Article by Matthew Waldbusser

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Architecture Is Saving Nature

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he Bay Area has a certain quality regarding the environment that most parts of the country are lacking in: sustainability. In studies conducted during the first two decades of the 21st century, the Bay Area has four cities in the top ten of the “Greenest Cities in the U.S,” with San Francisco topping the list, San Jose coming in at number five, Fremont sitting at number seven, and Oakland at number ten. Two more Californian cities, San Diego and Irvine, come in at two and three, respectfully, so it’s reasonable to conclude that Californians care about the status and health of our planet. With sustainability in mind, many Californians are obsessed with contemporary architecture. When given the chance, architects will design beautiful homes and buildings that blur the lines between modern living and nature. With popular designs such as the 175 acre tech campus, Apple Park, in Cupertino, and the 1,070 ft Salesforce tower in the center of San Francisco’s financial district, the Bay Area is home to many sustainable projects that are setting a precedent for the rest of the nation. In 2007, San Francisco was the first U.S city to ban plastic bags, which led more cities to follow suit and now eight states have banned single use plastic bags in an effort to reduce waste and protect wildlife. The Bay Area has strict regulations that require buildings and landscapes to meet a certain level of sustainability. These regulations largely have to do with water conservations and the types of plants that are used in landscapes. Being susceptible to droughts, it’s important that buildings use innovative technologies to limit wasted water. In landscapes, drought resistant plants are preferred because they take in as much water as other plants would. In downtown Los Altos, the Lucile Packard foundation headquarters represents one of these sustainable buildings that’s influencing the country. The building offsets 100% of its energy with its solar panels and an advanced heating and cooling system. Bridging the natural world and the workplace, the building offers a beautiful aesWthetic and helps the environment. 90% of the plants on the grounds are native to California which helps recreate habitats for local birds and animals whose homes have been lost due to human involvement. In addition, the building has a green roof which helps keep the building cool to reduce the use of air conditioning. The foundation says that their headquarters, “Represents a physical manifestation of our long-term commitment to conserving the Earth’s natural resources”.


Christopher Kurrle

“The architect is kind of the visionary for any type of building, we set the vision for the project and then we oversee it throughout the project.�

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hristopher Kurrle is one of the partners at the award winning architectural firm, Feldman Architecture. Feldman Architecture makes it a company goal to keep sustainability in the forefront when designing beautiful homes. From day one, designers work with a landscape architect to tap into the surrounding landscape. Many of their projects are “site responsive,” meaning that they take specific characteristics of the building site such as hills, trees, and the sun into their design to make the most of the landscape. Continuing to work with the given landscape, architects create the schematic design of the house and start to define what will be the structure. With California having a temperate climate throughout the year, the architect is able to blend the indoor and outdoor spaces beautifully. This trend of indoor/outdoor living has influenced people and designers throughout the world to be more eco-friendly in home building and commercial building as well. Single use plastics are being banned in more and more states, and nature is being brought back into the modern world. Instead of designing buildings that control nature, architects are introducing nature into their designs to add sustainability to the project as well as the beauty that it provides to a house or building. With more and more of the population residing in cities, urban parks have brought nature back to major cities around the world. As well as helping the health of the planet, there is evidence that being around nature benefits mental and emotional health. New York’s High Line is an elevated park on the west side of Manhattan. The park features plants that come from a 100 mile radius and tend to be drought tolerant to reduce the amount of water used in feeding the plants. Another architectural movement that Feldman Architecture uses is green roofs. Green roofs, also known as living roofs, are known for implementing vegetation onto the rooftop of a building, such as an array of grass and other plants. Other than improving the look of a building, green roofs have other benefits such as they: can reduce the energy of a building, provide new habitats for local animals, reduce air pollution, and they can last twice as long as traditional roofs. Using these eco-friendly designs, Feldman architecture has seven LEED Platinum certified projects. LEED stands for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” and is a scale that rates designs that follow eco-friendly practices. Being LEED Platinum is the highest honor a building can have with earning over 80 points on the scale. Architects like Christopher’s firm build contemporary buildings for visual appeal and influence the sustainability movement in the 21st century.

