Evaluation of Selected Addis Ababa Buildings with respect to the Green Building Features
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Date
2015-06
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Addis Ababauniversity
Abstract
The green building movement originated from the need and desire for more energy efficient
and environmentally friendly construction practices. Green building also brings together a vast
array of practices, techniques, and skills to reduce and ultimately eliminate the impacts of
buildings on the environment and human health. Green building often emphasizes taking
advantage of renewable resources.
Nowadays it is hard to argue that existing buildings of Addis Ababa show such considerations
to the environment or natural resources. Due to architectural experiments made to resemble
the buildings in western world, our buildings have lost their identity and integrity. We witness
buildings built from western building materials that are not suitable for our country. These
materials cause glare and unwanted heat. Because they lack the integration between
greeneries and infrastructures, the Addis Ababa buildings are faced with penetration of dust
and smoke in the indoor spaces. These, as a result, have led most of the buildings to be
considered unsustainable and uncomfortable.
This research paper mainly assesses the nature of the selected buildings in terms of building
orientation and location, functional layouts, indoor environment quality, energy consumption,
water consumption, waste management and building material and finds out how to adopt the
green building theories and concepts to the sampled buildings.
The paper is pioneer research clearly showing the issues related to the nature of existing
selected buildings found in Bole, Arada, Kirkos and Lafto Sub-city. Both descriptive and
explanatory research method were used and also mixed type of quantitative and qualitative
data were collected from primary data source and from secondary data source through reading
and note-taking, scanning and photocopying, browsing and extracting trusted web sites.
Software like Ms Word, Ms Excel has helped into interpreting the raw data into useful
information and also Auto Cad 2007 and Archi Cad 15 have helped in making illustration.
Additionally, Photoshop CS5 and Adobe illustrator 5 were used to enhance the qualities of the
illustrations.
By using the methodology described above it was found that most of the sampled buildings
had problems in their indoor environment quality, over consume energy, are indifferently laid
out functionally and have disorganized waste management system compared to green
buildings. Finally possible remedial solutions were given based on Environmental planning and
Landscape design.
Key words: Green Building, Sustainable building
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Keywords
Green Building:Sustainable building: