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Teaching Sustainability in Design without Greenwashing



Author(s)

Ulrike Heine

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DOI:10.17265/1934-7359/2014.04.002

School of Architecture, Clemson University, Clemson SC 29634-0503, USA

Teaching design incorporating a sense of sustainability to architecture students is a challenge today, primarily because of the trend to label every design as sustainable or green even though it is no different from a more traditional one. The result is a “green-washed” education in architecture. To address this issue, this paper describes a teaching methodology of architectural design with a special focus on sustainability implemented in the Graduate School of Architecture in Clemson. This method includes an analysis of the location, the climate conditions, the materials needed and the construction process. Knowing that sustainable design is generally perceived as being expensive, there is a special focus on simplicity and affordability. Rather than relying on expensive technical solutions, students are encouraged to design for the given environment and apply passive strategies. In the approach discussed in this paper, the design process is a number of logical scientific decisions rather than an intuitive draft. The goal of this pedagogy is to raise awareness about how to handle global resources carefully and to show the importance of the later performance of the project as a key to design. The teaching strategy is described here along with the successful participation by our graduate students in a number of refereed competitions.

Sustainability, design, teaching, passive design strategies, energy efficiency, affordability.