Sustainable Design for the Built Environment

Rob Fleming, Saglinda H Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351659161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

Sustainable Design for the Built Environment marks the transition of sustainable design from a specialty service to the mainstream approach for creating a healthy and resilient built environment. This groundbreaking and transformative approach introduces sustainable design in a clear, concise, easy-to-read format. This book takes the reader deep into the foundations of sustainable design, and creates a holistic and integrative approach addressing the social, cultural, ecological, and aesthetic aspects in addition to the typical performance-driven goals.

The first section of the book is themed around the origins, principles, and frameworks of sustainable design aimed at inspiring a deeper, broader, and more inclusive view of sustainability. The second section examines strategies such as biophilia and biomimicry, adaptation and resilience, health and well-being. The third section examines the application of sustainability principles from the global, urban, district, building, and human scale, illustrating how a systems thinking approach allows sustainable design to span the context of time, space, and varied perspectives.

This textbook is intended to inspire a new vision for the future that unites human activity with natural processes to form a regenerative, coevolutionary model for sustainable design. By allowing the reader an insightful look into the history, motivations, and values of sustainable design, they begin to see sustainable design, not only as a way to deliver green buildings, but as a comprehensive and transformative meta-framework that is so needed in every sector of society. Supported by online resources including additional reading for each chapter and classroom assignments, this book will be essential reading for students of sustainability and sustainable design.

1 Space, time, and sustainable design

Sustainable designers think very deeply about the design process. This is no surprise since the goal of the sustainable designer is to seek an alternative reality – a new operating platform for the human race. This new platform must be radically different from today’s models of design practice if we are to find our way out of the current climate predicament. After all, it would be unrealistic to expect that we can solve today’s problems with the same knowledge base and worldviews from the past. Discovering a new model for design requires a deep dive into the foundations of reality itself. There we find the space-time continuum, the basis of human perception in physical space. We begin to discover new ways of seeing the world, and ultimately to developing new design skill sets that will empower sustainable designers to better attack the world’s most pressing problems. This chapter will begin by studying space and then time to uncover useful principles for sustainable design and to develop a deeply important “mental model” of reality – a foundation for transformative sustainable design.

1.0 Space

Thinking across space is one of the fundamental skill sets of a sustainable designer. The simplest way to think about space and sustainable design is through the simple, but meaningful phrase: Think globally, act locally. The desire to reduce global pollution and to specify local materials indicates an ability to understand how specific design decisions impact the planet at different scales. The following passages are intended to break down the salient aspects of each step in the scale of space.

1.0.1 Cosmic scale

Cosmic space is infinite, the product of an ever-expanding universe, unfolding, evolving, always in a state of becoming. It is a miracle to be sure, worthy of a starting point in the pursuit of learning about sustainable design. Imagine the miracle of intelligent life. We are the only sentient beings within millions of miles of space. The chances of our existence are 1 in 100 billion (Siegel 2017). We are a speck of dust on a speck of dust on a speck of dust somewhere in the vastness of the galaxy.

Think for a moment about an alien race arriving on planet earth. After traveling millions of light years, they would be overjoyed to discover a planet with sentient life. They would see the verdant beauty of the planet and marvel at the azure waters. They would see rich and beautiful cultures, amazing monuments and buildings – a truly progressive civilization. The aliens would be impressed at first and quite proud of the human race. Upon closer inspection, they would see the dark underbelly of progress: the destruction of the natural landscape, the extinction of millions of species, and the climate altered in significant ways. And they would see countless examples of humanity’s sad legacy of enslavement, oppression, and discrimination. This is the scale of space that sustainable designers occupy from time to time, seeing the planet in its entirety as one organism, one place where everything is connected. The magnitude of even the smallest design decisions, like using a plastic straw, when multiplied by the millions of other similar decisions, have significant impacts at this scale. Today, the aliens would see our oceans destroyed by the careless use of disposable plastic – the ultimate convenience for us, but a death sentence to the oceans, and ultimately to our own species.

