What do we talk about when we talk about global warming? It'll get hotter, that's a safe bet; polar ice caps will be melting, and wildlife that can't adapt to warmer temperatures could be on the way out. But what does it really mean for the health of us, the human race? It's a question that remains surprisingly difficult to answer — research into climate change's impacts on human health have lagged behind other areas of climate science. But what we do know has scientists and doctors increasingly worried — a rising risk of death from heat waves, the spread of tropical diseases like malaria into previously untouched areas, worsened water-borne diseases. "When we think about climate change, we think about ice caps and biodiversity, but we forget about human health," says Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor of environmental studies and population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "There are a huge number of health outcomes that are climate sensitive."
The World Health Organization (WHO) and other global health bodies are working to remind us of that fact. On March 31 the American Public Health Association (APHA) launched its first blueprint for combating the health impacts of climate change, and on April 7, WHO will dedicate its annual World Health Day to the intersection between disease and global warming. The message is that severe climate change could fundamentally weaken global public health, that doctors need to be ready to deal with the consequences — and that there is a moral case to be made for reducing carbon emissions to save future lives. "If you look at climate change over the long term, it will profoundly affect the pillars of public health: water, sanitation, air quality and sufficient food," says Dr. David Heymann, Assistant Director-General for Health Security and Environment at WHO. "The fact is that human health should be at the center of the political debate on climate change, but right now that's not the case."
The first step to making that case is understanding exactly what warmer temperatures will do to us and our diseases — and few scientists know more about the topic than Patz, a member of the UN's Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (Hear Patz talk about global warming and health on this week's Greencast.) As temperatures increase, and hotter, drier summers become the norm in regions that were once temperate, powerful heat waves — like the one in Europe in 2003, which killed an estimated 35,000 people — will take a toll. At the same time, climate models suggest that rain could become less frequent overall but more intense when it does fall, leading to a double whammy. Longer and fiercer droughts in some areas will worsen hunger, but severe rainstorms carry an increased risk of water-borne diseases like cholera. "It's not just warming, it's climate change," says Patz. "It's changing the air cycle, creating more extreme flooding, more extreme droughts."
For some diseases, climate change will be boon. Take malaria — right now, the insect-borne disease is mostly confined to hot tropical areas, which is why you don't need to take quinine when you're hiking through Central Park. But if temperatures increase, the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite will be able to expand their range, while more intense rainstorms will give them more places to breed. A report this year by Australia's Center for Epidemiology and Public Health estimated that between 20 to 80 million more people will be living in malarial regions by 2080, as the parasite expands its range; another study released on April 3 by British doctors raised the possibility that insect-borne diseases — virtually unknown in the cool U.K. — could hit the British isles thanks to climate change. "There's real worry about malaria," says Heymann. "Malaria becomes a more threatening disease as it spreads to new areas where people lack immunity because they haven't had it before."
WHO and other bodies are pushing to strengthen the global public health system in preparation for the changes that global warming might bring. That means readying societies to deal with heat waves — ensuring that the most vulnerable elderly aren't left on their own — and improving defenses against vector-borne diseases, with anti-malaria nets and medicines like artemisinin. Such preparations will be especially needed in those parts of the developing world — sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia — that will bear the brunt of climate change. But Patz would also like to see public health tackle carbon emissions directly, cutting off global warming at the source. For him, carbon dioxide should be treated as a pollutant that damages human health, albeit indirectly, and it's in our medical interests to reduce it. "Energy policy becomes one and the same as public health policy," says Patz.
Policies that cut carbon emissions can have a direct positive impact on human health now as well. Imagine how much better off our environment and our cholesterol levels might be if more of us biked to work rather than drove — or if city planners put greater emphasis on designing more walkable communities and ensuring sustainable public transportation. But the reality is that climate change is happening today, and will be worse tomorrow, even if we manage to pull together a global effort to reduce carbon emissions, which seems less likely and more difficult every day. (A commentary in the April 3 edition of Nature argued that the technological changes needed to decarbonize energy could be much harder than we thought; meanwhile, over in Bangkok, diplomats at the U.N. climate conference last week made little progress on hammering out the successor to Kyoto.) If there is money to be spent on preparing the world for the health impacts of climate change, the priority should be adapting our public health system to a warmer world, versus spending on carbon mitigation. Global warming to some degree will be inevitable — but human suffering needn't be, if we're smart enough to prepare.
