Problems are often stated in vague terms…because it is quite uncertain what the problems really are.
~ John Von Neumann

SUSTAINABILITY PRINCIPLES & GOALS

Clear, concise sustainability goals and intentions are critical if the DTS Project House is to achieve these goals in an integrated architecture. Clear goals are critical to prevent means and ends from getting confused leading to a confused architectural expression. If intentions and implementation are not confused there is less chance the architecture becomes about sustainability rather than being sustainable.

Goals and intentions (ends) are determined and driven by values and sustainability principles. Implementations (means) are driven by art and science. When implementations are substituted for intentions or goals and intentions are determined by art and science the architecture loses much of its expressive power. There are a few instances, such as LEED Certification and Los Angeles City Green Building Code Tier 1 requirements, that an implementation is both a goal and the implementation of a goal.

Most sustainability design goals are determined a priori meaning they are determined not by the specifics of the DTS Project but exist separate and apart from the DTS Project House. This is because values and principles that determine sustainability goals are separate and apart from any specific project and are not determined, altered, or adjusted for any specific circumstances. It is critical that the sustainability goals drive the sustainability design process and design outcomes instead of the design process and outcomes used to expediently adjust the goals.

SUSTAINABILITY DEFINITIONS

There is little consensus on specific definitions of the general term “sustainability” or terms like “green” design and others that fall under the heading of sustainability. The definitions vary according to the priorities of the person or entity providing the definitions. Thus, it is useful and necessary that the sustainability design process commence with an explicit definition of sustainability. The definition must be refined to be architecture specific in order that it can be expressed in architectural terms.

Sustainability is the ability to sustain and grow the city, the collective, in a way that individuals have the opportunity to fulfill their potential and continue to do so into the future. Specific values and practices sustain the city and help it civilize individuals. A wide range of subject matter positively affect sustainability such as physical and cultural resources, law and order, justice, institutional structures, and health and wellbeing. Architecture can address many of these areas and express many sustainable values, but architecture cannot affect all of the areas that contribute to sustainability. Architects may want to and be able to address all areas of sustainability, but many must be addressed outside of architecture.

Architecture and building can directly reinforce positive institutional structures, affect negative emissions and waste of natural resources impacting negative climate change, promote health and well-being of communities and individuals, and spiritually and physically connect humans to the natural world. Sustainability principles and values are universal with sustainability goals and implementation specific to time and place – specific to the architectural project.

DTS PROJECT HOUSE SUSTAINABILITY PRINCIPLES / GOALS

The specific DTS Project House sustainability goals and design implementations follow from sustainability principles and values. Principles and values relevant to sustainability express why sustainability is a social and individual good; what makes for a sustainable future; and how the natural world and the earth contribute to sustainability. References to “earth” encompasses both the physical planet and its atmosphere, and their impacts.

Today, many instinctually presuppose sustainability is a moral imperative, but do so without defining why it is a “moral” good for the earth to go on existing and for humans to sustain themselves. This instinct needs to be transformed into a value so that sustainable practices can be effectively implemented. It is hard to make a cogent argument for sustainability unless you believe humans are here on earth for a higher purpose – just continued existence cannot be enough to justify a moral imperative. One’s beliefs regarding a higher purpose goes a long way toward determining one’s sustainability principles and values and ultimately sustainability goals and how they are implemented.

The future is no more controllable than it is predictable. the only reliable attitude to take toward the future is that it is profoundly, structurally, unavoidably perverse…Whatever you are ready for, doesn’t happen; whatever you are unready for, does.

~ Stuart Brannd

Principles / Goals

1. Principle ONE The earth and natural world exist for humans to responsibly use to facilitate their sustainability – the earth does not exist as an end in itself separate and apart from man

Sustainability Goals: 1. Responsibly use and exploit the physical attributes the earth provides. 2. Responsibly use and exploit the natural resources the earth provides. 3. Make tangible the physical and inspirational resources the earth provides man.

2. Principle TWO The health of the earth is critical to the extent its health promotes the health and wellbeing of human beings

Sustainability Goals: 1. Minimize the negative physical impact upon building on the site. 2. Minimize the negative impact of the building’s operations. 3. Use building design to promote the physical health of the building’s users. 4. Exploit and make tangible the alignments of the earth’s wellbeing with man’s wellbeing.

