Sustainable Design for Health, Productivity and the Environment

Sustainable design is a collective process whereby the built environment achieves new levels of ecological balance in new and retrofit construction, towards the long term viability and humanization of architecture.  Focusing on environmental context, sustainable design merges the natural, minimum resource conditioning solutions of the past (daylight, solar heat and natural ventilation) with the innovative technologies of the present, into an integrated “intelligent” system that supports individual control with expert negotiation for resource consciousness. Sustainable design rediscovers the social, environmental and technical values of pedestrian, mixed-use communities, fully using existing infrastructures, including “main streets” and small town planning principles, and recapturing indoor-outdoor relationships. Sustainable design avoids the further thinning out of land use, and the dislocated placement of buildings and functions caused by single use zoning.  Sustainable design introduces benign, non-polluting materials and assemblies with lower embodied and operating energy requirements, and higher durability and recyclability.  Finally, sustainable design offers architecture of long term value through ‘forgiving’ and modifiable building systems, through life-cycle instead of least-cost investments, and through timeless delight and craftsmanship .

Vivian Loftness, FAIA, LEEDAP, is an internationally renowned researcher, author and educator in environmental design and sustainability, the integration of advanced building systems, climate and regionalism in architecture, as well as design for health and productivity. Supported by a university-industry partnership, the Advanced Building Systems Integration Consortium, she is a key contributor to the development of the Intelligent Workplace – a living laboratory of commercial building innovations for performance, along with authoring a range of publications on international advances in the workplace.

She has served on eight National Academy of Science panels as well as being a member of the Academy’s Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, and given three Congressional testimonies on sustainable design. Her work has influenced national policy and building projects, including the Adaptable Workplace Lab at the U.S. General Services Administration and the Laboratory for Cognition at Electricity de France.

Vivian Loftness received the 2002 National Educator Honor Award from the American Institute of Architecture Students and a 2003 “Sacred Tree” Award from the US Green Building Council. Vivian Loftness has a Bachelors of Science and a Masters of Architecture from MIT, is on the National Boards of the USGBC and AIA Communities by Design.

 

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