Respect for the cardinal directions and geometry in design were central to the theme of architectural design traditions since ancient times in India. This relationship is celebrated at millions of thresholds of households of India in the form of 'Kolam' or 'Alpana'.

Sustainability was a part of life, not only in India, but all traditions across the globe, till the Industrial Revolution. Industrial revolution, followed two centuries later by the information revolution with the advent of computers and the internet, shrunk the world phenomenally in terms of time, space and accessibility. Materilas and technologies became widely available, thus the gap between the global and the local vanished.

In architecture, shelters of all kind emerged, from the NEED based of the ordinary folks to the GREED based real estate market, and finally to the kind with the purpose of fulfilling the LEED norms, all in the name of a newly discovered GREEN revolution in the building industry. In between several new seeds of ideas were sown in the form of 'isms' in architecture, practically every decade...

Yet several issues related to the biggest industry of mankind- the building industry, remains unexplored... post occupancy evaluation, functional efficiency audit, energy audit, structural audit and creation of a comprehensive data-base of buildings in the settlements all over the world. Today we talk of digitally enabled cities, yet we don't have even a limited data base of the built-environment around us, though birth and death of humans is counted by the second and census created...

The following was a presentation made at the CII-IGBC Green Buildings Conference 2013 held in Chennai, India in October 2013. You can also see the same as a video at:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puyKHtO5ACU