What Does it Mean?
Sustainability to me is related to the choices we make in our everyday life on the usage of natural resources that would not have negative effects on our environment and would help preserve the natural resources for our future generations’ living.
Humans have taken natural resources for granted for many years. On a larger scale, most of our energy production depends on nonrenewable resources such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy. These resources cannot be replenished once they are exploited to reach their quantity limits.
Environmental impacts from the over-exploitation of these materials, such as climate change and severe pollutions, are harming the ecosystem. Even though we are starting to use more renewable sources to generate energy, but these renewable sources are only 12.6% of the US domestic fuel supply in 2021. These negative signs warn us that we need to accelerate our decision making and technology advancements on sustainability to ensure that our Earth can still be restored to its healthy state before it is too late.
On a smaller scale, sustainability can be done with very small and easy act, for example, by using your own bottle instead of buying drink in unusable plastic bottle, using reusable shopping bag instead of plastic bag, or turning off all the light in your house before you go out. These small acts can not only save resources, but also animals who are inevitably harmed by humans’ unthoughtful and negligent acts.
Sustainability is not an option. It should be a MUST.
Sustainability should be considered as one of the priorities on every aspect of our life. Especially on building designs, the total fuel cycle energy for the structural materials can be extremely high if the materials are not carefully selected in design; the people are using buildings for their everyday life, their habits of using the building with regards to energy consumption and the building’s performance efficiency on satisfying people’s needs are critical factors in determining whether the building designs have taken sustainability into consideration.
What Inspirational Examples Can We Learn From?
- Shanghai Tower, Shanghai, China
The Shanghai Tower in China is twisted in a way to effectively reduce the effects of wind load hitting on the building and is also optimized to reduce as many structural materials needed as possible for the building. The building also has a rainwater collection system that is working perfectly with the internal air conditioning system.
- Bullitt Centre, Seattle, USA
Solar panels cover the whole roof of Bullitt Centre in Seattle, which provide sufficient energy to sustain the building’s daily operations. This building uses heavy timber as its structural material, and it is designed to last 250 years.
- The Crystal, London, United Kingdom
The glazed windows in The Crystal are specially designed to control the effect of solar radiation on the building to minimize energy usage. The windows have different transparency levels and some with reflective coating to achieve this goal, which is impressive in both aesthetics and sustainability.
I would be interested in combining the sustainability concepts of the Bullitt Centre and The Crystal for my project.
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