Urban Coherence
"Much of the work undertaken by sustainable architects has been relatively limited in scope. LEED certification, for example, deals primarily with the architectural object, and not with the larger infrastructure of the territory of our cities and towns."
When talking about the sustainability in architecture, most of us often think about the performance of an individual building which is integrated with many cutting edge technologies in order to improve the indoor environment, to reduce the amount of used energy and even to generate the energy from renewable sources. This is actually a limited scope since it just focuses on an individual buildings and disconcern about the surrounding context. Building is a part of a whole infrastructure of a city including trees, walking paths, roads, street light, human and so on. All of them relate to each other and directly or indirectly influence the performance of each other. They, together, build a network and form the urban coherence. Therefore sustainability is not only the issue of the design of an individual building but it has to be considered on the larger territory.
However the reality makes it harder for architects who want to solve the sustainability in the large scale. A large amount of real estate owners today are in private sector who just spend their money on improving their own buildings. Actually due to their scopes, it makes sense that it is waste their time and money to allow architects and designers working on the relationship between their buildings and the larger infrastructure unless they are forced to do that by the requirements of laws and regulations. But if they are forced to do that, the result is no longer sustainable. In this circumstance, buildings codes just require architects to deal with the physical form and visible stuff while to achieve sustainability requires a deeper research about the political issues, social relations, culture and life style and humanity. So the question are: How can we change the attitude of buildings' owners? Is it realistic for architects to focus on the larger territory in the sustainable design while most of our works are driven by time and money?
When talking about the sustainability in architecture, most of us often think about the performance of an individual building which is integrated with many cutting edge technologies in order to improve the indoor environment, to reduce the amount of used energy and even to generate the energy from renewable sources. This is actually a limited scope since it just focuses on an individual buildings and disconcern about the surrounding context. Building is a part of a whole infrastructure of a city including trees, walking paths, roads, street light, human and so on. All of them relate to each other and directly or indirectly influence the performance of each other. They, together, build a network and form the urban coherence. Therefore sustainability is not only the issue of the design of an individual building but it has to be considered on the larger territory.
However the reality makes it harder for architects who want to solve the sustainability in the large scale. A large amount of real estate owners today are in private sector who just spend their money on improving their own buildings. Actually due to their scopes, it makes sense that it is waste their time and money to allow architects and designers working on the relationship between their buildings and the larger infrastructure unless they are forced to do that by the requirements of laws and regulations. But if they are forced to do that, the result is no longer sustainable. In this circumstance, buildings codes just require architects to deal with the physical form and visible stuff while to achieve sustainability requires a deeper research about the political issues, social relations, culture and life style and humanity. So the question are: How can we change the attitude of buildings' owners? Is it realistic for architects to focus on the larger territory in the sustainable design while most of our works are driven by time and money?
Unfortunately, in the world we live in money drives everything and if something can be done cheaper or sustainable the cheaper option wins every time. I think that we have come too far in our capitalist views for us to completely change how we make sustainable design a part of everyday life. Maybe we shouldn't make our focus about being "sustainable", but rather accept the inevitable.
ReplyDeleteMaybe if we had a better way of accounting for environmental impact, we would be able to understand the real cost and make arguments for more "sustainable" practices. I think it would be helpful to us designers if we had a materials catalog that listed price of the material, but also broke down the embedded cost of the material and what the other environmental costs were.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if money necessarily drives everything and who says that sustainability needs to cost more? I agree with what David said in class was look at sustainability as something that has benefits versus how things are done. It all comes down to the scarcity vs. austerity arguments.