Towards a sustainable architecture

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While designing a building, architects are generally driven too much towards studying and explaining what the overall cost of the building will be until the construction is complete and ready for opening. The investors are righteously concerned with how much a building will cost them until the property starts to return the preliminary investments. However, the fact that management costs are as much as important as the construction costs of the building escape most developers scope. It is surprising that a building’s management costs can, over time, exceed the initial construction costs. The architect’s duty is to continuously remind the client of the importance of management costs and sustainability of the finished building. What the management costs are, I will point to further on into my post. Firstly lets understand what sustainability is.

What is sustainability?

This is a very important question, where the answer can lead us to various remedies to many of the environmental problems we encounter every day. Air pollution, water pollution, noise pollution, water scarcity, food shortage, biological extinctions of animals and plants … etc. are all environmental problems we face today although it may escape our attention. The air we breath, the water we drink, the food we eat, the energy we consume to heat and cool our environments and to help us communicate and entertain are all factors we can’t live without. We need all of these in order to continue our lives. However, do we care of the quality of our lives? Some of us do and most of us don’t. Those of us who don’t care may actually not have the time to stop and care. This is another problem that is caused by living by modern standards, but we will not be dealing with that here. What I’m trying to say is that there is a developing understanding about sustainability, and the sooner the better everyone stops and gains a global vision of a better efficient unselfish lifestyle.

To live in healthy environments we need balance, balance of consumption. This means we consume more than we produce, or we produce more than we consume. To obtain the balance or sustainability of supplies we need to use more of the abundant energy supplies and produce less waste. We need balance.

To give an example, we can use more energy obtained from solar panels or wind turbines to benefit from the abundant energy on earth. And if we do it locally in our buildings the cost will decrease even more since we don’t have to have the energy transferred to our habitat. Providing vegetation in our environment absorbs excess radiation through our glazings, thus lowering the HVAC costs, and providing a both comfortable and healthy environment with more aesthetical value. There can be many more examples explained but we mustn’t escape the main point: sustainability is an important aspect of architecture that should always be considered, especially in our time of over-glazed high rise buildings and isolated suffocating environments, where we are exposed to over radiation, toxic air and synthethic materials.

There are many ways to maintain sustainability and economise our management costs in our buildings.

Solar panels are one of the most known and widely used applications, they are cheap and easily constructed. You can see a lot of solar panels at sunny regions of the meditteranean especially used for water heating.
Solar panels can also be used for electricity supplies, however it is a bit more expensive.
Wind turbines are widely used on windy lands, if you live in such an area why not benefit from this abundant resource of energy.
Organic and environmental materials, help your environments breath. Instead of using synthetic materials that produce excess radiation and volatile organic compounds why not use organic materials that absorb all that bad unwanted stuff? There are many materials out there, from paint to carpets & wood, for interior and exterior. Just explore, get it and apply it, if you want a healthy environment.
Sustainable design, is an elementary feature for architecture. Why not use ventilation chimneys as both aesthetic and functional elements instead of mechanical ventilation gadgets? Why not implement solar panels as facade or roof finishings instead of sticking them onto the roof?
Waste management, is essential since the amount of garbage every household produces put together is very frightening. Usage of waste disposal devices helps the problem. Recycling paper and glass are other important things that can be done. Use glass, wood or cellulose instead of synthetically produced materials such as plastic. A very simple thing we can do is to use shopping bags in the form of nets, they used to be very popular before the use of plastic bags. You can even knit them yourselves.
Social sustainability, is essential to make your environment livable. Instead of making people use your environment by necessity, why not let them take pleasure in experiencing your building. Why shouldn’t we have enjoyable office spaces instead of over radiated aquariums? A mall full of greenery and sunlight is much more pleasing than a closed box with plastic plants and mechanical ventilation. Make it sustainable and enjoyable.
Organic cultivation, is what many people are going for nowadays. The stuff we eat for food have gone weird and its hard to buy decent fruit and veg’s. Where have all those tasty tomatoes gone? Use your window panes or back and front yards for growing organic fruit and vegetables. Organize a lovely corner in your house for vegetation, it will help circulate the air and provide a lovely corner for relaxation.
Building renovations also can contribute to urban and local sustainability. Turning an old building into a sustainable one can add much to both the environment and to its own value.
Just the same, much should be done by local municipalities and administrations to provide urban sustainability. Waste management, local solutions for water and energy recycly are some of the things administrations can provide. Local administrations can also prepare regualtions to direct people to sustainable life styles.

Examples of sustainable architecture:

The Gherkin

Sino-Italian Ecological Energy Efficient Building

Recycling historical buildings

Finca El Retorno, Ecological Refuge, Guatape

An ecological community

More and more people escape the big cities nowadays to live in a natural habitat away from all kinds of pollution and to grow their own crops, crops that they trust are organic and not chemically or genetically deformed. Together with the escape from the city we have a new form of tourism that provides a brief glipse of an unpolluted dreamlife, which is called eco-tourism. It is a commercial thing, eco – tourism, but when you think about it, it signifies how, many people yearn for this kind of life, but are trapped in their own self created toxic cages.

Sustainability shouldn’t only be considered as a means to decrease the amount of money we spend to provide water, air, electricity, internet, heating and cooling to our interiors, or about making people want to spend time in our man-made environments. It is only a local thing we can act out to participate in the global incentive. There are much larger global problems such as global warming, food and water scarcities, and the corruption of cultivation with insecticides and genetically “improved” fruit and vegetables.

Whether we like it or not, we have to take care of what we eat, drink, wear, touch and even breath. If you don’t care about yourself, who will?

Do you want a better – healthy life? Start contributing to your environment.

Further Reading:

Sustainable_Architecture

Sustainable_Development

Sustainable ABC

CTBUH Sustainability Knowledge Base