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Sustainability Standards - Set the Bar Higher!
I
will never forget a comment made by Lawrence Scarpa at one of the School of
Architecture lectures back in the fall of 2019.
He said that sustainability in buildings should be like a second nature
to us as designers – like ADA regulations.
It should be something that naturally and effortlessly gets incorporated
into buildings. It shouldn’t be
something that you win awards for. I remember
him saying something along the lines of “you never hear architects/firms bragging:
look at this building I designed - it’s completely ADA compliant!”. Sustainable
strategies and opportunities should be baseline requirements for our design. Awards shouldn’t be given out for doing what
is morally and environmentally right. As
such a massive contributor of waste and carbon emissions, the building and
construction industry has a responsibility to minimize this harm wherever
possible. As key stakeholders in this
industry, we also have the greatest opportunity to be able to begin to
standardize this in the work we do on a daily basis. Because if we don’t take responsibility and
work towards solutions, who else is going to?
I agree with you that it is too hasty to set sustainability as some award granting criterion. The concept of sustainability is worth questioning. What to sustain depends on what spatial-temporal scale we look at things. The larger the scale is, the less we can do. The criteria of sustainability are most explicit at two extreme poles. While we are always caught up in the middle ground, sustain the outermost cosmological cycling and the innermost of the self, which is an active mind, seems to be the feasible way to go.
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