Exterior house painting tips can make a job go much smoother. AsktheBuilder.com host Tim Carter shares some house painting tips from his years of experience. His pointers will make your house painting job much easier.
Wind power is one of the fastest growing forms of alternative energy in the world. More and more, wind power mills are seen in the countryside, in large wind farms and for the most part, away from city life. But a new form of wind power is now designed to work in an urban environment.
The 1880s and 1890s were a time of great construction in Bombay. The Grand Victoria Terminus was built, and after it the Municipal Corporation building, another beautiful structure, followed by the Churchgate headquarters of the B.B. & C.I. Railways (now Western Railways). But there was no hotel worthy of the growing city.
Being an ardent fan of Mark Twain, Jamsetji Tata may have read of the writer’s fate in the so-called ‘best’ Watson’s Hotel: Mark Twain and his family were roused every morning at dawn by doors slamming, servants shouting, and “fiendish bursts of laughter, explosions of dynamite.” The Irish chef at the hotel was apparently more conversant with the French language that with French cooking, “serving up Irish stew on 14 occasions under 14 different French names.” Sir Stanley Reed, Editor of The Times of India, said Jamsetji had an intense pride and affection for the city of his birth, and when a friend protested against the intense discomforts of hotel life in Bombay, he growled: “I will build one.”
One day without consulting anybody, not even his sons or partners, he announced his plan to build a grand hotel. It was his personal contribution and money he was putting in — not that of Tata & Sons. Along the present Yacht Club at Apollo Bunder was a little bay where yachts used to scull. The British were reclaiming the land and he bought a substantial site of two-and-a-half acres on November 1, 1898 on a 99-year lease. There was no formal laying of a foundation stone but a traditional coconut was broken and a Parsi diva (oil lamp) was lit, perhaps by the well or spring between the present swimming pool and the lifts. This ceremony took place in 1900.
Many an interesting story is invented round the Taj being designed by an Italian/French architect who, after his exertions, went home and returned to find the building was put the wrong way around — what should have been in the rear was in front and vise versa. Heartbroken he went to the top floor of the Taj and flung himself out of the window. Dramatic! Touching! But not true. As anyone who stayed at the then-non-air-conditioned Taj in the summer would attest, the late afternoon breezes that blow across Colaba do not spring up from the harbour but sweep in from across Back Bay. The U-shaped wings of the hotel were positioned to trap this breeze and extract the most benefit.
Indeed, the necessity to draw whatever relief there might be from the torrid heat of western India was certainly the inspiration behind the hotel’s two most original features. At the time, the clientele Jamsetji expected was from abroad and his endeavour was to make the hotel as cool as possible. Thus it had high ceilings and wide corridors, which would be conducive to air circulation. Furthermore, the Wellington Mews — another property Jamsetji bought — behind the hotel site was where the horses and carriages were housed and these could roll in directly from the west side.
One convincing explanation comes from the daughter of a Goan customs officer, Francis Xavier D’Mello, who was stationed in the customs shed at Apollo Bunder and witnessed the Taj rising stone by stone: “Jamsetji Tata came regularly to watch his great hotel being built. The customs shed provided the only shelter from the blazing sun, so Mr. Tata used to come there and have long chats with my father. Once my father asked him why he had put the entrance to the Taj at the back, and Jamsetji told him that he wanted the majority of his hotel guests to have rooms overlooking the sea. Jamsetji surely had some hand in his broad instructions to the architect.”
