BUILDING/COMMUNITY

Summary of "Big and Green"

While we were in Washington, we went to visit the "Big and Green" exhibit at the National Building Museum. This exhibit was on alternative building structures that are more environmentally conscious and could be used in cities. The exhibit had actual buildings and plans for building on display in order to prove the point that better building methods are possible and work. These were divided into five categories, Energy, Light and Air, Greenery Water and Waste, Construction, and Urbanism.
For the energy section, buildings which create their own sources of energy were on display. Some buildings were built in order to catch passing wind currents to make energy for the building. Others had sun panels to capture energy from the sun. They even had a model of how many windmills it would take to power an entire city, and it's a field of windmills. But it would be worth it though to build.
The next section was titled "Light and Air.” The buildings on display in this exhibit would be ideal to live in because access to sunlight was one of the main factors kept in mind while during their design. Not only was light a huge factor, but also temperature. Those buildings had special windows which would capture heat in the winter, but keep cool in the summer. With each of those exhibits, they provided huge panel with drawing explaining how each feature on the building worked.
The next section was called Greenery Water and Waste, the buildings in this section almost all had plants. There was one building on which each balcony had a small set of trees to capture water, keep the air fresh, and filter the captured water. I never thought that thick greenery could be incorporated into a building structure, not just on the roof, and function to help the building and its' inhabitants. One thing I wondered though was with all those plants, would the architects develop something to keep the insects they would attract outside the building?
The next section was titled Construction and was about the way that current buildings are built. It showed some green buildings which were rebuilt into the frame of old buildings in order to save materials. But the building that amazed me the most was a building which could be built in a short amount of time, I think it was less then a month, and could be lived in by people. But the outer shell of was make out of some cloth, the model looked like a spiders web, and it had to be supported by trucks at the base. The purpose, as was explained, was to design a building which could be built in a short period of time in case of a natural disaster which wiped out other buildings.
The last section was titled Urbanism which focused not on buildings only, but the cities which the buildings would make. It stressed the importance of keeping the environment in mind when designing cities. Overall, it was a really good exhibit, and also to keep in the context of the exhibits subject, the paper used to display the information was all recycled. Even the cardboard wall used to separate the sections was recycled. I would highly recommend this exhibit to other people.