Ken Yeang Knihy

This book aims to establish a strategy for sustainable design, and for understanding the decisions that need to be made in the design of a complex building type such as the skyscraper.

Reissued with a stunning new jacket design, the Virago classic about working class life at the turn of the last century

"It's Not Easy Being Green presents the key principles of ecological design and planning in the built and research work of the architect Ken Yeang in an easy to read graphic novel that takes the reader through Ken's formative years to him becoming a practical architect while showing the evolution of his thoughts and ideas."--Cover

The publication accompanies the exhibition at ifa Galleries Stuttgart and Berlin, focusing on South-East Asia, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia. Recently, innovative projects have emerged that prioritize sustainable and landscape architecture over mere investor interests. Featured architects, landscape architects, and activists provide diverse responses to the demands of future-oriented construction in both tropical and urban settings. Renowned Malaysian architect Ken Yeang, a pioneer in eco-architecture, began exploring traditional Malaysian building typologies in the early 1970s, leading to his development of the bioclimatic tower. His projects emphasize alternative energy, rainwater collection, recycling, and vertical greenery. In contrast, landscape architect Ng Seksan focuses on horizontal designs, creating gardens, parks, and public spaces that harmonize with natural landscapes. Additionally, the founders of the Green School in Bali utilize natural materials and a holistic educational approach that emphasizes harmony with nature. "Green Design" transcends architecture, embodying a commitment to thoughtful education for the future, applicable in cities like Kuala Lumpur, Bali, New Delhi, Singapore, London, Stuttgart, and Berlin.

Saving the environment from continued devastation by our built environment is the single most important issue for our tomorrow, feeding into our post-millennial fears that this third millennium will indeed be our last. Ken Yeang reconstructs and revisions how and why our current design approach and perception of architecture must radically change if we are to ensure a sustainable future. He argues forcefully that this can only be achieved by adopting the environmentalist’s view that, aesthetics apart, regards our environment simply as an assembly of materials (mostly transported over long distances), that are transciently concentrated on to a single locality and used for living, working and leisure whose footprints affect that locality’s ecology and whose eventual disposal has to be accommodated somewhere in the biosphere. This manual offers clear instructions to designers on how to design, build and use a green sustainable architecture. The aim is to produce and maintain ecosystem-like structures and systems whose content and outputs not only integrate benignly with the natural environment, but whose built form and systems function with sensitivity to the locality’s ecology as well in relation to global biospheric processes, and contribute positively to biodiversity (as opposed to reducing it). The goal is structures and systems that are low consumers of non-renewable resources, built with materials that have low ecological consequences and are designed to facilitate disassembly, continuous reuse and recycling a (a cyclic process that mimics the way ecosystems recycle materials), and that at the end of their useful lives can be reintegrated seamlessly back into the natural environment. Each of these aspects (and other attendant ones) is examined in detail with regards to how they influence design and planning. Ecodesign provides designers with a comprehensive set of strategies for approaching ecological design and planning combined with in-depth analysis and research material not found elsewhere.