| Isn't sustainable design chiefly about conserving
energy?
In part, yes. Whether considering
gas and electrical consumption, water consumption or material
consumption, each of these elements is fundamentally about
energy. This alone should be a primary motivation for an owner
embarking on the process. But sustainable design also encompasses
other opportunities to save many other valuable resources.
Focusing on conservation alone obscures the overriding benefits
of sustainable design: achieving a fundamentally superior
building that performs better, elevates worker productivity
and retains higher long-term value.
How futuristic are sustainable technologies?
Not very. Let me describe for you a building that meets the
definition of sustainability and see if you can imagine it.
It is built entirely of a local, easily accessible, ready-to-use
material, with inherent insulating qualities, that is nontoxic,
rapidly renewable and recyclable. The structure is reusable
for generations and at the end of its lifespan, leaves no
ecological trace of its existence.
Any idea? It's an igloo. My point is that
good sustainable design is likewise simple and sound. Hardly
futuristic.
Not very many of us can make do with
igloos, so how do you go about producing a sustainable building
for the rest of us?
We believe that sustainability is founded on fundamentally
good practices: minimizing demand, using passive systems,
optimizing active systems and reducing waste. That's the mindset
we bring into the process, without any predisposition to using
elaborate or unproven technologies.
I want to emphasis the word "process." That's
what sustainable design is. There's a misconception that sustainability
is a defined entity, like an extra fixture that can be attached
to a building. In reality, sustainable design is a process
of integrating ideas, objectives and priorities for building
systems by the players responsible for their creation. True
sustainability is driven by sensible decisions made early-on
in facility programming.
How early on?
Sustainability begins with decisions about the building site.
Is it urban, suburban, greenfield, brownfield? If it's already
been selected, can you make adjustments to the site? Did you
consider proximity to public transportation? What about the
impact on wildlife and the local natural ecosystem? By the
way, there's no one right answer to these questions, it's
just the process of questioning, the weighing of options and
the balancing of your priorities as you go along that keeps
sustainability as one of the objectives of the design process.
When you place the building on the site,
you can take advantage of solar access, prevailing breezes
and programmatic adjacencies to produce more efficient lighting,
ventilation and temperature control.
Is there really that much opportunity
to impact sustainability through simple choices?
You'd be surprised. Let's take the igloo case again and consider
your building materials. A sustainable choice would be a material
that requires as little energy and process as possible to
use on your project. That includes the energy to transport
that material. So the most sustainable choice would be different
for different locales - a locally quarried granite or marble
or a locally produced brick, for example. But remember, sustainable
design doesn't dictate a decision for you; it asks that you
consider the degrees of sustainability and choose as wisely
as you can.
Achieving a higher level of sustainability
can be a matter of not overlooking the obvious.
Can you give an example of a sustainable
strategy that is commonly overlooked?
Daylighting. If you've sited the building beneficially on
the site and used shading strategies, you can harness daylight
without solar gain. The fact is, people like daylight, and
they like to work in it. There are also shared lighting concepts
to explore, or dimming controls that enable you to lower perimeter
lighting without reducing work surface lighting. Many of the
conventional standards in place for workplace lighting produce
an over-lit environment, and artificially so.
What about water?
That's what we ask. Once again, there are many simple and
economical strategies in water conservation, recapture and
reuse. Gray water recapture and reuse, or rainwater recapture
and reuse, for example. There are the choices of waterless
urinals versus flush valves, and automatic versus standard
fixtures. Up to now, there haven't been very many places where
building owners have had to be conscientious about water conservation
and it's very easy and inexpensive to do, even if you just
do it in your landscaping. Depending on your location and
your site, up to half of your water use may be outdoors. In
one project, we built cistern tanks out of oversized pipes
located in planters to store rainwater for irrigation.
How do you escape the fact that all
of this costs more?
It doesn't necessarily cost more. Sometimes it costs a lot
less. It does take time, commitment and extra thought. Once
you invest in the thinking, the execution is often a no-brainer.
If you take the long view on building performance, you'd see
that most of the money you spend over the lifespan of a building
isn't in upfront costs. About 85 percent of your costs are
in people. Initial capital costs and operating costs are fractional
by comparison. So if you can make a design choice that makes
the people inside your building more delighted and energized
by their environment, more comfortable and therefore more
productive, you're going to see a big payoff.
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