3. Principle THREE Do not preserve but conserve the natural world – man needs to be integrated with nature not removed from nature

Sustainability Goals: 1. Integrate the natural into the architectural experience. 2. Integrate manmade architecture into the natural landscape. 3. Purposely use the resources the earth and nature provides. 4. Make tangible the responsible use of the resources the earth and nature provides.

4. Principle FOUR Humans are part of nature with a human nature – humans and nature are crucial to each other

Sustainability Goals: 1. Conceptually connect the building’s users to nature. 2. Physically connect the building’s users to nature. 3. Make tangible nature’s beneficial impact upon man. 4. Make tangible man’s indispensability to nature. 5. Respond to human nature as it is and not as we wish it were.

5. Principle FIVE All things natural and manmade are irrevocably interconnected and help give each their identity and meaning

Sustainability Goals: 1. Sufficiently intertwine architecture and sustainability and landscape that they lose their unnecessary distinctions but maintain their necessary significance. 2. Use interconnections that work synergistically to achieve and express more than the individual parts can achieve and communicate alone 3. Use interconnections to express truths in the design that individual parts alone cannot express. 4. Make tangible that it is through the interconnections among the parts that we can fully understand the full nature of individual parts. 5. Use architecture to show how nature’s majesty is only apparent with man’s intrusion.

6. Principle SIX Man’s treatment of the living earth is indicative of how man will likely treat other living beings and human creations

Sustainability Goals: 1. Minimize design and building decisions made for expediency. 2. Express overwhelming care and concern in design and building. 3. Implement the intentional in both design and construction. 4. Give focus to the necessary accidental. 5. Reject the disposable and create the to be cherished.

7. Principle SEVEN Nature models healthy and sustainable relationships between parts and wholes where living entities achieve simultaneous thriving individual and communal identities

Sustainability Goals: 1. Evaluate design elements and materials for both the quality of their individual attributes and their contribution toward the intended qualities of the architectural whole. 2. Combine functional elements in ensembles that create meaning surpassing simple function. 3. Incorporate elements and materials with identifiable attributes that are made stronger when the elements are made part of an ensemble. 4. Incorporate elements that when combined in an ensemble achieve more than they would achieve separately.

8. Principle EIGHT Past PRESENT Future

Sustainability Goals: 1. Incorporate the time tested in design and construction 2. Design and construct for the way the world currently is and not the way we wish it were 3. In the design and construction minimize the number of precluded futures.

9. Principle NINE Wastefulness is a practice to be avoided in every arena of life no matter how plentiful the resource being expended

Sustainability Goals: 1. Do not waste effort and talents. 2. Do not waste resources. 3. Design and build for energy efficiency. 4. Do not waste monetary resources. 5. Recycle ideas and traditions. 6. Recycle natural resources. 7. Recycle manmade material resources.

10. Principle TEN All organisms, structures, and organizations are either growing or are dead – sustainable structures are always becoming (growing)

Sustainability Goals: 1. Create and build a house for a dynamic life. 2. Create and build for a physically flexible house. 3. Create and build for a physically adaptable house. 4. Create and build in a way that allows users to help the DTS Project House become the best version of itself. 5. Make tangible that it is the appropriately static that makes dynamism possible without devolving into chaos.

An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion…I think that humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of one. They are not dead yet.

~ Brian Eno

11. Principle ELEVEN Authenticity and purpose mitigate against style and fashion – the enemies of sustainability

Sustainability Goals: 1. Develop implementations with conceptual durability. 2. Choose materials for their physical and conceptual durability. 3. Incorporate design elements that have both function and purpose. 4. Express and exploit intrinsic qualities over surface treatments. 5. Provide structure for necessary items of taste.

12. Principle TWELVE Sustainability can never substitute for architecture or excuse bad architecture

Sustainability Goals: 1. Do not make design or construction decisions solely to satisfy sustainability metrics. 2. Align sustainability goals implementation with architectural intentions. 3. Question both the architectural intentions and sustainability goals when the architectural intentions and sustainability goals seemingly contradict one another. 4. Integrate sustainability into the architecture and construction and never apply sustainability to the architecture. 5. Evaluate the DTS Project House as a work of architecture and not a work of sustainability.

