Low-Tech versus High-Tech: Which Approach Should Green Buildings in Developing Countries Adopt?

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Today, designers are using technological solutions to help our buildings become more sustainable, and as a result, green buildings can fall into the two categories of low-tech and high-tech. 

• Which building would you like to live in? 
• Which building would you like to work in? 
• Which buildings should we be designing? 
• Is it our responsibility to use the latest technology to achieve the highest overall building performance? 

Your answer to these questions may not be the same in every case. A fundamental question is: which approach is more compatible with the sustainable future development of your locality?

What do “low tech” and “high tech” mean in architecture?

To have a meaningful discussion about the merits of a high-tech or low-tech approach respectively, we need to first arrive at a definition, or at least a loose understanding, of what is meant by these terms.

Imagine a low-tech building made of natural materials, simple and affordable, which uses natural forces in a passive way – such as sun shading, natural ventilation and passive cooling – to provide a stable comfortable environment. A building requires little maintenance and requires user interaction to function, thus supporting the development of a “relationship” between the occupants and their building and between them and the external environment. 

In essence, low-tech solutions are passive and indirect solutions that designers use to manipulate environmental conditions in a building to improve comfort.

And now imagine a high-tech building, which “lives,” which “thinks,” which “learns”, and knows what its occupants desire how best to achieve this, which interacts actively with its environment, which provides maximum comfort levels using automatically controlled air conditioning, uses minimum resources to achieve this and on top of this, supplies the surrounding infrastructure with energy and water. 

A building, which cleans itself with “smart” windows and employs highly complex green walls with a considerable amount of plants and trees to clean indoor air. A building, which uses the latest technological advances to reduce embodied energy and increase recyclability. Designed according to biological principles, a building, in which the skin, the respiratory and nervous systems work together, combining natural forces and technology, functioning automatically but allowing user interaction. 

In essence, high-tech solutions used technological innovations to implement “smart” systems that monitor and adjust aspects of the building to human needs.

Should developing countries ‘import’ high-tech, capital-intensive green building solutions from developed countries?

Technology plays an important role throughout the history of architectural development. A study by Shao and Nagai (2017) concludes that technological solutions using both ecological high-tech and passive low-tech approaches have actively been employed in developed countries, while developing countries typically prefer the latter. 

In Malaysia, however, adopting high-tech solutions imported from developed countries for local green buildings is not new. In my interview conducted in 2009 with Ong Ching Loon, the Managing Director of Cofreth (M) Sdn Bhd and the Past President of ASHRAE Malaysia Chapter, he said,

“In one of the buildings that we manage, it has the most advanced technology. Even the local agents do not know how to maintain them. I looked through the manual and our managers sat down, the manual said "maintenance free." How can that be? When you have rotating equipment, how can it be maintenance free?…The local agent is only the re-seller who sells advanced mechanical equipment imported from overseas…And one day, a leakage problem appeared. The local agency had to take their people from overseas to come and that repair cost them about RM50-60K. Again the issue here is that we adopt the latest technology but we do not have the capacity [to manage the technology ourselves]…So we are at the mercy of being 'slaughtered' for [the sake of energy] efficiency.”

An eco-economist E.F. Schumacher in his 1973 book Small is Beautiful, disagreed with the employment of high technologies in developing economies on several accounts. He held that developing nations would only become hopelessly reliant on wealthy nations by blindly replicating their production models, consumption standards and values. He felt that the level of technology may far exceed the ability of the population in these developing economies to operate and maintain them.

In addition to adding to the foreign debt, the purchase of such “high” technologies might further increase the dependence of the developing economies on their industrialized debtors for assistance in their operation and maintenance. In many cases, such equipment often ends up as broken, useless “white elephants.”

Shao and Nagai (2017) explain this further by arguing that technological innovation – typically affected by building service equipment, structure and skin – is limited by regional development i.e. economic levels, technical strength, ethnic customs and climatic conditions. In developed countries, the standards at social, material and technical levels have been quite high as a result of the countries’ accumulation of long-term industrial development. In this case, they still try to develop science and technology and focus on various technical means, including low-tech design. 

Meanwhile, in developing countries where the economy is trailing behind and actual material conditions are still developing or remain poor, they employ the low-tech approach to solve building problems based on local characteristics to ensure localization. As Edwards (2001) mentioned: “Asia and Africa act out good green practices by instinct and their point of reference is not Newton of Einstein but the local wisdom keeper.” 

In developing countries, building technologies are sometimes solutions "without alternative", instead of "alternative solutions". The desire to use healthy, non-polluting materials is not always possible because there is no option. Low-energy technologies are, on the contrary, often used because of the cheap labour available, but the low-energy technology used is not always clean. 

Architectural design that does not need additional investment, is not commonly used in developing countries. It is, however, an important way to save energy and achieve a more appropriate built environment. Among other reasons to explain this phenomenon could be the intention to look "developed", following the paradigm imposed by developed countries. 

Which approach is more sustainable?

Traditional low-tech design is economical. It favours low-embodied and local materials that are ideal for building with and repairing. It also emphasises good passive design to reduce the need for the latest technology, rather than relying on the latest advances of technology to solve problems created by the design. Natural ventilation, controlled solar gain, and night-time cooling are all traditional low-tech design strategies that are ultimately more sustainable and easier to manage than high-tech solutions.

