Sustainable Design

Hello all,

Time has been flying by so fast this summer.  August is already creeping around the corner meaning classes are soon to follow.  This summer so far has given me many great new opportunities, and has taught me about many new things.  Every Friday the CUE team has a get together.  We rotate between having an educational meeting, which we have some type of reading for, which then leads up to the next week’s fieldtrip.

One of the topics we focused on was sustainable design and architecture.  I had a brief preview to this topic in the fall, when I visited the Keep Indianapolis Beautiful building, but I was still new to the topic.  One of the sustainable techniques that we discussed was the living machine.  This is a form of wastewater treatment that mimics a wetland by using plants to cleanse the water.  This idea amazed me.  Not only is the water getting cleaned to be reused onsite but also has a great visual effect with it.  When someone is told that wastewater is getting treated then see how beautiful the “plant” is it will forever be an eye opener.  Finally we are looking at the way nature has been doing things since the beginning of time and copying it, rather then making our own.

For our fieldtrip to go along with sustainable design we rode our bikes to the Nature Conservancy building located downtown.  The one main thing I learned for this trip was just the littlest things can make a big difference.  Everything about this building had a lot of thought put into it and was the most environmentally friendly it could be.  Just little things like open spaces with big windows and reusing the bricks from the previous building can go a long way.  One of the best ideas, in my opinion, was having the cooling system in the floor.  This way the air is closer to where the people actually are instead of the coolest area to be the ceiling.  It was great to see all of the sustainable design in action after we learned a little bit about it.

stay cool everyone,

Shelby Johnson