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(Wiley, 2007)
Review by Marilyn Miller Farmer, AIA, LEED AP
 This book
makes a convincing case for the need for a paradigm shift in the
human species’ overall design approach, and provides
substantial examples of how this can be done. It points out that
architects and planners are best equipped for the challenge. David
Orr, in the foreword to Sustainable Design, Ecology,
Architecture and Planning, sums up the problem: “Harvard
biologist Edward O. Wilson describes the twenty-first century as a
“bottleneck” in which the forces of rapid climate change,
species extinction, and population growth converge. Unless managed
with unusual skill and wisdom and graced with considerable luck,
the future of Homo sapiens could well be “nasty, brutish, and
short,” as Thomas Hobbes put it in the 17th century.”
Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees believes that our chances of
making it to the year 2100 are no better than 50/50. Scientist
James Lovelock is even more pessimistic. Donald Watson, in his
foreword, concurs, suggesting an ecologic model and metaphor is
required to replace our current economic model. Williams provides
insights to such an ecologic model in this book.
Sustainable Design, Ecology, Architecture and Planning is
organized in two parts, the first of which offers an overview of a
new design paradigm using the ecological model and focusing on
connections across multiple scales and multiple disciplines of
knowledge. Each chapter focuses on sustainable design at different
scales—region, community, and building. The author’s
expertise spans the various scales but he is most passionate and
persuasive about the regional scale because this is clearly where
the most impact lies for sustainable design and where it has been
most lacking in modern times. It becomes clear how these scales
overlap and intersect and why sustainable design must continually
interface with the next larger and next smaller scalesto be
sustainable..
Included in part one is a differentiation between green design and
sustainable design and why we must focus on the latter. This is
where I, as an architect and planner, began to gasp at the task.
Williams is suggesting something that may seem incomprehensible or
at least unlikely: that we must unplug and live on locally
available resources—nothing more and nothing less. He is
asking us as humans and as members of the design profession, to
assume the daunting task of re-educating ourselves, adding entire
disciplines of knowledge to the already daunting repertoire
required for current decision-making processes. The new ecological
model requires systems thinking across all disciplines, including
vast knowledge about specific regional ecologies, bioclimatic
conditions, carrying capacity, growth patterns, economic
structures, and governmental policy. There are numerous and
detailed examples in the book that illustrate this process of
interdisciplinary thinking. The good news is that we don’t
have to do it alone, and in fact cannot. We do need to rethink our
current way of doing business moving from a competitive economic
model, to a collaborative ecologic model with a considerably
broader education and knowledge base from which create the critical
connections across the different scales and across
disciplines.
Williams describes a new paradigm of holistic, multiple-scale
systems knowledge and collaborative thinking that will be required
to achieve the new ecologic designs necessary to address and solve
our current crisis. “We must become literate about our home.
Once we design within our local resources, then sustainable
designs, connected to and reflecting the natural place which they
are apart will evolve.” A complete overhaul of human
education, and in particular design education that is capable of
solving the global issues we face today will be required. The new
educational model requires knowledge of ecological principals,
earth sciences and physics to address the multi-dimensional issues
and problems at hand on personal and professional levels.
Although part two of Sustainable Design, Ecology, Architecture
and Planning documenting 10 years of the AIA Top Ten Green
Project Awards is a nice compilation of the AIA’s contribution
to the sustainable design efforts, that information is much more
detailed and readily accessible on via the Internet. A more
interesting and pertinent dialogue for this book would have been a
discussion about the evolution of the Top Ten
selected projects over the years, hopefully becoming more
sustainable than green, and perhaps a vision of the future of the
Top Ten Green Project Award entries that actually achieve
sustainable design across all scales.
The greatest impact of this book is the unequivocal declaration
that we must become unplugged—not just from all unsustainable
energy sources but also from other resources that we currently are
using faster than are naturally being replenished, most notably
water, upon which all development (indeed, all life) depends. This
is a tall order, one design professionals are well suited to
address. Williams has laid out the challenge providing guidelines,
insights, and examples of an ecological model at each scale. How we
define the problem and understand our responsibility to solve it
will dramatically impact the design process and the solution.
Williams’s book illustrates with concrete examples at each
scale that by changing the initial questions posed at the beginning
of a design process, we can greatly affect the outcome with the
goal of reducing our carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2010 and
becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
Marilyn Miller Farmer, AIA, LEED AP, is principal of Habitat
Studios and director of Green Building Pages, a sustainable
building materials web resource guide.
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