Sadly, having designed the Taj along with a Parsi architect under Jamsetji’s instructions, Sitaram died of malaria. The dome designed on the model of the Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) had not been built. W.A. Chambers was called to help. Khansahib Sorabji Contractor built the solid structure.
The prospectus for the hotel to be underlined some salient features: “The Hotel, when completed, will be five storeys high, and will accommodate, beside hotel boarders to the number of 500, a number of permanent residents. Immense cellars, below the ground floor level will contain the refrigeration plant, which will cool the rooms of the inmates, and will also enable their food to be stored in a manner foreign to India. The ground floor will be occupied by the offices, first-class restaurants, and shops for the sale of articles generally desired by travellers. The first floor will be mostly taken up with a grand dining room, drawing room, reading rooms, billiard room, and a few grand suites, all provided with electric fans. The second, third, fourth and fifth floors will contain bedrooms, mostly double and furnished in the Continental style with sofa, tables and chairs, and other furniture, and on each floor bathrooms and lavatories. The kitchens etc., will be on the top of the house with a roof garden. The Hotel will be lighted throughout with electric lights, and many lifts, also worked by electricity, will convey residents from floor to floor with comfort. A Turkish bath will also be fitted up in the Hotel.”
Jamsetji personally went to order the electrical machinery from Dusseldorf and chandeliers from Berlin. Furthermore, he made sure that if by chance electricity failed, a back up system of gas lights was at hand. There was the in-house soda bottling plant, an electric laundry, fans from the USA — and the first spun-steel pillars from the Paris Exhibition where the EiffelTower was then the latest wonder of the world. These pillars, a hundred years later, hold up the ceiling of the Banquet Hall.
For all his projects Jamsetji got the costing done thoroughly but not for the Taj. It was his gift to the city he loved — as the Taj Mahal of Agra was Shah Jahan’s memorial to the woman he loved. It cost about Rs. 25 lakh. When the hotel opened, it had a large staff of waiters but only seven guests. It was Bombay’s first public building to be lit by electricity and when it happened, those present outside clapped as they saw it lit.
As if such a grand edifice was not enough, he purchased two small islands near Uran called Panjoo and Dongri so that the guests at the Taj could go on picnics.
Jamsetji wanted to lease out the Taj to an experienced European hotelier. The plans fell through and finding the staff and running the hotel was to fall initially on him in 1902 and later on his partners and colleagues. The Gateway of India came up only in 1924 to commemorate the visit of King Emperor George V and Queen Mary in 1911. Before that at the Gateway site, sahibs used to sit at tables sipping burra and chotta pegs.
Perhaps, says Allen and Dwivedi (who have done research on the Taj), Jamsetji believed in starting a new venture on an auspicious date, Muhurat as it is called. It was decided to open the hotel on December 16, 1903, before the building was complete. Only one wing was ready and the dome had not been completed. A study of Jamsetji’s medical reports of the late-1903 shows his health was deteriorating. His sons and colleagues may have decided to speed up the opening so he could have the satisfaction of seeing at least one of his dreams come true. Steel, the hydro-electric venture, and the Indian Institute of Science came up after his death.
Five months after the Muhurat, when Jamsetji died, a leading journal of Calcutta, The Empress, wrote in the obituary: “The new hotel represented, to Mr. Tata, something more than a mere commercial venture, and he had determined that the Taj Mahal Hotel should set an example, which should re-act throughout India, in removing one of the greatest hindrances to agreeable travel in this country. The plans were drawn with the sole purpose of securing an entirely worthy building, and he looked for no immediate financial returns. There is something peculiarly saddening in the coincidence that the fixing of the key-stone of the noble dome should have preceded, but only a few days, the death of the man who inspired it.”
The lives of the clientele, which was mainly British, revolved round news from home. The P. & O. brought the mail every Friday morning and left every Saturday evening. The London GPO’s largest single destination was mail for India. It was rushed from London, sorted out between Aden and Bombay and special bags delivered within an hour of the arrival of the steamer. Saturday was spent in answering letters. The Sea Lounge at the Taj was created as a letter-writing room and by special arrangement mail from the Taj was directly delivered to the ship.
