So you are starting to build a house while keeping the same principle of being an environmentalist.
Today, speedy industrialization is doing damage to our environment at an accelerated rate. It’s getting worse over time that it’s getting close to irreversible damage. And you want to do your part in your humble way – to participate in saving the world by doing little things that can have great implications for humanity.
Environment and technology trade-off
We’re all familiar that technology often comes with a detrimental trade-off. While it makes our life more convenient and easier at the moment, it does something to the environment that will only arise in the future – to be specific, environmental hazards.
While it makes the way we do things advance, it often comes at the expense of the environment. Building infrastructures is one of these scenarios.
Technology can be used for good too.
Thankfully, technology is now being used as our ally and as an advocate to and protector of the environment. Green architecture is emerging to be an alternative method to create infrastructures that are advanced and on par with today’s standards that are also pro-environment.
If this is the first time that you’ve heard about it, there’s no reason to fret or be anxious. My main goal here is to introduce or re-introduce to you why this is so great. It can help us and the future generation to a sustainable living.
Green architecture defined
Green architecture, as we have briefly touched on earlier, is a way to build and maintain buildings. This is a collective term to represent efforts in architecture that minimize the negative impacts of building infrastructures. It just doesn’t refer to the processes and materials that are not harmful to the environment; it also advocates that there can be a balance between the best technology that we have now and what the environment will be like in the future.
It entails the conservation of natural resources while making our living and buildings more sustainable.
In this perspective, the environment holds equal weight to the quality and advancement of the building.
The traditional architecture
Architecture in the past has contributed to a huge amount of physical and energy waste, causing some of the environmental problems that we are dealing with today, such as global warming.
Keynotes
So you end up having an excellent idea about Green Architecture, here are further keynotes:
Green architecture focuses on the designs and practices that will reuse materials that are already available, whichever form they come in. The infrastructure is suggested to be incorporated by green landscapes such as trees around and gardens. It also doesn’t simply end in the physical aspect. It will also include practices for the participants to care for nature. In a household, for example, the household can practice no-plastic use.
Because water is also part of our natural resources that can come to a point – later on – in getting depleted, it’s also among the things that Green Architecture will try to reuse in the hopes for sustainability ad clean living.
It promotes alternatives
Among other things that it promotes would the use or applications of alternative energy. It can come in the form of solar panel installations to power up the appliances in the house.
Future-proof
Green Architecture isn’t just limited to materials and resources. It also tries to look at the impact of the infrastructure in the long run.
It will not just be about conservation but also sustainability. The building will be engineered to make sure that it doesn’t negatively contribute to pollution. New advancements in technology will be applied to have these infrastructures be tools to counter the worsening of pollution.
Much more important than how the natural resources are utilized that do not harm the environment is instilling the right attitude and mindset to the people who will use the building – say its employees – to be part of that green advocacy and help them realize that a good environment and cutting-edge technology can co-exist at an equal rate of progress, that one can advance without being detrimental to the other.
Green architecture isn’t limited to the process but also to the practices that will be carried out later on.