Sustainable design: ecology, architecture, and planning

325 Pages·2007·20.01 MB·English

by  Daniel Edward Williams

Sustainable
Design
ECOLOGY,
ARCHITECTURE,
AND PLANNING
Daniel E. Williams, FAIA
Forewords by David W. Orr and
Donald Watson, FAIA
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Williams, Daniel E.
Sustainable design: ecology, architecture, and planning / Daniel E. Williams.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-471-70953-4 (cloth)
1. Sustainable architecture. I. Title.
NA2542.36.W548 2007
720’.47—dc22 2006102173
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
WILEYBICENTENNIALLOGODESIGN:RICHARDJ.PACIFICO
p r e f a c e
La aritmetica non e opinione
—arithmetic is not an opinion.
The media has saturated us with the measurements, the “arithmetic,” on how badly
we have been doing as stewards of our home: global warming, drought, sprawl,
asthma, and obesity are direct results of the way we have chosen to live. Implicated
in the equation of global climate change is the way we plan, design, and build on the
land. We have consumed precious natural landscape and depleted vegetation, soils,
and water, using up the resource base that has been our benefactor. To understand
what it might take designers to change this arithmetic, we must first understand
both the magnitude and complexity of what brought us to this point, and second,
we must learn ways to change our direction.
We do know that we must aggressively commit to designing sustainably—that
is, designing within the limits of our natural resources and natural laws. Some
choices are obvious and readily available to us. For example, we can develop and
employ renewable resources, find alternatives to scarce and diminishing resources,
and use less more efficiently and wisely. This does not mean accepting a lower qual-
ity of life but, instead, designing ways to achieve a higher quality of life for the pre-
sent and future by designing for an “unplugged” life that functions well without
exploitation of nonrenewable resources and increases renewable capacities for pre-
sent and future generations.
The scope of global issues that account for the arithmetic of climate and cul-
turalchange demands more of us. This book reviews the range of impacts that plan-
ning and design might undertake to redress global consequences. The collection
of design principles and practices set forth in this book illustrates the meaning of
deep sustainability, which is a commitment beyond the standard energy-efficiency
responses—demonstrating the best of what sustainable design can accomplish. This
book presents multiple scales and a comprehensive overview of sustainable-design
principles and practices, which are defined to set high but realizable goals, and these
principles and practices are illustrated by examples and case studies.
Sustainable design is an approach to design based on natural-systems function-
ing—what Ian McHarg aptly titled his book Design with Nature. The considerable
energy in nature can provide enough to power a sustainable future if we listen and
learn from it. Designs that use the available site energies are approaching sustain-
ability—these designs connect everything and are the ecological model.
xvi PREFACE
Climate change is everyone’s challenge, and architects must play an important role commensurate with
their impact.
PREFACE xvii
xviii PREFACE
Form follows energy.
The five chapters that follow address the challenges of sustainable design on a
range of physical scales. The ecological modelis discussed in Chapter 1. In this chap-
ter the case is made for learning from biological and ecological system functioning
and using ecological principles as a working model for sustainable design.
Chapter 2,Sustainable Design, reviews the challenges before us and argues for
a deeper look into and beyond green design, making the case that a critical element
in the change to sustainable living is in how we practice design and how we must, in
fact, design a sustainable future.
Chapters 3 through 5 are discussions and case-study examples on various scales
of design from regional to urban to architecture, based, in part, on an ecological
model.
The focus of Chapter 3, Regional Design, is on the regional scale. The impor-
tance of large-scale design and planning illustrates systems thinking and systems
solutions at the larger scale, suggesting that the design of regions is the most critical
to sustainability at other scales.
Urban design is discussed in Chapter 4, Sustainable Urban and Community
Design, showing that sustainability at the urban scale requires the design of livable
communities that are efficient, that possess a human scale, and that provide a high
quality of life for people with diverse incomes and cultural interests. The functional
PREFACE xix
foundation for these communities is rooted in ecological principles and the use and
cycling of sustainable local energies and renewable resources.
