Tropical Green Building refers to a style of construction that focuses on energy reduction, reduced use of chemicals, and supporting local labor and community. This requires close cooperation of the design team, the architects, the engineers, and the client at all project stages, from site selection, scheme formation, material selection and procurement, to project implementation. Tropical Green Building has the same basis as green building in more temperate climates, but the methods of construction are completely different. In the tropics, the focus is on keeping cool, preventing insect infestations, and reduced maintenance in the home.
Generally, tropical green building also seeks to reduce power consumption through intelligent architecture, such as by allowing in lots of natural light so that electric lights aren't needed during the daytime, and at night, using white-painted ceilings and low-energy light bulbs such as compact fluorescents or LED lamps.
Solar power, wind power, and/or the use of micro-hydro are often deployed, but not always the focus of tropical green building.
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Famous quotes containing the words tropical, green and/or building:
“Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But the lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
‘I love my Love, and my Love loves me!’”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)