Best Sustainable Architecture – part a

Best Sustainable Architecture – part a

Although it is sad to say this, it is so hard to find a new topic to talk about, hence I will go back to architecture that I am most familiar with. The upcoming few episodes will be all about the most recent and best sustainable design on earth now.

With the substantially increase concern on our environment, sustainable architecture needs to be more than just installing solar panel or green roof, it has to work as a whole integrated approach to sustainability and has special quality that is unique to others so as to pose as a exclamation mark in viewers’ heads.

The first quality that a building should have is the site awareness. Glenn Murcutt, who is the best Australian architect and won the Pritzker Architecture Prize for Australia, was my third year studio’s lecturer. I am glad that he is once my teacher. The first thing that he taught me is the importance of passion in architecture, and the second thing is the site awareness. Maybe this is his style of design, his claim is somehow reasonable. If a building that does not relate to the site, people will not feel resonances when they walk into the building. They won’t have a sense of what the site is about, what material is unique in the site, what view is valuable to have a look at, they are just in a piece of artwork, a box if worse. This isolated architecture can just stand without using the existing qualities found in the site, in other words, wasting all the good values. Therefore, a separated architecture can never be a sustainable architecture as it does not utilise local qualities and does not teach the future generation to use such quality.

References

The Top 10 Most Innovative Sustainable Buildings of 2014

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3029434/the-top-10-most-innovative-sustainable-buildings-of-2014