In years to come, world-renowned personalities have stayed there, from Somerset Maugham and Duke Ellington to Lord Mountbatten and Bill Clinton. The hotel was featured in a hundred books, including Louis Bromfield’s One Night in Bombay, which is centred on the Taj.
The maharajas become the great patrons of the Taj and invited the hotel to do special catering in their states. The Chamber of Princes was to meet there regularly every January — hence the ‘Princes’ Room’ at the southern end of the Taj. The business maharajas were to follow next; today the Taj is the most sought after venue for wedding receptions, and one can frequently see fire crackers being let off at the gate as the bridegroom’s party dances merrily away.
As there was no Gateway of India for 20 years after the Taj came up, the hotel offered the first view of the city to ships sailing into the harbour until 1924. Even now, with many more tall buildings on the skyline, the hotel engages immediate attention. It is a symbol of Mumbai.
We at Snowcem Paints salute the brave men who laid down their lives for our nation in wake of the ghastly Mumbai terror attacks, and extend our heartfelt condolences to the families of the innocent victims. God grant them eternal peace.
If you're like most homeowners, you probably dream of one day completing a major home-remodeling project. And I'm not talking about retiling a tub here. This is the once-in-a-lifetime renovation—the kind that dramatically changes how you live, energizes the entire household, and makes all the neighbors really jealous.
Perhaps your dream is to build a two-story addition with a family room below and a master bedroom and bath above. Or maybe you've always wanted to expand the kitchen and install French doors leading to a wraparound deck. Regardless of what your dream entails, all major remodeling projects can benefit from the expert design help of an experienced, licensed architect.
I know what you're thinking: Architects are way too expensive and only necessary when building multimillion-dollar homes—and last week's economic roller coaster isn't helping any. The truth is, architects are well worth the extra cost on large remodeling jobs because with thoughtful evaluation and design, they can meet—and often exceed—your expectations. In fact, depending on the size or complexity of the remodeling, calling in an architect might be the only way to get the project off the ground, and to ensure your dream comes true. Here's why you consider taking the plunge if you're gung ho about a large-scale redux on the house.
1. To See the Big Picture
An architect has the training and skill to produce a detailed design based on your particular needs and desires—a design that's sensitive to the architecture of your existing home, and scaled to the proper proportions. However, what truly makes an architect valuable is the ability to develop and refine a vision of the completed project that you can see and understand. And architects are experts at seeing not only the big picture, but also the hundreds of tiny steps between concept and completion.
After the initial consultation, and once you and the architect have defined the scope, features, purpose and functionality of the project, the architect will develop a set of preliminary drawings, sometimes called schematics. These drawings are just the first of many that you should expect to see.
"It's important for the architect to spell out in advance what each set of drawings will include," says Richard Hayes, architect and managing director of the American Institute of Architects. And don't be concerned if the preliminary drawings seem lacking, because each subsequent set will contain more and more detail, including written specifications. In fact, Hayes recommends asking the architect to show you a final set of drawings from a recently completed job, just to give you an idea of what to expect at the end of the design phase.
But before you settle on a candidate, carefully consider the firm's past designs and gauge whether its vision for your house meshes with your own. If you want to incorporate salvaged stained glass windows and antique brass doorknobs, for instance, don't choose the architect whose past work features floating drywall over recessed fluorescents.
2. To Handle the Paperwork
When most of us think of an architect-designed project, we envision the aesthetics of the building: its size, shape and finished surfaces. But behind the pretty face are the skeletal bones of the building. It's the architect's job to design the project to satisfy building codes and meet specific structural demands. And striking that balance between aesthetic beauty and structural safety is no easy feat—it requires a vast knowledge of various building materials and construction techniques. Hiring a pro makes sure your renovation plays by the rules.
