Tomorrow's Project by HunterDouglas Contract
Tomorrow's Project is a discussion platform for prominent architects and designers to voice their predictions on the future of design. Every other week, we speak to design leaders who are developing ideas for smarter ways to live and work that challenge the norms in their sectors: healthcare, education, corporate, retail, and hospitality design.
Sam

Question: designLAB looks at the intersection of art and science. Tell me how this relates to sustainable design?

Sam: designLAB approaches sustainability from a low-tech, common sense approach. This means utilizing strategies like sitting rainwater filtration, natural daylighting, and local/renewable materials. By using basic, intuitive approaches to create real environmental benefit, we are able to take advantage of the best of both the subjective, artistic elements and the technical, scientific aspects of design.

Question: Tell us about some projects that you have completed that involved sustainable thinking.

Sam: The IFAW headquarters in Yarmouthport, MA is our most noteworthy, which transformed a brownfield site along Route 6 into a new headquarters with restored natural habitat. We're also in the process of completing a LEED-silver addition to the observatory at Wellesley College and a geothermally conditioned arts center at the University of Maine in Farmington. All of these projects took advantage of our balanced approach to sustainability to produce significant environmental achievement at modest cost.

Question: Are there particular practices that that you consider the norm when creating a green environment (for example, daylighting, sourcing sustainable products, etc.)? How are you going above and beyond?

Sam: Creating a green environment at all has become the norm, so yes, all of those practices are incorporated into our projects whether they are expressly identified as "green" environments or not.

We really focus on passive, low-tech strategies. Because of that, I would say we aren't really doing anything that is that far ahead of the curve (at least technologically). For us, it really all starts with the site: siting the building, its interaction with the landscape, daylighting, connection between inside and out, etc. I'm not sure that this approach is necessarily the norm (there are plenty of buildings that use the site as an afterthought, like some sort of bad ornamentation), but I wouldn't say that it is necessarily innovative in the way the people get excited about new technology and gadgets. It's good practice, but it's not rocket science.

Question: Describe your vision for the future of green design in two to three years.

Sam: In an effort to stay ahead of the "mainstream," green rating systems will become more and more complex, eventually overwhelming their usefulness and causing their own obsolescence.

The systems were developed to give people a simple way to understand green building. As the general public becomes more informed, they begin to understand the complex issues at play and understand that "greenness" it is not as simple as silver, gold, and platinum. LEED recognizes this too, and is trying to make the system more complex to cover different types of situations differently (homes, renovations, etc.) and to continuously raise the threshold for recognition. Unfortunately, this added complexity means that LEED no longer serves as a simple (albeit oversimplified) tool to explain green building to the uninitiated. People, in essence, have to become knowledgeable about green building, just to make sense of the LEED system, and once they are more knowledgeable, they have less need for it. In that way it becomes obsolete.

We are seeing evidence of this as more and more institutions and agencies develop their own standards for green building. They are often based on LEED, but they don't feel the need to get the plaque on the wall, and they feel comfortable enough with their own knowledge to make their own assessment of how "green" a project really is.

Question: Describe your vision for the future of green design in five or more years.

Sam: This is well beyond five years, but we need to acknowledge that sustainability (in the truest sense of the word) is the balance between resources consumed, and the number of people consuming them. Therefore, even though we are working hard to gradually decrease the amount of resources consumed per person, we're in denial about the fact that population growth is far outpacing our reduction in consumption. At a certain point, we're going to have to reconcile that.

Question: Tell us something unusual about yourself.

Sam: I have ridden my bicycle from Seattle to Boston.

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