Green Building Design and Delivery

Green Building Design and Delivery is a sustainable construction term used to address the ecological, social and economic influences of a building in its environment.

Green building refers to the quality and characteristics of a building that are used to create a sustainable construction, and that high performance building construction is a holistic approach to ensuring that the building’s elements achieve optimum environmental benefits while mutually creating a system substantially better than the standard practice.

The sustainable construction movement is so important. Not only does it provide an ethical response, it provides a practical response to maintaining our environment. During the life cycle of a building, sustainable constriction is more financially

conservative. Last but not least, it serves to provide better quality for our total well being.

20 years old, the Sustainable Building Technical Manual created modern guidelines for green building. The premise of its existence appears to remain the same, as it provides formulas for measuring a building's water usage, water savings, or utility usage and cost savings. The manual has an interesting approach to noise as well, as it talks about Speech Privacy Potential Factor (SPP), which attempts to quantify the privacy given to a space.

The United States Green Building Council (USGBC) is a plethora of engineers, architects, builders and environmentally conscious people that are attempting to create a sustainable surrounding that will provide ecological and social longevity. According to the USGBC website, In 1993, Rick Fedrizzi, David Gottfried and Mike Italiano developed USGBC with a mission to promote sustainability in the building and construction industry.

The Architectural 2030 challenge is an attempt to eradicate the use of fossil fuel by the year 2030. It is lead by a non profit, independent organization that recognizes the effects that buildings have on the use of fossil fuel. In their efforts, the goal is to convince designers and law makers to set of fossil fuel minimum guidelines for new building construction, use renewable energy and ultimately be a carbon neutral society by 2030.

A checklist was developed from the Environmentally Responsible Design & Construction Group, which serves to implement sustainability for the built environment through five major categories, Design, Land Use and Site Issues, Materials, Equipment, and Business Practices. It suggest designs should be made with smaller footprints, land selected should be closer to municipalities to decrease automobile usage, materials used should not release pollutant gases, equipment should be user efficient and builders should minimize job site waste.

Green building design, I think, is a feeling. It is using your sense of touch, smell, sound and sight to control your building environment. While the world may not realize it now, it is becoming incredibly apparent that it is necessary to consider such alternatives. As land space becomes less frequent, green spaces have decreased and the natural well being of individuals have diminished to a lesser quality of life. Certainly one can not think that the longevity of our ecosystems can be maintained through our manufactured , industrial approach. Green building will soon become a norm, perhaps soon we will have no other choice.

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