Building Better
Trail Building: Habitat Destruction by a Different Name
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mike Vandeman
Scientists are generally honest, in what they say – but not in what they choose to study. Despite a diligent search in one of the world's best libraries (the University of California, Berkeley), I wasn't able to find a single book or article on the harm done by trail building. I notice that whenever I see a picture of a trail, I think "Oh, a trail – so what?" It takes an effort of will to think about the wildlife habitat that was destroyed in order to build the trail. And the habitat destruction isn't restricted to the trail bed. As Ed Grumbine pointed out in Ghost Bears, a grizzly can hear a human from a mile away, and smell one from five miles away. And grizzlies are probably not unique in that. In other words, animals within five miles of a trail are inhibited from full use of their habitat. This is a form of habitat destruction! If there were no trails, we would be confronted by our own destructiveness every time we entered a park. It is only because the habitat has already been destroyed for us, that we can pretend that we are doing no harm. That leaves only one option compatible with wildlife conservation: minimizing the construction, extent, and use of trails.
Healthy and Sustainable: Bridging the Gap in the Current Sustainable Building Design Practice
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Osama E. Mansour
A healthy building protects occupants from unhealthy environment, promotes health and wellbeing by design, and sustains its ability of playing this role by having smart operation and continuous maintenance over its lifetime. Sustainable buildings save energy, water, and natural resources; and mitigate the burden on the environment while providing occupants with better indoor air quality. Sustainable building design practices claim that sustainable buildings are healthy or at least healthier than conventional buildings. However, the term healthy building is still blurry when it is associated with sustainable building design. When we look at LEED and WELL as predominant rating systems that promote sustainability and health in buildings, one can easily recognize that the criteria of designing a healthy and sustainable building are still not fully aligned, one also asks; should sustainable building follow the full criteria of a healthy building? How can a sustainable building accommodate such criteria under the framework of sustainability? In this study, the author analyzes the criteria of designing a healthy and sustainable building. The purpose is to bridge the gap by establishing a theoretical framework to accommodate the health parameters in sustainable building design. The analysis introduces a novel insight on enhancing the quality of sustainable buildings by examining the possibility of integrating the full criteria of a healthy environment in sustainable building design practices.
Making It Last: Design, Repair, and Sustainability
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rudi Meyer
Despite their importance for sustainable design strategies, repair, its concomitant bricolage, and maintenance have hardly figured in academic design discourse until recently, nor indeed, in histories of technology. The emphasis in these, overwhelmingly, has been on innovation and technological solutions that are deemed to promise ways to overcome the consequences of the over-consumption of ever more limited resources. However, some designers are once again turning to repair, reuse, and repurposing in their approaches. There are calls to “design for repair”, renewed efforts to reuse or recycle both materials and design objects, and, in a move that recalls the adhocism of the 1960s, experiments in repurposing design artifacts, in and of themselves, or as part of a new constellation of objects, with a new function or purpose, as was briefly done, in the 1970s in the wake of the 1972 publication of The Limits of Growth by the Club of Rome, viz the works of the Des-in Gruppe, e.g. the “tire sofa.” Design literature has, in a limited way, taken up repair, however, often it is subsumed in other discussions, e.g. examinations of Levi-Strauss’s ideas concerning bricolage; considerations of “making do”, bodging; ideas of “good enough” (Herbert Simon’s “satisficing”), and, as above, Jencks’ and Silver’s ad hoc design, rather than addressed directly. Repair is integral to the life of a design object, prolonging its life is one key to sustainable design, and in-depth discussions translated into practice promise to be fruitful for at least in some measure addressing issues of sustainability.
