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Perrin Pellegrin
The new building at the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus
is a living laboratory for sustainable building practices. The four-story
building reused 100 percent of the demolition waste and 92 percent of the
construction waste that, at most construction sites, would go to a landfill.
All building materials--from the concrete that contains 20 percent fly-ash
on the first two floors and 17 percent on the upper floors,
as well as carpets, rubber flooring, wallboard, tiles, furniture, and
insulation--have high recycled content.
Energy efficiencies are achieved by paying attention to the building's
unique location. The office wing, which faces the ocean, has no mechanical
air-conditioning; it relies on natural breezes from transoms and windows.
A white roofing material reflects the sun's heat. Up to 10 percent
of the building's power will soon be generated by a photovoltaic installation.
Inside, all materials are free of asbestos, formaldehyde, and CFCs. Toilets
use reclaimed water; urinals are waterless. Bren Hall got a high LEED rating
from the U.S. Green Building Council.
Offsite:
Bren School of Environmental Sciences and Management,
www.bren.ucsb.edu. |
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TEACHING GREEN
Contrary to widespread reports that sustainability is poorly understood
and erratically practiced in America's architecture and design schools,
there are some stellar programs at several universities, such as the Carnegie
Mellon School of Architecture. Vivian Loftness, who leads the department,
laid out the next steps toward greening design education.
Schools of architecture, interior design, and engineering should rewrite
their mission statements, she said, and then hire and tenure environmental
professionals as teachers. "The schools should adopt LEED for campus
facilities. Faculty and students must pursue campus and regional activism"
as well as national and international activities. "Perhaps most important
is the need to promote and fund multidisciplinary research at schools of
architecture, interior design, and engineering," Loftness said.
"We see Georgia Tech as a living laboratory," said engineering
professor Annie Pearce, who is part of a team that's developing a three-course
sustainability sequence as well as the campus task force on sustainability.
In the next five years the university will undertake a $650 million
construction project, including infill development, that they expect
to be LEED certified. The new campus itself will serve as a case study
for teaching green principles.
But there is no specialized degree in sustainable engineering at Georgia
Tech. "We wanted to integrate this subject seamlessly," Pearce
said. "It's like safety. It should just be there." She believes
that the best learning is from doing. To that end, Pearce runs building
workshops where students must assemble the sustainable building systems
they have designed.
THE SUSTAINABLE DESIGN STUDIO
A few years ago, when a team from the Rural Studio at Alabama's Auburn University
School of Architecture was invited to a sustainability conference, "We
found it quite amusing," professor Andrew Freear remembered. Known
as a free-spirited bunch, these architects were not concerned about labeling,
only performance. "We encourage our students to make sensible choices
about materials and what the architecture needs to do," he explained.
Perhaps what the studio imbues in them, more than anything, is accountability.
"They design and build these things--and if something goes wrong, they
have to deal with it," Freear added.
Samuel Mockbee, the Rural Studio's legendary founder and guiding light until
his death in December 2001, never bothered calling his or his students'
work "green," or "sustainable," or "eco."
He believed in architecture as a social art built on tolerance; respectful
of people's needs, aspirations, and dreams; understanding of community and
materials; and informed by common sense--all that's required to sustain
families, society, and the environment that gives them life. With D. K.
Ruth, Mockbee founded the Rural Studio in 1993, and proceeded to show that
there could be an evolutionary shift from the survival-of-the-fittest-star
system toward a more humane relationship-based architecture education.
The studio takes undergraduates from the Auburn campus for a semester or
more to rural Hale County. There they design and build a house, a church,
a community building--whatever is needed by the residents. Thus the students
learn to work in teams, build relationships with community members, and
utilize the most economical materials. Sometimes they beg or scrounge for
car windows, used tires, and other useful things that an affluent society
throws away and recycle the cast-offs to build beautiful shelters for those
who need them.
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