E
Nature vs
v . Neon
Can sustainable design save money
and the environment? By Phillip G. Bernstein
BUILDINGS ARE THE MOST VISIBLE cultural symbols we encounter
in our daily lives. Yet most people see them as static symbols, unchanging
structures within the familiar framework of a city or neighborhood.
But a new generation of architects, owners and developers understand that
buildings are more like living things than static assemblies of steel, wood,
glass or stone. Designers now acknowledge that a project built today will have
4 TIMES SQUARE, DESIGNED
BY FXFOWLE ARCHITECTS, PC,
is one of the world’s first
environmentally friendly
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profound impacts on people, the community
and the environment throughout the arc of its
existence — sometimes 100 years or more.
This new attitude, combined with changes
in design and construction technology, creates a new approach to architecture called
sustainable design. The essence of this ap-
DECEMBER 12, 2005
New York Times Magazine
(Tip-In for Autodesk Presentation)
proach is to integrate explicit
consideration of a building’s environmental impact and energy
usage over its entire lifespan.
A building has a profound
and unexpected effect on the
environment. For example, its
construction alone generates
a significant amount of waste
material — as much as four
pounds per square foot, or about 40% of non-industrial landfill.
After completion, the average building can cost as much as 10 times to run
as it did to erect. Some of that cost is maintenance, but a large component is
energy usage — delivering heating, lighting and air conditioning and operating elevators, phones and computers. In fact, buildings consume 36% of the
nation’s energy, and almost 70% of the electricity in the U.S. each year, with
huge resulting impacts on the environment.
Sustainable design seeks to reduce these effects and costs by examining
all aspects of a building’s design: choice of materials, fresh water consumption and internal air quality, just to name a few. A sustainable approach can
involve something as simple as the use of recycled materials, or aspects as
complex as solar and geothermal heating and cooling systems.
One of the keys that makes sustainable design possible is the advanced
nature of the technology used to design buildings.
Paper blueprints and physical models produce the same static view of a
building that most people share and provide no understanding of how a living structure will behave over time. Sustainable design under those circumstances is more a matter of professional intuition than the kind of analytical
precision needed to really understand how a building will operate once built.
Current technology, however, can create a digital model of a building that
incorporates information about its behavior as well as its physical structure.
This process, known as building information modeling, can be crucial for both
making major choices about a design and evaluating the myriad of small decisions that affect sustainability — both of which have significant effect on energy use, material waste and even air quality.
Adopting technology to create sustainable design is re-fabricating architecture. With a better understanding of the long-term impacts of a design, both
architects and developers can create new buildings that will be great not just
today, but for decades to come.
PH I L L I P G. B E R N S T E I N The author is a Fellow of the American
Institute of Architects who teaches at the Yale School of Architecture.