Best Practices

Summary: Daniel Williams’s new book, Sustainable Design, “is a description of a transition from the exclusive concern for form making to the art and science of place making,” says Oberlin College Professor David Orr in his foreword to the book. With a complete compendium of the 1997–2006 annual AIA Committee on the Environment Top 10 projects and bottom-up discussion of ecology and sustainability, the book conveys a powerful, much-needed message. Even its medium is its message: Sustainable Design is printed on 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper. Following is Williams’s definition of sustainable (versus green) design and a checklist of where to start.

Green design versus sustainable design
Sustainable designs sustain—sustainable design sustains. Sustainable designs function on sustainable resident energies. Sustainable designs last, they are flexible, they are loved and cherished, they endure, they function when they are tethered to non-renewables and also when the non-renewables are unavailable. They can function in a blackout, or a drought, or natural disaster or on a beautiful day without any input from non-renewables. The designed connection to the place affords the ability to function without non-renewables. Sustainable architecture and design add to quality of the environment, to clean air, to water, to renewing and protecting life—all by designing the connections to what is there. The place is better because of sustainable design.

Green design is an element of sustainable design. Green buildings and communities that integrate the local climate and building resources, create healthy interior spaces with natural light, and complete recycling and reuse of materials are critical to the development of a sustainable future. Green buildings that efficiently use grid-based (non-renewable) energy slow the energy and pollution crisis, but if the energy sources powering these buildings are unsustainable, the design is not sustainable.

Sustainable design differs from green design in that it is additive and inclusive—it includes continuing, surviving, thriving, and adapting. Green design incorporates ecologically sensitive materials and creates healthy buildings and processes that do not negatively affect the environment before, during, or after manufacture, construction, and deconstruction. Green design incorporates efficient mechanical systems and high-performance technologies but still functions primarily through the use of fossil fuels. Sustainable design integrates the principles of green design and goes further to become a passive and active structure that is designed to maximize the use of a site’s natural renewable resources. When buildings are conceived as organisms instead of objects, they become part of the ecological neighborhood, and, since they operate off existing site and regional renewable energies, they are sustainable.

Sustainable design improves the quality of life while eliminating the need for nonrenewable energy. When a design solution incorporates sustainable energies to power that design’s function, that “work” is done for free. Free work is what natural systems provide; it powers all ecology. Human ecology, though similar, is critically different. Although largely powered by sustainable processes that provide essential needs, human settlements rely on fossil fuel for food, comfort, transportation, air, water, and security. Designs powered by free sustainable energies require no fossil fuel and are capable of providing a healthier level of comfort and a higher quality of life. In achieving this connection with local free energies, sustainable design reduces or eliminates the daily consumption of non-renewables, reduces project costs and maintenance costs and requirements, increases user approval and user productivity, and reduces the total embodied project energy. Sustainable design is green design powered by sustainable energies—functioning unplugged.

Where to start
If the imperative is to be sustainable, the design program for buildings and communities is simple. The projects should meet the following criteria.

• Be developed within existing urban boundaries and within walking distance to transit options. New projects would preferably be built on a cleaned-up brownfield.
• Use green energy and be unplugged from non-renewables.
• Be fully useful for intended function in a natural disaster, a blackout, or a drought.
• Be made of materials that have a long and useful life—longer than its growth cycle—and be anchored for deconstruction. (Every design should be a storehouse of materials for another project.)
• Use no more water than what falls on the site.
• Connect impacts and wastes of the building to useful cycles on the site and in the environment around it. Be part of the cycle.
• Be compelling, rewarding, and desirable.

The following questions should be asked of design to gauge a project’s sustainability.

• Is the project accessible without fossil fuel?
• Did the project improve the neighborhood?
• If the climate outside is comfortable, does the design take advantage of this free sustainable comfort?
• If there is sufficient daylight, do the lights remain on? Do they have to?
• Does the storm water flow into an engineered underground system, or does it stay on the site for future needs while improving the natural system micro-climate and pedestrian experience? Is irrigation done with pumped chlorinated-potable water?
• Are the toilets useable when the power is off?
• Is there sufficient natural ventilation?
• Is comfort personally controlled?

There are limits to all resources. Technological solutions often cause problems greater than those they were intended to solve, requiring additional cleanup, storage of toxic materials, and additional taxes to pay for such services.

To achieve an interactive network of humanity and nature—a landscape that has a place for both the needs of humans and the functions of nature—planning and design must reorient themselves from using more to the view that there are limits. It then becomes the combined mission of science, planning, and design to discover these limits and work within them; to put form to a common vision and develop incremental steps and strategies on how to get from here to there.

Copyright 2007 by John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission.