LEED the Way to Something New

 What even is LEED? Well its a way to save the environment right? Technically, yes, thats the goal but I dont think it's quite working out the way they want it to. Getting LEED certified is a fairly easy thing to do and it looks nice on a resume but is it really helping the environment? So many architects and clients want to get their building LEED certified and while some do it for the right reasons, a large majority simply do it for political gain. It looks good to have a LEED certified building especially a gold one but there are so many shortcuts being taken to achieve that. An Architect I talked to about a building they designed that achieved the gold rating was pretty open about it. He said that at the end of it all, their building had only gotten silver certified but in order to get gold they just slapped on a few more sun shading louvres and planted a few more trees around the landscape and boom, their building which was constructed no differently than any of their other buildings in the past was LEED gold just because of a few passive strategies that actually required more steel and land manipulation. 

Im not saying that LEED isn't doing a good job, it's actually the best we have at the moment, but It could definitely be better. We need to find a way to get people to want sustainable buildings rather than thinking about it as another boundary they can try and loophole.