Sustainable Designs

Class Discussion Topics: What was Bob Berkebile’s contribution to green architecture? What is a Living Building? What is the baggage that David Orr is referring to? How does that relate to your life and the design of communities and buildings?


Reading: "Hyatt Regency skywalks designer Bob Berkebile is the godfather of green building"
Berkebile have contributed a lot of green architecture. He chaired a Committee on the Environment for 2 years and published the first Environmental Resource Guide in 1992.  Buildings are one of the highest consumers of electricity and resources.  With in the US buildings use 70% of the nations electricity, 30% of the nations raw materials and make 30% of the nation's waste.  Berkebile pointed out that green-building does not have to be more expensive, since we can utilize free energy sources such as the sun.  A big contribution that Berkebile did for the green architecture movement is in 1993 was to help create the U.S. Green Building Council.  This council is very influential today for green building, which is committed to sustainable building design and construction.  A great thing that have come out of the US Green Building Council is that they developed the  LEED building rating system.  Berkebile has his own firm BNIM which is one of the leading environmental design outfits.  


Reading: "First Living Building Challenge winner" (by Berkebile’s firm):http://tinyurl.com/2fl2ghw
The winners of the Living Building Challenge was The Omega Center for Sustainable Living in New York and the Tyson Living Learning Center in Missouri.  From what I gathered from the reading the criteria for the Living Building Challenge was similar to the LEED rating system but each criteria was called a "petal."  A cute themes to have that a living building should connect and be related to something living such as a plant.  The "petals" rating topics covering site, materials, energy, water, indoor quality, beauty and inspiration.  The Omega Center has a very cool way of reusing water and gray water by use a Eco Machine. The Eco Machine is a living systems that uses plants, bacteria, algae, snails, and fungi to recycle wastewater, clean the water that is then used to restore the aquifer. 

Living Building/Architecture 

Reading: "Baggage: The Case for Climate Mitigation: David Orr: http://www.davidworr.com/files/CB-62%20Baggage.pdf
The baggage that David Orr is referring to is all of thing that we cannot fix. Even if we try our best now to slow down of stop climate change there will be species, ecosystems and coastal cities will be lost or dramatically altered.  We have to carry those results and that baggage with us into the future.  Hopefully this baggage will make us be more precautionary and wiser about our future actions.   We need to keep David Orr's thoughts in mind so that when we design future communities and buildings they will not contribute to climate change.