"A good architect knows the building code, and alternative ways to solving structural problems," explains Marc Olivieri, a Connecticut construction manager. "Architects also prepare most of the documentation necessary to acquire all the various building permits." And those services can ultimately save you time and money.
3. To Hire the Muscle
No one understands the design of your project better than the architect, which is why he or she is the perfect person to coordinate the various construction professionals before the work starts in earnest. For example, an architect will meet with structural engineers or HVAC mechanics prior to construction to discuss the design, answer questions and ensure everyone knows their job.
The architects' plans make all the difference in translating your dreams to the details a contractor needs. If a problem should arise—which often happens—the plans will act as a record of what should have been done, and the architect will find a solution without compromising the design, your needs or your wallet.
4. To Oversee the Job
Once the design phase is completed, you can decide how involved the architect is in the actual day-to-day construction of the project—if at all. You can hire an architect just to design the project and create all the necessary drawings, and that's it. He or she then has no further involvement. However, for an additional fee, some architects will manage the project by hiring subcontractors, establishing the work schedule and confirming that all work is done properly and according to the final plan.
Another common practice is called Contract Administration, or "CA" for short. "When you sign a CA," explains Hayes, "the architect will check in on the construction from time to time to answer questions and ascertain if work is adhering to the intent of the design."
A third level of supervision is available through design-build firms. These one-stop shops will design and build your project, providing supervision throughout every phase of construction, including hiring subcontractors. This option also saves you the trouble of negotiating and signing two contracts—one with an architect and another with the contractor. But be aware that some design-build firms employ home designers, not certified architects.
It's also important that you be involved during the construction process, even if it's just to consult with the architect from time to time. That way, you'll be able to express your concerns as the project takes shape. "Working with an architect is a bit of a balancing act," says Olivieri. "You want to make sure your needs and desires are satisfied, but without surrendering all control to the architect when changes or refinements to the design are necessary."
5. To Go Green
More and more architects are starting to design buildings that are environmentally sensitive to both the planet and the homeowner. Considering sustainability in concept and construction will ensure your investment lasts a long time, limits its consumption and saves you money through efficient design.
The options available vary widely depending on the experience of the architectural firm and the circumstances of your project. Even if you're not plunging into a photovoltaic array or a backyard wind farm, smart choices can make significant, smaller gains. Consider using recycled and nontoxic materials, solar or passive water heaters, efficient insulation and a trustworthy thermostat. Because many of these measures involve whole-house systems, it's critical to plan them in advance.
Adapted from Ayn Rand's bestselling potboiler, The Fountainhead combines architecture with drama, romance, and sex. Gary Cooper plays Howard Roark, an idealistic architect who refuses to create buildings that violate his aesthetic values. Patricia Neal is his passionate lover, Dominique. 1949
An architect (Paul Newman) and a fire chief ( Steve McQueen) race to rescue the occupants of a burning San Francisco skyscraper, which is touted as the "world's tallest building." 1974
Directed by Fritz Lang, this silent film classic interprets Le Corbusier's plans for the future, imagining a mile-high city built by slaves. For this DVD version, producer Giorgio Moroder speeded up the pacing, restored the tints, and added a rock and disco soundtrack. 1926
An aging thief (Sean Connery) becomes enmeshed with a beautiful insurance agent (Catherine Zeta-Jones). The real stars of this film are the PetronasTwinTowers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. 1999
A rising black architect (Wesley Snipes) has an adulterous affair with a working class Italian American (Annabella Sciorra) in present day New York. Directed by Spike Lee. 1991
OK, you won't see skyscrapers, but The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a must-have for anyone who is serious about studying the relationship between film and architecture. In this German Expressionist masterpiece, the evil Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) hypnotizes an innocent villager to commit murder. Director Robert Wiene set the eerie tale in a surreal world of twisted angles and contorted buildings. Silent, with music track, 1919
Former Playboy Playmate Anna Nicole Smith is a helicopter pilot who becomes a hostage after flying a terrorist to the top of a skyscraper. Sex and skyscrapers -- what more could you want? 1996
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