Sustainable Green Building is here

Real Estate Weekly, July 10, 1996 by Lois Weiss

"Here is an opportunity to do something smart and beneficial, and it will take coordinated effort to do it and a coming together of people who are diametrically opposed on this issue," she said after criticizing the obstructionists.

One burden, said Joseph Rose, the City's Planning Commissioner, is the city's own bureaucracy, which he is trying to stream-line.

An interagency construction rule reform task force is at work, and the city has just won a Federal grant to clean up industrial brown fields.

James Wines, president and creative director of SITE Environmental Designs, a non-profit city group that offers development design services, showed slides of his Spanish project that included the leafy columns.

Created for a world exposition in Madrid by that city's government, the long and low structure was meant for people to not know when they are inside or outside of the glass-walled building. A small stream flows next to the gentle curves of the structure, while flowers and ivy fall over from rooftop gardens. Inside, there are waterfalls and natural places for people to sit and mingle.

"This is an ecological design revolution that is as fundamental as the first design revolution," he said. "This is design that brings people back to their senses and allows us to reclaim our destinies."

He said people need to think about buildings as organisms rather than trying to make them merely more efficient machines.

While developers consider a sustainable development to be "one that is 100 percent occupied," environmentalists believe the tenants will soon clamor for green buildings and help keep them sustained.