Grimshaw Architects

On April 17th Quinn and I visited the Grimshaw Architects to see how they incorporate going green when going green.  After explaining how our school is focusing on sustainability they told us about their unique way of green design.  At Grimshaw they are not the protocol designers who settle for only good.  They base their designs on the climate around the building and find ways to use the climates energy year round.  Most buildings don’t go the lengths they do when designing a building.  They look for the building impact of humans, natural resources, water, air in the atmosphere, land and soil, community, cultural features, the transportation used to build it, the clean energy, minimizing energy loss, embodied energy, and the climates issues.  The woman we talked to was named Alice who went through a power point explaining each slide.  A couple that stuck out to me was that if the whole world had the same ecological footprint as the U.S. then we would have to have 5 earths. Another slide said 12% of water use, 39% co2 emissions, 65% waste output, and 71% electricity consumption is from buildings.The company has building across the globe and has shown us that you can be green in unique and different ways.