Huges (2016) sees the problem with the ideals of high tech in buildings from the energy perspective. He asserts that high tech gives the preconceptions of being sustainable by reducing a building's overall energy consumption “smartly”, but does not consider how that energy is obtained, or how much energy is consumed by the technologies that created the building. In other words, high-tech solutions use technological innovation, increasing the energy input in a building's development, and reducing its energy output during operation. 

Low-tech solutions, as seen in many vernacular buildings of the past, are highly sustainable because they do not increase the energy input or output during their construction or operation. Rather, they redirect existing environmental resources to make conditions comfortable for human occupation.

Therefore, it is sensible to suggest combining high and low-tech solutions to produce designs that support the true principle of energy efficiency by balancing the relationship between the output of beneficial energy and the input of energy, or the resources used. Indeed, if we want to make our buildings come closer to being sustainable, we must gradually change the energy inputs into our buildings by adjusting the way we design, construct and inhabit our buildings. 

Schumacher also questioned the sustainability of high-tech methods of production, which have an increasing tendency to consume ever-expanding quantities of Mother Earth’s non-renewable resources. Such an approach might be able to placate the ever-growing range of human wants in the short run, but in the long run, it would result in dire consequences for future generations.

The idea of “appropriate technology” for developing countries

In light of all of these drawbacks of high technologies, Schumacher proposed that developing economies should employ “intermediate technology” or “appropriate technology” or the use of technology according to the available local industries, equipment, materials and labour standards. Numerous international organizations, the United Nations included, have applied this appropriate technology theory toward helping developing nations build their economies.

Certain populations in developing countries need simple, appropriate technologies instead of complex, advanced ones. Of course, the idea is not to stagnate existing local technologies, but rather to harness the readily available skills toward developing high-standard local technologies congruent with the local socio-economic conditions and living standards. Not a repulsion of foreign advanced technologies, “appropriate technology” seeks to transform and advance the local technological level in a gradual fashion.

The “appropriate technology” principle is synonymous with a right limit to the appetite for brilliance and high performance. For instance, the industrialization of building construction should be kept at a reasonable level, e.g. flexible partitions, precast bathrooms, modularized building materials and semi-automated construction. Let’s take HSBC HeadquartersBuilding by Sir Norman Foster as an example. The building was designed to save energy because Sir Norman Foster incorporated a solar reflection system that tracks the sun’s path to save energy during its operation stage. 

But embodied energy of the building is enormous as all components were prefabricated all over the world before being delivered to Hong Kong for assembly. For example, the structural steel came from Britain; the glass, aluminium cladding and flooring came from the United States while the service modules came from Japan. Unsurprisingly, it was the most expensive building in the world at the time (c.a.HK$5.2 billion, roughly US$668 million). Since Hong Kong is the fifth richest country in the world, this extreme practice may be considered acceptable. But is this really a green building? To me, this is comparable to a billionaire who donates one dollar to charity!

The effectiveness of high-tech buildings is dubious, considering our environmental crisis. Fortunately, past icons of high-tech architecture, such as Sir Norman Foster and Renzo Piano, are being influenced too by environmental ecology and adapting greener building designs. Foster now holds that the designer should predicate his choice of technology not on its level of sophistication but on the local circumstances; Rogers goes further to argue that there is no such thing as “high” or “low” technology but just “appropriate” technology and that complex technologies shall only be used where there is simply no other choice.

Piano’s ultra-tech Centre Georges Pompidou in France (1977) – a building made of steel pipes and glass tubes with an exposed skeleton of brightly coloured tubes for mechanical systems – has been criticized for concentrating primarily on technical performance skills and lack of emotion. 

He then exclusively pursued green techniques with his lagoon-side Tjibaou Cultural Centre (1998) on New Caledonia Islands in the South Pacific. To reflect on the indigenous Kanak culture, he incorporated local materials, traditional structural systems, common technologies and eco-designs, including adjustable ventilators to channel the monsoon and fresh air into the buildings. Specifically, the vertical elements were more exposed in the upper portion by reducing the height, increasing the ventilation effect and thereby reducing heat. The building is well arranged; it looks like sails from a distance, while a closer perspective presents an indigenous headdress, harmonious with the sky, sea and trees. It has been noted as “showing a combination of high technology and high emotion” (Edwards, 2001).

Conclusion

All in all, the idea of “appropriate technology” is to make green buildings accessible and “smart”, optimizing eco-designs with available materials, technologies, construction and equipment. This idea should be adapted in developing countries as an overarching guideline in green architecture. Buildings with “appropriate technology” are ones that can be mastered with the locally available technologies in design, construction and management.

Most importantly, designers in developing countries should apply the techniques inherent in traditional architecture. This could create passive buildings that maximise airflow, mitigate their impact on the local environment and provide thermal comfort to residents. Passive architecture covers a considerable part of traditional technology, low-tech, immediate technology, appropriate technology and other concepts and is a direct expression of the modernization of traditional technology. 

On the other hand, high-tech, high-performance building systems are no more than over-managed spatial machines with excessive emphasis on functionality. We should also be less concerned with the appearance of the building as a parameter in determining whether a building is high or low-tech and more about the substance of the approach.

References

Crysler, C.G., S. Cairns and H. Hynen (2012). The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Sage, p.725.

Edwards, B. (2001). Green Architecture. London: John Wiley & Sons Limited, pp.10 & 13.

Huges, M. (2016). Architecture Shaped by Time and Place. D/Zine Issue 8. Brisbane: The Dub Designers, pp.40-49.

Schumacher, E.F. (1973). Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.

Shao, D. and Y. Nagai (2017). The innovative application of eco-technology in architectural design. Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 12(10), pp. 2592-2596.