May/June 2007

Newsletter of the Committee on the Environment (COTE)

Letter from the Chair

Nationwide resources and natural systems are increasingly being understood as issues of human rights, health, safety, and security. Recent Supreme Court decisions have begun a rebuke of the Bush Administration’s neglect of the climate change challenge. Mainstream commentators are urging leadership and action on this critical issue. For instance, Tom Friedman has sought to rebrand the movement; he’s looking for a more muscular, manly posture. Bill McKibben proposes that we need a new mental model that embraces a broad diversity of approaches to what quality of life and value really mean to our species now.
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AIA/COTE News

2007 Top Ten Recipients Selected
The AIA Committee on the Environment announced this year's recipients of the AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects Awards, which were celebrated at the AIA national convention in San Antonio. The awards celebrate designs that integrate architecture, technology, and natural systems.
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View winning projects
2007 Top Ten Green Projects Awards Jury
Current TV's feature on this year's recipients

Voices Heard at AIA Convention
Read on for a sampling of voices heard at the AIA 2007 National Convention

Proposals Due for 2008 AIA Convention
Let’s make sure the green wave doesn’t subside. Proposals for the AIA 2008 National Convention, to be held in Boston, are due July 1. The convention will be based on the theme, We the People, and will be a great chance to talk about the links between diversity and sustainability.

Features

Biomimicry and Green Building: How Would Nature Build a House?
by Jennifer Roberts

Biomimicry is a new methodology based on Janine Benyus’s highly acclaimed book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. This emerging science involves studying nature’s most successful designs and mimicking them to solve a wide range of human challenges. For instance, biomimicy can provide an exciting framework for anyone engaged in making homes more environmentally sustaining. Although it doesn't provide easy answers or shortcuts to going green, it is a beautiful tool for inspiring us to look deeper into what we need and want from our homes and lives, and how we can achieve those aims in a regenerative, life-sustaining way.
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Understanding Sun Angles
by Norbert M. Lechner

Solar responsive design is a cornerstone of sustainable design, and an understanding of sun angles is the foundation of solar responsive design. To achieve solar responsive design, it is best to assume the pre-Copernican system of the sun revolving around the earth. To understand sun angles, it is useful to use an imaginary skydome placed over a building. If we painted a spot on the skydome each hour where the sun passes through on its way to the center and then connected the spots with a line, we would get the sunpath for that day.
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Learning from the Work: A Look Back at an Early Top Ten Green Projects Award Recipient
by Donald Watson, FAIA

Among the earliest Top Ten Green Projects award recipients was one that I designed with George Buchanan Architects, the New Canaan Nature Center (1982). It was the earliest completed project and the longest project in operation. After 25 years, I am reengaged by New Canaan Nature Center to plan the structure’s renovation. Although much loved and used, the greenhouse is used differently than planned. Every person connected with the original building has moved on, a three-ring binder of operational instructions is lost, and many original design decisions and practices are all but forgotten. These conditions immediately bring to mind Alex Pike’s instruction to design simply, for long life, loose fit, and low impact. To these I now add my 25-year lessons learned: inscribe the operating instructions in some lasting way and provide for easy adaptation to multiple other uses.
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Guest Voice

Just Enough Is More
by Steven Coyle, AIA, CNU

What is just enough when applied to the planning of human settlement? How should we evaluate viable approaches to sustainability? In the search for sustainable growth, four criteria can be used: time tested (what has worked in the long run?), vernacular (what sustainable solutions can be used with efficiency and simplicity), pervasive (what remedies offer broad applicability?), and virtuous (what strategies limit potential negative consequences?).
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Book Reviews

Ecological Architecture: A Critical History
EcoDesign, A Manual for Ecological Design
The Humane Metropolis: People and Nature in the 21st Century City