Recently, I began a new business idea with my girlfriend Barbara and friend Sanders. I won't go into the whole idea because we think its a good one and we want to do it before somebody else does. But it basically looks at the sustainability of buildings. How they are designed, how they are built, what materials they use and don't use, and how that's better for the people who use them. We've had some preliminary meetings and are putting together more solid plan for what we want to achieve. We have our pilot project, a local library that is on track to achieve a LEED gold certification. If you asked me two weeks ago, I would have had said that we had our product and we were ready to start moving forward with it.
Then, last week Barbara and I toured the library with the director and she pointed out all of the LEED elements as well as other innovative components of the library. Afterwards, we had a conference call where Barbara and I briefed Sanders on the tour and what we felt we should highlight. After talking for about 45 minutes, Sanders finally chimed in and said, "I thought that our focus was to highlight the sustainability of the facility and most of the things you guys are talking about are community involvement, fun design for the children's section and art." It then dawned on me that he was totally right, but at the same time he did not understand the whole picture. He hadn't had the opportunity to experience the space, so he had yet to be affected by the space.
When Barbara and I came away from the tour, we weren't excited about the nightly flushing of cool air into the ventilation system to reduce the need to cool the air or even localized task lighting that reduced the need for big overhead room lighting which requires more energy to light a given space. We came out talking about the mini dual flush toilet designed for children(one of the few times I called a toilet cute), the reading room that overlooked the Animas river surrounded by windows which let all the warm morning sun in and the very cool conveyor belt/sorting mechanism for books that come in from the night drop. We realized that our focus wasn't only to show how energy efficient a building could be, but how did the overall design, mechanics and structure improve the experiences of the people who visited the library, worked in the library, rode their bikes past the library.
An architect can design a structure that is built with the most sustainable, recycled goods, has the highest possible energy efficiency, produces no waste into the environment and so on, but if it isn't a comfortable space to exist in then you've lost all of your sustainability. The value of the space has been compromised by the intent to maximize its "sustainability". If nobody uses that space then it becomes a waste of the land it was built upon, a waste of energy to heat and light an empty space as well as all of the resources it took to build it. If the usage and enjoyment of a space is maximized then it increases the sustainable value, simply because it is being used.
The combination of the elements that we don't want to see, smell, hear, ingest along with functional design, creative lines, proportional spaces and comforting colors creates a space that we yearn to comeback to over and over again. Its those spaces that makes us feel mentally, physically and emotionally healthy. That combination creates sustainability. We are going to continue to build structures to live in, work in, recreate in, and govern in. That will never really change. What we can change though, is improving them with more intelligent design. And that smarter design improves our overall experience with them, thus not needing to tear them down and replace them with new structures. That's sustainability.
Our business idea has a new focus.
