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Sustainable design and planning is one factor of an international need for addressing the issues, old and new, of the environmental impact we have on the Earth. The benefits of green design and smart growth extend from the Rainforests in Brazil to the homeless man
sleeping on the train from Paris to Versailles. Sprawl, a phenomenon of cities expanding without limits in places like Los Angeles and Atlanta, is destroying the areas surrounding cities across the world from lack of mass transit and production of environmentally
harmful gases. According to the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), “buildings in the United States use one third of our total energy, two-thirds of our electricity, one-eighth of our water, and transform land that provides valuable ecological services.” While sustainability is a concept that must be embraced by every facet of our world, the rising acknowledgement and acceptance of sustainability in architecture and urban design is an optimistic step in the right direction.
In the year 2000, the USGBC created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, which is a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings. Since its conception in 2000, the LEED standard has consistently gained popularity across the United States. Many architecture firms have become members of the USGBC and thousands of individual architects and other professionals are becoming LEED Accredited Professionals. This momentum, however, has not yet found its way into the education process through which Americans become architects.
The amount of energy we consume, especially in the United States, is astronomical and growing. The wealth we possess and waste on environmentally harmful buildings has a globally negative impact. One way American architects and planners are hoping to decrease the current stress on the environment is to become LEED certified to design green buildings and spaces. Many other countries, by contrast, incorporate sustainable design into their architecture by common practice rather than for specific titles and certification. Their students are given the opportunity to incorporate green design from the first days of their studies and are forced to use that knowledge through restrictions placed on them by the government and its building codes. American architecture students, on the other hand, are rigorously challenged on the ideas of their design rather than the practical applications to make it happen. Such lessons in practical application
are ideally learned during another important part of the current education process: internships.
My contention is that every graduate of architecture school should be a LEED Accredited Professional or its equivalent, and an integral part of that experience would be to apply as much of that knowledge as possible while working as an intern. Every architect should
be equipped with the knowledge that will allow the practice of more environmentally friendly designs; the process of obtaining that knowledge should absolutely begin in architecture school, and be reinforced through internships that serve as a bridge from the
academic career to a professional career.