sustainable architecture

[ani_7harry]

Hi everyone.....

I am in my first year..... Can anyone please tell me about what exactly is sustainable architecture......?

[lekizz]

Buildings can be extremely damaging to the environment, when the building materials are extracted, made or refined, when the materials are carried to where they are reuqired, when the building is constructed, when it is repaired and redeveloped in the future, when it is powered (by electricity, oil etc.) and when it is demolished and disposed of.

Sustainable architecture tries to minimise its impact on the planet. That can be done by using local, simple materials that do not need to travel far, or by designing a building that can change and be re-used in the future, or by creating a building that uses natural, freely available sources of power, and by making sure the building materials can be re-used and recycled at the end of the buildings life.

It is a big subject! And getting more urgent because of 'global warming' and other worries.

[Surface to Air]

also use of natural ventilation, daylighting, public transit orientated developments, etc. you can earn points from LEED for so many things. Recycling old concrete as fill... the list goes on and on. it is a very good design practice.

[Ghazaleh]

I think lekizz and surface to air are absolutely right.
Sustainable architecture can also be posed in terms of budget and social and individual behaviours of users.
To creat buldings which response to budget matters and behaviour patterns.

[nisreen]

hey friends what all u say is quite true. but above all more important is social awareness about the subject and educating the society about it, which is the moat difficult task that architects have to preform. sustainable development is which meets the needs of the present without compramising the ability of future generation to meet there on needs.

[AP]

I will just say that global warming is a theory, albeit one with a lot of popular support. But there's no more proof for it than for global cooling; some scienists maintain we need to be designing for living through another ice age, not for warmer climates. And then there are those who say we need to increase CO2 output (i.e. increase our impact on the planet) to prevent the planet naturally entering another ice age.

I agree with Ghazaleh

Sustainable means being able to keep doing it, not necessarily minimising impact.

Economically sustainable building, for instance, means not creating "white elephant" buildings which cost more to run than they generate back - if you keep doing that then society eventually can't sustain any more buildings. (and arguably there is little point in creating buildings which are environmentally-sustainable if they are not also economically sustainable).

Social sustainability too; consider how islands can only support given populations. china is pushing the very limit on how much development it can socially and economically sustain, and in the past societies have collapsed through over-growth, easter island being the only one jumping to mind where they developed too much demand for resources by growing too big, ran out, collapsed.