courtesy  :  britannica

green architecture

In the early 21st century the building of shelter (in all its forms) consumed more than half of the world’s resources—translating into 16 percent of the Earth’s freshwater resources, 30–40 percent of all energy supplies, and 50 percent by weight of all the raw materials withdrawn from Earth’s surface. Architecture was also responsible for 40–50 percent of waste deposits in landfills and 20–30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Many architects after the post-World War II building boom were content to erect emblematic civic and corporate icons that celebrated profligate consumption and omnivorous globalization. At the turn of the 21st century, however, a building’s environmental integrity—as seen in the way it was designed and how it operated—became an important factor in how it was evaluated.

Influential pioneers who supported a more integrative mission during the 1960s and early ’70s included the American architectural critic and social philosopher Lewis Mumford, the Scottish-born American landscape architect Ian McHarg, and the British scientist James Lovelock. They led the way in defining green design, and they contributed significantly to the popularization of environmental principles. For example, in 1973 Mumford proposed a straightforward environmental philosophy:

McHarg, who founded the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, laid the ground rules for green architecture in his seminal book Design with Nature (1969). Envisioning the role of human beings as stewards of the environment, he advocated an organizational strategy, called “cluster development,” that would concentrate living centres and leave as much natural environment as possible to flourish on its own terms. In this regard McHarg was a visionary who perceived Earth as a self-contained and dangerously threatened entity.

This “whole Earth” concept also became the basis of Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Named after the Greek Earth goddess, his hypothesis defined the entire planet as a single unified organism, continuously maintaining itself for survival. He described this organism as

During the 1970s the Norwegian environmental philosopher Arne Naess proposed a theory of “deep ecology” (or “ecosophy”), asserting that every living creature in nature is equally important to Earth’s precisely balanced system. Working in exact opposition to this philosophy, the politics and economics of that decade accelerated the development of green awareness. The lack of business regulation in the United States meant unlimited consumption of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the 1973 OPEC oil crisis brought the cost of energy into sharp focus and was a painful reminder of worldwide dependence on a very small number of petroleum-producing countries. This crisis, in turn, brought into relief the need for diversified sources of energy and spurred corporate and government investment in solar, wind, water, and geothermal sources of power.