15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About
15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About
Incroyable! Where in the world does this hype come from?
And what's more, only a few people in the world seem to be asking sensible questions about it yet. And even then, the organisations that ask these questions such as the 'Greenwash Brigade' show their own biases when entering the 'buy local' debate. When they ask 'is a buy local economy really sustainable?' they adopt a xenophobic analysis that appears to assume that anything foreign is almost always bad and limits its reasonable compromise trade ideas to under or over 16okm distances within the USA. What chance remote places (New Zealand pop 4m or Samoa pop 214k) to produce anything but a few of the basics of life in such a non-trading future? The impression that is provided is the historic US isolationist 'I'm alright Jack' approach.
Very few people seem to be addressing the real issues: what are these buildings like to be in? (A couple of people who are: Usable Buildings and 'Performance in Practice' ). From time to time one hears rumours about buildings that have 'gone wrong' and are no longer being touted as 'low energy' / 'good passive design' / 'sustainable' / 'healthy'. What seems to happen, as I heard when I asked about a building I had photographed when on a visit to the USA recently - and about which I had blogged a year or so ago, is that the owners shut down all discussion. This just adds to the legends of sun umbrellas inside to combat solar glare and debates about whether the required performance analyses were done. Perhaps we would move beyond just ticking the appropriate in a LEED score system if we honestly reported mistakes and examined why they occurred? If assessing the performance of a building from its users point of view became mainstream... this type of press coverage would cease. Instead of passing on uncritically the PR of the designers, we would be reading carefully constructed assessments of the real performance 'meters' - the people who live in and occupy the buildings and their community of passers-by and other affected people.
Ref: 'It's way to easy being Green': "Installing a $395 bike rack is worth the same under the LEED checklist system as installing a $1.3 million environmentally sensitive heating system."
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1 comment:
That is double-speak gone overboard!!! Greenest buildings in the world?! Just *building* the majority of those is going to cause more environmental damage/degradation than a considerable number of other 'not-so-green' buildings! Much as I admire Norman Foster, closing down his company would have a far greater positive effect on the environment than building the two of his listed there!!
The comments about LEED rating are interesting - the BREEAM rating here in the UK is similar in it's problems. The other thing with BREEAM is that there are actually 2 ratings - a design rating and a finished building rating. It is almost always the former that gets publicity (without clarifying that it is a design rating)... and I have no idea how many clients actually pay to have the second assessment!!
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