Sustainable Built Environment, Introduction

Excerpt

Sustainable design is a collective process whereby the built environment achieves unprecedented levels of ecological balance through new and retrofit construction, toward the long-term viability and humanization of architecture. Focusing on environmental context, sustainable design merges the natural, minimum resource conditioning solutions of the past (daylight, solar heat, and natural ventilation) with the innovative technologies of the present, into an integrated “intelligent” system that supports individual control with expert negotiation for resource consciousness. Sustainable design rediscovers the social, environmental, and technical values of pedestrian, mixed-use communities, fully using the existing infrastructures, including “main streets” and small town planning principles, and recapturing indoor-outdoor relationships. Sustainable design avoids the further thinning out of land use, and the dislocated placement of buildings and functions caused by single use zoning. Sustainable design introduces benign, nonpolluting materials and assemblies with lower embodied and operating energy requirements, and higher durability and recyclability. Finally, sustainable design offers architecture of long-term value through “forgiving” and modifiable building systems, through life cycle instead of least-cost investments, and through timeless delight and craftsmanship. …