Chapter 5 is on architectural design and the building scale. The primary focus is
on buildings and structures, several of which function more like organisms than sta-
tic objects. Sustainably designed buildings are connected to their site and natural
place in order to capture, store, and distribute the natural site energies, the neigh-
borhood scale, and local climate conditions.
Part II, Chapter 6 presents the winning entries from the AIA/COTE (Committee
on the Environment) Top Ten Green Awards from its inception in 1997 through
2006. This section illustrates how quickly sustainable design has become part of
acceptable and mainstream design practices and how the lessons-learned metric for
performance has become increasingly better defined. These examples give credence
to thinking that sustainable designs are achievable, affordable, and compelling.
The sustainable-design challenge is about designing places that increase natural
and human capacity. These designs better fit the planet, the local climate, the site,
and the specific places we build and live and work in. Sustainable design is achiev-
able if we understand how ecological systems provide sustainable flows and stor-
ages of materials and energies from the place—to design and build an ecology—as
an organism might build and live in an ecosystem.
The first challenge is to understand ecology, to become literate about our home,
and to learn what sustainable forces and energies are available on the project site
and, then, design to make use of this knowledge—to design the connections. A pri-
mary goal is to unplug our designs and power them with only on-site energy. Once
the idea of using site energies is understood, the exciting process of sustainability
Because a magnifying glass
begins, through designs that are connected to and reflect the natural place and that
uses available sustainable
are loved and truly sustainable.
energy—sunlight—it serves
The comparative value of community and ecology is that they both revere con-
as a metaphorical sustain-
nections, relationships. The rethinking of design—not as an object but as an organ-
able match. It captures and
ism with flows and storages of energy and materials—is basic to sustainability.
Creating designs that facilitate connections—capturing, concentrating, and storing concentrates a sustainable
energy and materials—between the sustainable energies and materials of the site energy.
and region will create sustainability.
Architects and planners relish complex challenges, and designing sustainable
buildings and communities is just such a challenge. Sustainable Design: Ecology, and
Architecture, and Planningis intended to help architects, planners, landscape archi-
tects, engineers, and public officials—the professional agents of change—under-
stand the deep issues of sustainability and gain the knowledge necessary to meet the
sustainable-design challenge.
c o n t e n t s
Foreword by David W. Orr ix
Foreword by Donald Watson, FAIA xiii
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xxi
Introduction xxiii
Part 1
CHAPTER ONE: The Ecological Model 1
Ecology 2
Ecology as a Model 3
Waste Debts 5
The Value of Land 7
Paradigm Shift 8
Thinking as a System: Connectivity, Not Fragmentation 9
CHAPTER TWO: Sustainable Design 13
Where Do We Want to Go? 13
Design Matters 13
Why Architects? 14
Green Design versus Sustainable Design 15
Why Now? 16
Approaching Sustainability 17
Place-Based Energy and Resources 18
Principles for Designing Sustainably 18
Where to Start? 20
CHAPTER THREE: Regional Design 23
Evolving from Nonrenewables 25
Another Weak Link: The Power Grid 25
vi CONTENTS
The Regional Design 26
Water: A Common Denominator 27
Make No Small Plans 29
The Regional Design Process 30
Regional Case Studies 43
Cache Valley, Utah 43
Farmington, Minnesota: Building within the Community
Watershed 50
Smart Growth: Southeast Florida Coastal Communities 59
CHAPTER FOUR: Sustainable Urban and Community Design 69
A Matter of Place 70
Principles for Sustainable Communities 72
Regional Ecology and Biourbanism 72
Sustainable Urban and Community Case Studies 81
Lessons from Belle Glade: Can We Save the Everglades
and Sustain Agriculture? 81
Rio Nuevo Master Plan 84
Growing the Great River Park 91
CHAPTER FIVE: Architectural Design 103
The Site: Challenges and Opportunities 103
Site Design and Environmental Analysis 106
Sustainable Infrastructure 116
The Skin 116
Evolving a Sustainable Design Practice 120
Sustainable Design and Existing Buildings 121
Sustainable Interior Architecture 126
Part 2
CHAPTER SIX: The AIA/COTE Top Ten Green 129
Projects Program
1997 AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects 130
1998 AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects 140
1999 AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects 147
2000 AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects 159
2001 AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects 170
2002 AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects 182