Approaching Sustainability

On the scale of the build­ing or how humans dwell, we find the scale archi­tec­ture, where tech­nol­ogy can be most blind­ing. Recently sus­tain­abil­ity employed in archi­tec­tural prac­tice has been a very sin­gu­lar venue via energy effi­ciency: a sci­ence of Btu’s—where design moves and choices are proved only by sta­tis­tics and green mate­r­ial attrib­utes that may have more sta­tis­ti­cal weight than sub­stan­tial effect, mean­ing the more effec­tive thing to do does not always look good to the econ­o­mist. In William McDo­nough and Michael Braungart’s (Cra­dle to Cra­dle authors) dif­fer­enc­ing between eco-effectiveness and eco-efficiency; they describe effi­ciency as being “less bad” and effec­tive­ness as a strat­egy that not just avoids envi­ron­ment harm but increases eco­log­i­cal health.1 Envi­ron­ments we cre­ate should mimic nature, as work­ing ecosys­tems. Steven Kellert in his book Build­ing for Life offers this cri­tique, “though admirable, McDo­nough and Braungart’s con­cept of eco­log­i­cal health needs to be extended to include a greater empha­sis on human expe­ri­ence, incor­po­rat­ing the recog­ni­tion of how much people’s phys­i­cal and men­tal well-being depends on their con­tact with nature.” 2 There­fore design­ing a human envi­ron­ment as a work­ing ecosys­tem is impor­tant, as well as design­ing an envi­ron­ment that brings peo­ple closer to nature.

1. William McDo­nough and Michael Braun­gart, Cra­dle to Cra­dle: Remak­ing the way we make things. (New York: North Point Press, 2002).

2.Steven R. Kellert, Build­ing for Life: Design­ing and Under­stand­ing the Human-Nature Con­nec­tion. (Wash­ing­ton, DC: Island Press, 2005).

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