Like millions before me, I too had dreams of making my own house; I had visions of myself in a pristine white marble bathroom, sitting on a throne carved out of a single piece of blond granite, while clean air that smells of freshly-cut-grass blows through all my living quarters. It would be a house fit for kings, one that is not dependent on the whims of WAPDA (I live in Lahore); a dwelling that casts aside the harsh reality of Pakistani summers. I imagined that the house would be nothing less than awesome.

But, that didn’t work out.

Like most things in our country, trying to build an energy-efficient, smart house proved to be harder than I thought it would. I did, however, end up building a house that was about 40 per cent cooler than a standard house in Pakistan. So here’s part one of my four years of research and hard work, compressed for your consumption..

About ‘Jack’I am no architect or engineer; nor did I have enough money to make an entire house. All I knew was that most of the new houses built in Pakistan are “unliveable”. I feel that in summers, Pakistan, in most urban areas, is generally hot. I believe the technical term for this kind of climate is ‘semi-arid’ but it could be ‘Salma Agha’ for all I know, so don’t quote me. The houses built here – yes, the ones made of brick and mortar – act like an oven; they soak in the sun during the day, and radiate that heat at night. Mortar and brick are not only excellent conductors of heat, but also really good at retaining it because of all that mass.

That’s basically how an actual brick-oven works! So think of yourself as a slow-roast, sitting in your crore-rupee oven the next time you’re sitting there cursing load-shedding. If you take a temperature reading of your wall in May or June (anywhere in the plains of Pakistan, and depending on the orientation of your house), the reading would be anywhere between 33°C to 38°C. Now that number… for anyone who’s spending above six million rupees to build a house… should be unacceptable.

The number gameHere’s another way of putting this number into perspective. A temperature of 20.5°C is ideal for the human body; that’s when we are most comfortable and our metabolism most efficient. Our government suggests putting air-conditioners at 26°C (although I personally feel that they say so because they don’t have any electricity, rather than anything else!). Anyhow, with the AC on 26°C, it’s a very comfortable summer night. But can you imagine the amount of work your poor AC has to do in order to bring your room temperature down by 10 degrees during the day? If 10°C is not easy for you to understand, think of it as 10,000 rupees in your electricity bill. And that’s just a guess… it probably translates to something more than that.

The houseMy house is around 5°C cooler than a standard brick-and–mortar house. A majority of these houses are built on free templates downloaded from the internet, with way too much emphasis on how they look, rather than what it’s like to live inside them. Take it from me; the difference of five degrees becomes a lot at 3 pm in Lahore on a June afternoon. You can get by at 35°C with just a fan on the first floor; at 40°C, it’s like lying under a huge hair dryer.

My objectives for the house were simple:1.    Make an energy-efficient house that is not too dependent on electricity.2.    Try to use as much recycled material as possible to keep the price down.I’ll get to number one later; let me get my utter failure on objective number two out of the way first. From experience, I can tell that the labourers in Pakistan are unskilled – not only are they unskilled, they are also dead from the neck up. Learning something new does not factor into the equation for the mazdoors because they work on daily wages. When they’re not working, they’re not earning.

Not surprisingly, my ingenious idea of making walls out of used tires filled with sand and supported by steel columns was met with a blank stare. All the architects I spoke to, said that all the previous experiments of using alternate materials to build a house, ended up costing more than the standard materials because there was a huge learning curve – not just for the masons and mazdoors, but also for the architects and engineers in the business. They told me it takes too long, and at the end of the day, looks like crap.

“Convention can kiss my behind,” I thought, as I made my way to Bilal Ganj (a place in Lahore) to find used tires for my trial run. It took me less than two hours of being stuck in a traffic jam, have my feet run over by donkey carts, and being ripped off by various Pathaan tire dealers, to start thinking, “Maybe conventional building materials weren’t such a bad idea after all.”

Long story short, the “used materials” cost me almost as much as a brick wall; and my “tire-wall” ended up looking like it was made by a blind dolphin on crack; not pretty.

Used bricks didn’t work either. It was really hard obtaining used bricks that were decent enough to be used. And the ones I did find ended up using 50 per cent more cement just to be evened out. So my architects sat me down, once again, and said there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel; using brick and cement was the cheapest, quickest way in Pakistan. I reluctantly agreed, but added another objective just to make life harder for myself:3.    Only use materials made in Pakistan.Making a climate-friendly house in Pakistan is no rocket science. The Mughals and the British did it for years. Houses that were built up to the 1950s were great that way; they had verandahs and cross-ventilating windows. However, with the standard plot sizes and the bylaws these days, it’s not always possible to squeeze in even one verandah, and open spaces around the built areas is also difficult.

The glory daysA hundred years ago, the British made houses with really thick walls to hold out the heat, verandahs around the rooms to keep the sun away, and 20-feet high roofs to create a chimney effect so that hot air rose up and out of the air-vents at the top. How clever! How I’d love to see them do the same thing in a 10-marla plot, with our existing bylaws!

To be continued on Thursday, March 15.