1.0.2 Macro space

In 1968, astronauts looked back on the planet earth for the first time, and saw a big beautiful blue marble. They saw the planet in its entirety, not as a lifeless collection of minerals, but as a complex, interdependent, lively ecosystem. This is the macroscale of space, and it is critical for sustainable designers to be able to conceive of the vastness of the planet and predict the impacts of design solutions to far-away places. Climate change is apolitical: It doesn’t observe borders. Rivers link different countries together and form the borders between others. Imagine the Colorado River, originating in the Rockies and slowly finding its way towards Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, millions of gallons of water are extracted to irrigate crops, dammed to produce energy, and used for recreation. The Colorado River rarely reaches the Pacific Ocean anymore (Postel 2014), dying a slow death after it crosses the U.S. border into Mexico in a small, sad puddle of muddy water.

At the north pole, unusually warm temperatures are melting arctic ice at a record pace, causing village structures to literally sink into the ground and polar bears to move south in search of food (Derocher et al. 2018). In the rainforests of Brazil, the forests are burned daily to make space for cattle ranching, replacing the oxygenation process of photosynthesis with carbon dioxide emissions and eventually methane emissions from millions of cows soon to be slaughtered for steak dinners. The great rivers of the Yangtze in China and the Ganges in India are fed by the spring melt of winter snow packs in the Himalayas. But the glaciers are retreating and the snow packs are diminishing, threatening the water supply for millions of people. The macroscale enables the designer to imagine the impacts of their decisions at the global scale, a frightening but empowering point of view. While it’s true that the negative impacts of our design decisions are multiplied by the thousands each day, plunging the global ecology into a downward spiral, there are literally millions of people around the world working to turn the table. By joining together to develop new frameworks, new design approaches, and a whole range of solutions, sustainable designers have clear pathways to engage and attack global issues at the scale of their projects, thereby changing the very face of the planet. Passive House (13.9.2) is one of the many rating systems that are transforming design and construction practices to align with global solutions for human-induced climate change. Resilient design has also emerged, asking design teams to consider how projects can adapt to changing conditions and bounce back from shocks like hurricanes, forest fires, and floods.

1.0.3 Mezzo space

The Mezzo scale is our space, the scale of the human. We perceive space all around us, and we are shaped by it in a myriad of ways. Our experiences and ultimately our happiness and survival depend on our manipulation of objects in the human scale for shelter, food, clothing, and all the things that make life worth living. The shape, form, and materiality of our buildings, interiors, textiles, and products are the result of countless hours of effort by the designer seeking to maximize the experience for end users. Artistic expression in many forms is embedded in the process, and without that, we are left with a life devoid of joy, mystery, and happiness. Design matters, but sustainable design matters more. The macro and microscales compel us to think beyond the human scale, to predict the impacts on human health now and in the future. Regional ecologies, the backbone of our living systems, rely upon us to think at the macroscale to make decisions that are restorative rather than destructive. And yet, many of us remain fixated on the human scale spending out time shaping and making beautiful spaces and objects to deepen the human experience. What if we could figure out a way to keep the traditional, aesthetic goals of design at the mezzo scale, but overlay the awareness of macro- and microscales to find the ways to address the big problems of today and tomorrow? That is exactly what sustainable design is all about.

1.0.4 Micro space

Micro space is all around us, and perhaps more importantly inside us. Just as the planet is made up of nested ecosystems, inside our bodies there are literally millions of tiny ecologies all working together to make us a whole and healthy person. Design impacts this scale in so many important ways, from the psychology of how we experience space, to the quality of the air we breathe, and to the types of nutrients that enter our digestive system. At the microscale, life itself depends on the quality of interactions that occur inside our bodies and in the environment around us. Doctors and scientists spend their lives understanding this scale, using microscopes to reveal typically invisible ecologies that form the basis for human health. The union of design and science is the key to unlocking this scale as a new frontier for the creative community, and new partnerships with the medical professions are now available. Zooming in to an even finer scale, we find ourselves in quantum space, a molecular reality of electrons, protons, and quarks. These form the building blocks of life itself. Surprisingly, designers are at work at this scale, especially in the way light is manipulated to create a “vibration” in the spaces and places we inhabit. The more we zoom in and the deeper we consider this scale, the more we discover nonlinear and, as yet, inexplicable aspects of reality.

