Green Buildings/Green Architecture

2880 Words6 Pages

Introduction A green building (also referred to as sustainable building or green construction) is a structure that employs an approach that is responsible for the environment besides being efficient in regard to resources all through its life cycle: This is from selecting the site to designing it, constructing, operating, maintaining, renovating and demolishing it. To achieve this, the client, the engineers, the architects and the entire design team closely cooperate at all stages of a project (Yan and Paliniotis, 2006). Practicing Green Building complements and expands the conventional building design areas of comfort, durability, utility and economy. Despite the fact that novel technologies are continuously under development to complement existing practices in coming up with greener buildings, the universal intent is that such structures are designed to diminish the general effect on the built environment on health of the humans in addition to the natural environment via: Diminishing environmental degradation, pollution and waste, improving productivity of the employee and guarding occupant health, efficient usage of water, energy, in addition to other resources. A natural building has the same concept to a green building but rather on a smaller scale and leans towards using natural materials that are obtainable locally. Green architecture and sustainable design are closely related topics. Sustainability can be described as fulfilling the needs of current generations devoid of compromising the capacity of generations to come meeting their needs. Leeds (The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) This is a Green Building Rating System that accelerates and encourages worldwide adoption of green buildings in addition to... ... middle of paper ... ...re as studies have also indicated that it is worth the effort in the long term. Works Cited Greer, D. (2004, September-October). Green builders get big help from deconstruction. In Business, 26(5), 20. Retrieved from http://www.jgpress.com/inbusiness/archives/_free/000648.html Kats, G., Alevantis, L., Berman A., Perlman J., & Mills, E. (2003, October). The Costs and Financial Benefits of Green Buildings: A Report to California’s Sustainable Building Task Force. Retrieved from http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/News/News477.pdf Simpson, J.R. (2002, November). Energy and Buildings, Improved Estimates of tree-shade effects on residential energy use. ScienceDirect, 34(10), 1067–1076. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778802000282 Yan, J. & Plainiotis, S. (2006): Design for Sustainability. Beijing, China: Architecture and Building Press.

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