What is Green?

How green our buildings are?

The designation “green” architecture is extremely wide ranging, as Cook and Golton pointed it out. Sustainable architecture is essentially contestable concept encompassing many viewpoints and open to broad interpretation. Glancing through thousands of articles, reports, and books you can find bewildering array of contrasting building types with different design approaches and technologies, each justified by highly diverse interpretations of what sustainability really is. Trying to comprehend the environmental innovations in architecture tends to be a confusing business and competing environmental strategies do not always make sense.

Even if we accept the fact that sustainable architecture is contestable concept, much of the debate over contemporary sustainable architecture tends to sidestep the issue. The common delusion is to create homogenous categorization of green architecture with no or very little regard to distinctiveness and diversity of the environment and ecological strategies.

So, how green our buildings really are? The most widely recognized categorization of the sustainable architecture is the LEED certification. However, the current ranking system has many flaws in it and more close analysis of the LEED certified buildings revealed that these buildings are not as green as we thought they are.

My understanding of Sustainable Architecture

Sustainable architecture is not about implementing the latest technologies in a building. I believe that architecture is one of the most significant factors that shape personality and social thinking. It has tremendous impact on our daily lives and social behavior. For this reason, I argue that architects should aim to change these social patterns in their designs.  Architects have the power to change our everyday behavior and habits that brought humanity to what we have today – depletion of natural resources, contamination of air, soil, and water, biodiversity reduction, climate change etc.

Centre for Engineering Innovation at the University of Windsor Ed Lumley in Windsor, Canada, is a great example of smart sustainable building. It is designed to be a “Live Building” that student can learn from. Building systems were deliberately exposed, which allows its occupants to see different processes in practice. Many high-performance design features inspire students to shape the future of the sustainable design.