Framing our Future

By Robert Blakeman, AIA, LEED AP
(From the NKBA's Profiles Magazine)

The demand for green and sustainable buildings is growing rapidly as government, academic and private organizations are now exploring an integrated holistic design process. This process actively considers the interconnections between systems, occupants, and the environment, using these connections to develop single solutions to multiple problems involving shelter, energy savings, aesthetics, natural daylight, indoor air quality, and affordability. These diverse groups are discovering that a healthy, resource-efficient, high-performance building more than pays for itself in dramatically reduced energy costs and better health and productivity for its workers, students, and families.

Green building involves energy- and resource-saving strategies such as low-E windows, reflective roofing, solar technologies, and efficient, renewable energy systems. These new structures also use healthy recycled materials like certified lumber, low VOC finishes, and natural fibers, along with practices such as green roofs and natural daylight harvesting. Reports have found that daylighting contributes to higher test scores by students, as well as decreased absenteeism and increased productivity by employees.

Smart green design provides a holistic approach to the development of both new and renovated structures. It builds around a collaborative design team that includes owners, architects, interior designers, engineers, construction managers, product suppliers, and finance teams. This group sets the project goals and determines the benchmarks for the proposed design, establishing the complexity of construction and pursuing a whole building approach to the design, while meeting the construction budget set by financial impacts.

Smart green design is built to promote some of the following benchmarks:

• Substantially reduce environmental impacts.
• Enhance and protect natural habitats.
• Reduce operating costs.
• Conserve resources.
• Encourage renewable energy technologies.
• Enhance building asset values and return on investment.
• Optimize health and productivity.
• Improve indoor air quality.
• Create a connection from the building to the environment.

Sustainability initiates design and growth based on an ecological footprint, which is a resource management tool that measures how much land and water a human population requires to produce the resources it consumes and absorb its waste under prevailing technologies. Today, humanity's ecological footprint is over 23 percent larger than what the planet can regenerate.

The LEED Green Building Rating System is a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for developing these high-performance sustainable buildings, which was created by the United States Green Building Council. LEED provides a complete framework for accessing building performance and meeting sustainability goals.

Sustainability is a simple idea based on the recognition that when resources are consumed faster than they are produced or renewed, the resource is eventually depleted. In a sustainable world, society's demands on nature is in balance with nature's capacity to meet those demands.

To reduce those demands and create spaces that are sustainable, we have to initiate design that provides high-performance building envelopes to reduce energy demands and systems, employ green and reflective roofs to lower energy loads and retain storm water run-off, use recycled materials to decrease the use of existing natural materials, and specify natural and nontoxic low-allergen materials that won't degrade indoor air quality.

All of this will provide a better quality of life for homeowners, while allowing us to live within the means of our planet.