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Dean Malecha, Thom Mayne, Dick Jackson on Sustainable Design
Tuesday night on NC State’s campus, Rose and 3 other heavy hitters gathered to deliver a panel on sustainable architecture. The conversation was engrossing, the crowd was ecstatic and politically charged and Rose was every bit the brilliant journalist, weaving three disparate and impassioned points of view into the future of what architecture can do for this world.
Mayne offered the reconciliation of design with green practice through smart aesthetics with green fundamentals built in. He underscored that economic incentives where important to get wide spread adoption of best practices, and cited the irrelevance and narrow focus of LEED standards, such as points for bike racks but no points for good bike paths. Mayne talked of architectural performance, where a building is judged by the way it serves its users health as well as the health of the environment. He spoke of the ‘amortization of architecture’ where buildings are built with permanence in mind rather than the 15- 20 year cycle that buildings are constructed on in the US. All of the panelists agreed that American development patterns contribute significantly to energy and material waste and that the short life cycle of American buildings means that they are aren’t built with the same kind of consideration for placement, quality and social interaction that can be seen in the urban constructions in Europe. Europe’s sensitivity to these ideals was cited throughout the night, particularly in regards to energy use; a European uses about half the energy of an American.
Dean Marvin Malecha was composed and the least animated of the three, offering the holistic design perspective that the College of Design works so hard to imbue into its students. Rose questioned if sustainability was an after thought and Malecha countered that the exercise of design was one where the designer worked to pull disparate information sources together to present something cohesive. Malecha closed talking about practical things that every individual can do to decrease the impact of their life- things like living close to your work, building and landscaping in ways that are sensitive to the orientation of the sun.
Dr Dick Jackson was adamant about the human side of sustainability. Jackson began by pointing out the 25 pound increase in average American’s weight in the last 25 years. Citing buildings that celebrate their stair system rather than hiding them, to encourage people to locomote on their on. Jackson talked about holistic education that informs students about the greater impact of humans on earth. He went on to say that every child in the US should have the opportunity to walk or ride their bike to school. That those Schools should be “temples of learning” built in the permanent and significant fashion “like they were in the twenties.“ Local schools that are not the temporary style of the trailers that fill so many of our schools properties. Jackson went on to talk about how children learn better in daylight and that schools should be built to take advantage of natural light.
If any conclusion can be drawn from the night, it rested somewhere in bringing more sensitivity to development. The panelists, together, presented a picture of potential for the US, one where we take the time and attention to detail to craft structures based on solving 21st Century problems.
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