Award-winning architect, author and global speaker Eric Corey Freed recently sat down with Green Places CEO Alex Lassiter to talk about the importance of building sustainably.
Freed is currently the senior vice president of sustainability for CannonDesign and was the founding principal of organicARCHITECT. He was also vice president of the International Living Future Institute, and chief community officer of EcoDistricts. Freed prides himself on the buildings he designs as taking responsibility for themselves in terms of their carbon, waste, energy, water and material use.
Approximately more than half of the world’s carbon comes from the design, construction and operation of buildings. And with humans spending almost 90% of our time indoors, 72% of the world’s electricity goes to buildings. So, Freed says, by paying attention to those things, we could greatly reduce their impact, while making a better building. “For example,” he says, “we can build a building that produces its own energy, processes its own waste, and doesn’t use carcinogens, and we can do this without needing any new inventions.”
The question comes down to, why aren’t we making a sustainable building, knowing what we know? “The first obstacle is tradition; we’ve always built this way,” explains Freed. “This is what we are used to. The second is fear. We’re wired to fear things that we don’t know or understand. Our initial reaction is to just reject it immediately. We’re not wired to innovate. We’re not wired to seek out the best solution. We’re wired to make ourselves comfortable. The third obstacle is ignorance, just a general lack of knowledge about these methods. They know there is a better way, but what’s one more building that’s toxic or wasteful; what’s the big deal?! There’s no connection with one building and how it will affect the bigger picture.”
For sustainable buildings to be adopted on a wide-scale level, Freed says it’s a design challenge, a financing challenge, a construction challenge as well as being a regulatory challenge. All four need to up their game, and that’s why there’s been a movement in design toward sustainability in construction in terms of materiality, products, supply chain, incentives and building codes. On the financial side, there are new models to help pay for this. For example, Freed says he is able to put solar panels on all of their new projects for free, given the buildings agree to buy the power.
When designing new buildings, Freed says he looks at everything through five main buckets:
- Operational Energy (how much energy will it use?)
- Embodied Energy (how much energy went into constructing the building and materials?)
- Healthy Materials (how can we avoid harmful chemicals?)
- Resiliency (how can we adapt to a warmer, wetter world?)
- Zero Waste (how can we design out waste?)
“We have to break out of this mindset they doing the right thing somehow cost more money when in fact it will save us money in the long run,” Freed says. “We have so many problems right now that could be addressed and possibly even fixed through the use of more sustainable business practices. Imagine striving to improve the quality of life of everyone! So, we need to stop thinking so we linearly about all of these issues and instead take a holistic and lifecycle approach to cost.”
You can read the entire discussion here: https://www.greenplaces.com/blog/leading-the-way-in-biophilic-and-regenerative-design-eric-corey-freed-is-dedicated-to-creating-deep-green-buildings-and-communities
