming by the restoration of these forests. Nowadays buildings with included little farming can be possible done with the hydroponics and aeroponics technologies, with a totally controlled environment, including control from winds and floods. Tropical climate is mainly very stable, so the comfort for buildings is gained very easily without consuming much energy to control the temperature and humidity. It has the sun all year almost in vertical position, so could be approached by making use of the photovoltaic panels. In other words, this area has many conditions to design passively with little actions. The wind is the only big issue that, in a way, helps to control naturally to lower the temperature, but in little occasions of the year, gets wide by the monsoons and hurricanes that could come around and destroy many crops every time gets into the land. Indeed, to this project, I thought that people who live in the tropics could live in harmony in the cities with their environment by self-feeding and giving, recycling water and making use of the renewable energy, and since most people coming from the countryside to the cities are farmers, they could keep their business actively and have less ecological footprint.

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