I was sitting in Regents while I was reading David Orr's Architecture and Education earlier today, which is fitting, as it seems to manifest a lot of the same ideals that Orr writes about. Here's an excerpt from the St. Olaf website about Regents:
Regents Hall is a sustainable or “green” building that serves as a teaching tool and speaks to the integrity of a St. Olaf education. A green building has measurably lower operating costs, minimizes the impact on the environment and promotes whole health for its users. With features such as a green roof, reliance on passive solar lighting, and the minimization of chemical and biological waste, Regents Hall is not simply a model for responsible environmental stewardship but a daily working example of sustainability in practice.
Orr talks about the idea of an academic building being able to tell a story; to teach students as much as the professors inside them do; to contribute to the occupants' overall well-being. He goes on to explain the project he started at Oberlin College to build a sustainable building that implicitly teaches its inhabitants to be more sustainable, to "promote ecological competence and mindfulness, and to show our problems are solvable and that we are connected to the larger community of life." I feel like Regents does that, at least a little bit, by using recycled materials, a green roof that helps lower heating and cooling energy, its water conservation methods, having abundant natural light from all its large windows, and the list goes on. It's neat that a building can show us better ways to live sustainably just by its architectural design.
No comments:
Post a Comment