1.0.5 Virtual space

This type of space is going to become critical in our movement towards a sustainable future. With the number of humans on the planet increasing, living space dwindling, and a failing environment, more and more of our existence will take place in virtual space. Whether this is a good or bad thing from a moral perspective is a larger discussion, but we can already see a future where entire virtual buildings and communities will be used for human purposes such as meetings, education, the creation of art, and more.

It’s hard to imagine just how far the digital world has come and how quickly innovation is now occurring. The great cacophony of data streaming in cables and in the air holds the key to an “information ecology” that will transform life as we know it and that holds the very real potential to fighting climate change by dematerializing physical matter typically associated with all the goods and services we need to survive.

The amount of energy and technology used to support virtual space is still quite high, and the devices themselves we use to interact digitally have their own ethical issues and environmental impacts, especially the rare earth metals required for fabrication. But virtual space, and by default virtual time, can reduce our impacts on the planet in very real ways – one of the many pathways to a sustainable future. Buckminster Fuller, one of the first contemporary sustainable designers, promoted a basic axiom to “do more with less.” Mr. Fuller understood the opportunities to deliver goods and services with a greatly reduced impact, something he called ephemeralization, a large word for a special kind of alchemy that defines one of the most powerful sustainable design approaches. At a more pragmatic level, virtual space allows us to “simulate” proposed sustainable buildings and measure their performance over virtual time. This allows for the prediction of a proposed design project’s environmental and energy performance. Finally, with the advent of 3D printers, the connection back to physical space and objects is reached, creating a blurred world between physical, augmented, and virtual reality.

Thinking across space is a critical foundational skill set necessary for effective sustainable design. Scales are nested within each other, all interacting at all times to define the quality of our reality. Sustainable design relies upon that understanding in its formation and application. Right now, many see sustainable design as a compliance path, as in, “I have to do these things to get my new project certified” as green or sustainable. That is a necessary but limiting approach and typically leads to resentment and backlash against sustainability. It’s better to learn how to see the world at all of its scales and understand how your decisions fit into the great picture. That is what makes sustainable design so exciting.

Additional resources

2030 Palette, http://2030palette.org/

Architecture 2030, http://architecture2030.org/

The Power of Ten: Charles and Ray Eames, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

1.1 Time

There is a special relationship between time and sustainable design. The environmental impacts from the past are felt in the present now more than ever. The future looms over us, threatening us with images of dystopia, climate collapse, and a lower quality of life. The present offers us a unique opportunity to dwell in the time continuum and consider how we got to this point in history, and it also allows us to begin to chart a course towards the sustainable future. Sustainable designers are very good at looking into the distant past to uncover tried and true passive strategies for cooling, heating, and more. Thinking over the long term is also a specialized skill set with the impacts of a single decision or performance simulation of an entire building.

Worldview shifts over time

We can view the past as a series of hyper-accelerated jumps in evolution, as shifts in worldview, or in how the collective or dominant culture views itself in the cosmos. This has great importance to how we understand sustainability, because the way we frame our views to nature, and the way we use technology, and the way we communicate determine the essential aspects of a worldview.

Perception of reality changes over time

Ken Wilber, the founder of Integral Theory, one of the basic frameworks that will be used in this book (1977), believes that consciousness is constantly evolving, and that as a person becomes more inclusive in one’s understanding, consciousness will rise to a higher level. The same is true of entire societies. As societies evolve, their consciousness changes and with that comes new worldviews. Wilber (1977) argues that society is heading towards a period he calls “the integral consciousness period.” For this book, we ar...