The Green Checklist

“In their various ways, all such guidelines concentrate on the technical production of the built environment and thus on the building as object, rather than on what comes before and after the object. And the assumption that the object should meet a standard of sustainability works to distract us from the more fundamental question of whether the object is needed in the first place; it also suggests that technical fixes are the solutions to problems (diminishing resources and global climate disruption) that were brought about by technological progress.”

LEED is becoming a hot topic when talking about sustainability in architecture. It provides a set of guidelines on how to achieve their different levels of sustainability based on given criteria that they set. On the one hand I do believe that this system isn’t as effective as it should be when trying to create sustainable designs. It seems like something that’s more used as a checklist that designers try to complete rather than truly creating a design that integrates these practices into the project. In contrast, I don’t entirely agree with what Jeremy Till states above. While he states that there is a question that needs to be asked about whether the object is needed, I feel that typically in the design process a building gets chosen in its location due to the needs of the people that live and interact with the surrounding context. This being said, the placement of the needed building is making the project more sustainable to its context. Also, technical solutions are made to fix technological problems but that is due to the innovation of products that we are gaining now in building sciences. Buildings that are trying to be sustainable and go through the checklist of LEED points does have more technology to fix these problems but these resolutions are supposed to help the longevity of the buildings lifespan.