The Green Building Conference and Exhibition 2010
Wednesday, 19 May 2010 |   |  0 comment

The Green Building Conference and Exhibition 2010 was held at Gallagher Estate, Midrand on the 29th-30th April. The opening address was delivered by the Minister of Public Works Geoffrey Doidge who said that South Africa has the technical and manufacturing capacity to be an international leader in greening the built environment.

Minister Doidge spoke about his department’s efforts towards creating a built environment green strategy and spoke about its need for industry assistance in this.
"The transformation to green provides emerging economies with opportunities to develop green products, green industry, and green jobs," said Doidge. He also emphasised that a transformation to a greener built environment would require a more sustainable approach to development overall.
The Department of Public Works has embarked on an energy efficiency drive in public buildings. The Department, along with the Construction Industry Development Board, is also working to understand the Green Star South Africa rating system which was developed by the Green Building Council of South Africa.

Dorothy Brislin, registrar of the South African Council for the Architectural Professionals (Sacap), later spoke about the Council’s emphasis on green building as an industry priority. Brislin spoke about the importance of incorporating green building into the curriculum when teaching architecture. "We are making it a criteria that green building must be a part of the curriculum," she said.

The first day of the conference saw local speakers Peter Brown and Llewellyn van Wyk presenting local green building knowledge with Dr Dirk Funhoff and Ryan Gravel bringing knowledge and case studies from overseas.
Brown, the president of the South African Institute of Architectural Technologists (SAIAT), spoke about the application of technology when building energy efficient buildings. Van Wyk, a research group leader at the CSIR and a board member of the Green Building Council of South Africa, presented a case study on low income housing.

Gravel, spoke about the Atlanta Beltline, a project which started with his thesis and is now the most wide-ranging urban redevelopment project currently underway in America. Funhoff, the head of the construction network team for BASF in Europe, spoke about the materials, innovations and challenges that are encountered when trying to build sustainably.
Local speakers on the second day were Michelle Garforth-Venter and Dr Sidney Parsons with international speakers Dr Ken Yeang and Christoph Ingenhoven.

Garforth-Venter, an environmental journalist, spoke about her experiences of the process of building an eco-home. Dr Parsons, an international expert in the energy management of buildings specialising in indoor environment control for building-related illnesses, presented on improving indoor environmental health.
Dr Yeang is one of the foremost designers in ecologically-responsive architecture and planning, he spoke about the process of green design and planning. Dr Yeang pioneered the passive low-energy design of tall buildings for which he coined the phrase ‘bio-climatic skyscrapers’. Ingenhoven, an award winning architect who designed the award winning Lufthansa Aviation Center, spoke about the future of green building using case studies from his work with Ingenhoven Architects.

The conference was complemented by the exhibition floor which housed a variety of products and services in the green building industry. Following the plenary sessions of the conference break away sessions were held in rooms adjacent to the exhibition floor. These sessions were based on the learning modules from the Green Building Handbook Volumes One and Two and consisted of presentations and discussions.

The first set of break away sessions included Landscape Building Design and Materials, Energy, Services and Indoor Environment and Planning and Sub-Structure. The second set of break away sessions included Super-Structure, Roofing and Finishes, Thermal Performance and Computer Modelling and Services. Speakers included Professor Gwen Theron, Naamalakai Ampofo-Anti, Luke Osburn, Dr Sidney Parsons, Llewellyn van Wyk, Margit Pfundenstein and Professor Andre de Villiers among others.

Delegates received conference bags made out of recycled material from billboards. Alive2green, the Green Building Conference organisers, offset the conference’s carbon emissions through the planting of 55 trees at an under resources community in the Western Cape through Food & Trees for Africa.