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Green Building Council South Africa (GBCSA) will be reducing their physical office footprint from two regional offices into one, resulting in GBCSA operations being located in Cape Town. Green Building Council to reduce physical footprint. available energy into shelter design, resulting in standardized materials
built shelter.The oil embargo of 1974 brought a rapid, although somewhat temporary
after 1950 this trend reversed and the average size of a home began
In my new book, The Godfather of Green: An Eco-Spiritual Odyssey, I recount my experience as a pioneer in the green building movement, starting with co-founding the first chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, Cascadia, in 1998, and continuing through the founding of Greenbuild in 2001-2002, still the country’s largest green building conference and trade show. The field of building science developed to address
programs, green rating systems and sometimes even government incentive
such as rotten wood inside walls, mold, sick building syndrome and fogged
materials out-perform their replacements. While more and more very deep green
more energy efficient homes, although the size of the home continues to go
unit.Unlike the energy crisis of 1974, there is no defining moment for the beginning
end to the availability of cheap oil, and America responded by building
For the first third of the takeoff run—the slow roll—not much appears to be happenin. These products spur architectural styles
(For an entertaining look at this
During the next third, the plane is clearly It’s easy to think, this will never get off the ground . of green building. Standardized
She later reflected, “What impressed me was how much affection and respect people had for one another.”Sign up with your email address to receive notifications of new blog posts.You will now receive Reinventing Green Building updates and automated notifications whenever Jerry Yudelson publishes a new blog post. along with climate change, oil dependence, sick building syndrome, water
this trend to the point where few homes were built with local materials.Toward the end of this period, wood started to become a scarce (and hence more
Industrialization and cheap transportation fed
preventing any problems.In larger buildings, steel and concrete had
Castle" or "McMansion", a house dramatically larger than
developed by a small group of dedicated people, who were also launching the
This also produced a much greater interest in alternatives
Up until the industrial age,
programs in many areas now, but in spite of that, conventionally building
read Witold Rybczynski, "Home- A Short History of an Idea")The industrial revolution brought both manufactured products and readily
In some cases, these manufactured
only in larger cities, but a new concept called suburbia, which is organized
Taking part in this movement almost from the inception gave me a life-affirming way to return to my environmentalist roots from the 1970s.My wife Jessica went with me to many green building events and met many local leaders and practitioners. This also produced a much greater interest in alternatives approaches to housing, and in this period the solar power movement is born, which itself is the beginnings of the green building movement. transportation capable of moving both goods and people resulted not
As defined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Green building is the practice of creating structures and using processes that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building’s life-cycle from siting to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and deconstruction. already replace stone allowing builder to build things like skyscrapers that
natural building movement.At this point (2010) green building is on the radar like never before
effects on the solar power industry. Watching the green building movement grow in the late 1990s and early 2000s was like watching a plane take off. born, which itself is the beginnings of the green building movement.By the 1980s many of these early highly insulated homes developed problems,
a fact that lingers to this day. dual pane windows. these issues, which were mostly unintended consequences, by studying exactly
increased dramatically and migrated toward the cities. At the same time, average house
how building work. in only a short time energy returned to being as cheap as ever with devastating
expensive) resource, resulting in many new wood fiber composite
energy allow more people than ever to own homes. materials are later found to produce small amounts of toxic gases, houses of
increasing even though average family sizes continued to shrink.Houses of this era are, while much improved over their predecessors, consume energy at
"Typically, buildings are designed to meet building code requirements," the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has reminded us, "whereas green building design challenges designers to go beyond the codes to improve overall building performance and minimize life-cycle environmental impact and cost."