Sweet Orange

You might have heard of sustainable design or green building development, but what exactly that means might be vague to you. A general answer is the following: Sustainable design uses certain construction practices, construction and design products, and design principles to solve development problems. And it uses these practices, products and principles in a way that uses features of the natural environment as an advantage. In contrast, most builders currently use practices, products and design principles that attempt to overcome the natural environment. In addition, sustainable design uses existing material when possible and does not use toxic materials.

Here are some more details on these green building fundamentals:

Use the features of a building site to achieve a desired result. For example, when conventional building practices are used, the location of the sun is ignored when deciding on which direction to orient a building. Sustainable design practices use a different approach. When sustainable design practices are used, the building is situated in a way that takes advantage of the heating or cooling that the location of the sun can provide. Conventional building practices force the home or building owners to rely heavily on costly, high-energy-consumption, mechanical systems to heat or cool a building.

Another example of using the features of a building site to achieve a desired result is using materials from the site as much as possible. The Nueva Hillside Learning Complex, which built sun screens, benches, and decks from the Cypress trees that were cut down to clear the building site, illustrates this point.

View the building site as a system and link that system to other systems. Another way of saying this is close the loop. The output or waste from one system is used as the input to another system. Or the output from one part of a system is used as an input to another part of the same system. For example, waste water can be captured and then reused in other ways, such as watering landscapes.

Recycle as much as possible. This might include finding new uses for construction waste but, in some cases, could include finding new uses for existing buildings instead of tearing down these buildings.

When possible, share the same building or site among multiple organizations. Of course, this is geared toward commercial and school buildings rather than residential buildings.

That is it for the Reader’s Digest definition of sustainable design. Of course, much more detail is possible. But this will do for an introduction.