Sustainable Building
Green Building, Green Construction Or Green Architecture
Sustainable building, or green construction as others call it, refers to erecting buildings that demonstrate some responsibility and concern for the local environment.
Thinking and acting green in this respect means that money is invested in construction materials that are eco-friendly, care is given to the choice of the construction site, and few resources are needed when renovation or demolition is required. Moreover, truly green construction projects will have in view the entire life cycle of a building.
Once the building is erected, there are other aspects of sustainable building development that need to be considered. They are:
- Does the building require few or many resources of energy, water or gas?
- Do the people living or working inside the building feel a positive or negative impact on their health?
- Does the building improve the local image or spoil it?
- Does it impact positively or negatively on the surrounding environment?
- Does it reduce or increase the rate of pollution through waste?
If all the questions above are answered with the first of each two options, it means you have got the ultimate sustainable building project on your desk and it surely is something that cities these days are in desperate need of.
Apart from design, which is what we call green architecture, there are numerous techniques and principles which, if applied correctly, will create or transform a building into an environmentally friendly construction. Most often, sustainable building means optimizing energy consumption and that involves alternative sources of energy such as sunlight captured and transformed into energy with the help of solar panels.
Yet the principles are many more and they deal with efficiency in terms of structure design, energy, water and materials, indoor quality of the environment, and reduction of waste and chemical substances that are the outcome of unfolding human activity inside buildings. Of course the ideal would be to manage to combine all of these principles. Reality, however, demonstrates that not all of these standards can be met within the same construction and there is still need to develop ideas in the field of sustainable building.
However, until the ‘ideal’ can be reached, governments seem to encourage the trend of transforming the already existing constructions into green ones by adding improvements to them. Their hope is that carbon emissions will be reduced and the environment protected from complete deterioration.
Fortunately, water consumption inside these buildings will decrease dramatically since city life is at risk of becoming dust dry if consumption continues at the current rate.
