Place and Time - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 166

into the design. Thus, the building is seen as an entity that goes beyond mere
shelter to become a “selective filter” against outside interferences and admitting
desirable qualities (e.g., incoming solar radiation in the winter, daylight, and air
exchanges). 8
Thus, green architecture embodies a sense of place that differs from that of
the “endless frontier” of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and much of the twentieth
centuries, where individualism and conquest led to buildings that optimized
isolation from the environment rather than optimization of the environment. In
the former sense of place, the environment was easily viewed as inexhaustible
and ever resilient. Whereas green architecture often starts with a view of the
potential building, the canvas of the environment is the real starting point. Using
the common art analogy, the building site canvas is certainly not empty as many
earlier designers perceived the site to be. It is actually quite full, and any change
must account for the effect that a building or planned community will have on
this environment. One of the first to articulate this new sense of place was Aldo
Leopold, whose ideas we discuss next.

Pruitt-Igoe: Lessons from the Land Ethic in 21st-Century Design

Environmental ethics is the set of morals (i.e., those actions held to be right or to
be wrong) in how people interact with the environment. Three ethical viewpoints
dominate environmental ethics: anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism
(see Fig. 4.5). Anthropocentrism is a philosophy or decision framework based on

Figure 4.5 Continuum of ethical
viewpoints.
Adapted from R. B. Meyers,
“Environmental values, ethics and
support for environmental policy: a
heuristic, and psychometric
instruments to measure their
prevalence and relationships,”
Presented at the International
Conference on Civic Education
Research, New Orleans, LA,
November 16-18, 2003.

What is valued? Ethical construct

Humans exclusively Anthropocentric

All cognitive entities

All sentient entities

All biotic entities Biocentric

All material entities

All entities and ecological
phenomenon (abiotic and biotic,
plus other values, richness,
abundance, diversity
sustainability)

Ecocentric