13. Principle THIRTEEN Elements that serve multiple purposes and functions are more sustainable than ones that serve a single purpose or function

Sustainability Goals: 1. Evaluate design and construction decisions for how many different aspects of the architectural agenda and how may sustainability goals they address. 2. Eschew design solutions, materials, and technologies that fulfill only a single design intention. 3. Incorporate design elements that serve both multiple purposes and multiple functions. 4. Incorporate design solutions that address the widest range of issues with a single material or component.

14. Principle FOURTEEN Architecture is at its most powerful when it defends institutions that promote sustainability

Sustainability Goals: 1. Make tangible the critical significance of the institution of the family. 2. Make tangible the structure giving role of the institution of the family. 3. Make tangible the role of the family of the chief filter between the inndividul and the community.

15. Principle FIFETEEN Anything that distracts an entity from fulfilling its inherent potential is working against its sustainability – sustainable natural entities model an ability to dynamically work toward fulfilling their inherent potential

Sustainability Goals: 1. Commence design with a known purpose but an unknown outcome. 2. Nurture a design outcome that appears inevitable in the end. 3. Do not apply sustainability but nurture the design’s internal sustainable potential. 4. Provide and nurture manmade structure and systems that develop from fulfilling their purpose and function.

16. Principle SIXTEEN Nature’s scope and beauty provides evidence that there is a higher human purpose than mere existence and there is something more significant than our individual lives

Sustainability Goals: 1. Use architecture to connect its inhabitants physically and psychologically to the grandeur of nature and its processes. 2. Integrate nature and the natural into the architectural experience. 3. Make tangible the majestic scope and phenomena of nature. 4. Use the aspects of architecture promoting sustainability to make tangible architecture’s greater purposes.

17. Principle SEVENTEEN Architecture and sustainability have the aligned purpose of making the lasting (eternal) more significant than the expedient (transient)

Sustainability Goals: 1. Show how the expression of the most significant purposes of architecture make a building more sustainable. 2. Show how the most significant physical qualities of architecture are also sustainable. 3. Use sustainability implementations to make the architecture lasting and vice versa. 4. Show how good design decisions necessarily fulfill both sustainable goals and architectural intentions.

18. Principle EIGHTEEN Sustainability is specific to time and place

Sustainability Goals: 1. Align DTS architecture and construction with its site’s physical and cultural resources. 2. Use sustainability implementation to make the DTS Project House specific to its time and place 3. Use knowledge and resources available today without precluding what might become known in the future.

19. Principle NINETEEN Sustainability must be achieved without sacrificing the present for the future

Sustainability Goals: 1. Evaluate all sustainability measures for how they affect the present as well as the future. 2. Make tangible how sustainability does not inhibit luxury and glamor. 3. Use architecture to make to make the city better (more sustainable) but not perfect.

20. Principle TWENTY Sustainability and innovation are connected in a continuous cycle as sustainability provides the necessity and opportunity for innovation and innovation is a necessity for growth and sustainability

Sustainability Goals: 1. Integrate innovative green technologies. 2. Integrate innovative green materials. 3. Employ innovative fabrication and construction processes. 4. Use energy management innovations to fully exploit sustainability measures. 5. Use data collection innovations to create useful knowledge.

21. Principle TWENTY-ONE Architecture and thus sustainability use technology to achieve their values and make their values tangible

Sustainability Goals: 1. Only use technology in the service of architectural and sustainability intentions 2. Consider technology in its most expansive definition as “the application of scientific knowledge to the practical aims of human life” 3. Carefully employ technology as it is always a non-neutral manipulation of the human and natural environment.

To make environmentalism work in design, we must embrace today’s tools: the digital revolution. We sometimes think that technology is the opposite of nature, but this dualism misses the point. In fact, sensors networks, and artificial intelligence can make our buildings more like living things: able to respond and evolve. ‘Smart’ and ‘sustainable’ can form a harmonious alliance.

~ Carlo Ratti

22. Principle TWENTY-TWO Modeling sustainable practices and behavior is more effective than lecturing and preaching sustainability

Sustainability Goals: 1. Achieve LEED Platinum Certification for the DTS Project House. 2. Use code advantages afforded by green codes to make DTS Project House more sustainable. 3. Integrate architecture and sustainability in the design and construction so that the DTS Project House is sustainable and not about sustainability. 4. Make the DTS Project House design and construction accessible to the public and interested parties.

Sustainability is unappealing if it’s always portrayed as something negative, a form of moral self-denial, an ethical dilemma, a moral sacrifice, a political dilemma or a philanthropic donation.

~ Bjark Ingels