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Sue Chan

“Sustainability is ingrained in our projects�

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ue Chan is the Principal at Huettl landscape architecture. Getting her degree in Landscape Architecture from University of California, Berkely, she devoted herself to sustainable designs for a healthier planet. When Huettl starts a project, they have their client answer a questionnaire to truly fulfill their client’s needs. Their team then looks at the land that they’re working with to understand elevation, grade, and drainage. If the home is already built, they design using the house, looking at where windowsills are and where entryways and exits are. Using these key details, they can design the landscape to perfectly blend with the home. They typically create two different designs for each project to give the client more options to choose from, but clients often combine distinct elements from each and blend them for a perfect landscape. Moving into the design, they use SketchUp to make 3D models for a better understanding on what the landscape looks like and create their project like it’s a video game. 3D modeling also helps during the planning portion, where they can show their clients an accurate representation of what the project will look like, and then they choose which designs they like better. After the client determines which design they like, Huettl’s team will move into what colors and materials they will use for the project. Once the design is finalized, they work with city planners and contractors to start the physical building chunk of the project. On average, their projects take around six to eight months to complete the design. Coming from a city planning background, Ms. Chan is able to use the Bay Area’s sustainability regulations to make sure that their projects reach that level and go beyond it to set a model for other landscape architecture firms to follow. She believes that their style is changing the community to be more sustainable without substituting style and comfort.

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Bridget McIver

“Like originally it was like a lot of glass and steel. And now I would say it’s almost organic modernism.”

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ridget McIver is a designer who saw her Menlo Park community change as a result of contemporary architecture. Ten years ago Ms. Mciver began a project to design a new home for her family. She helped design her house around the growing modern movement of sustainability in the 21 century. Working directly with her architect, Bridget’s house was introducing something that wasn’t very prevalent in her town -- utilizing Menlo Park’s natural surroundings directly in her home plans. During the design process, Ms McIver and her architect examined and critiqued how the McIver family lived in order to design a house that accommodated their needs. When McIver and her architect were done, they had created a home that represented a change towards a living within nature. They referenced an Eichler design to build her single story home, complete with guest quarters and a pool, all the while encompassing existing vegetation that blend both home and the natural environment. McIver called it an almost organic modernism, that was more sustainable in its use of “a lot more natural materials. So a lot more use of wood and stone”. Over the years, Ms. McIver has seen more and more houses follow the same architectural trends that she helped establish in her city. In Menlo Park now, as well as in other neighboring communities, many homes diverge from steel and stone, and incorporate more organic materials to be more connected to nature. This new design concept is where modern and contemporary differentiate; modern tends to take control over the surrounding landscape, while contemporary embodies nature to create a new aesthetic. Contemporary architecture bridges multiple styles of architecture together to create the current and evolutionary approach that we see so heavily in the Bay Area today. Following the latest trends, sustainability and nature have been blended into contemporary designs to accommodate modern day living. McIver has seen a positive result with more houses taking on sustainability driven contemporary in her town and across the Bay Area. She sees that as contemporary architecture evolves, there will be a greater push towards protecting the environment in our cities.

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As we push our planet into a state where it can’t support the level of pollution that humans are poisoning it with, we need to drastically change our approach to building our cities. In Europe, architecture is responsible for 36% of carbon emissions. For many years, cities around the world approached designing sustainable buildings as being less wasteful. Now, instead of trying to slow the destruction of the environment, “it should be about reversal—about positively contributing to improving the environment.” says Architectural Digest writer John Gendall. This means that architects need to design buildings that are carbon negative and revert the carbon footprint that they made when completing the structures. To design in a more sustainable way, architects need to keep energy as their main concern. They need to make thoughtful decisions for how to reduce the amount of energy that the building utilizes. For instance, thoughtful window placement can offer more daytime light and more natural ventilation which would decrease the energy needed for that building. For landscaping, by having trees shading the roof of the building, the energy needed to cool the solar heat gain can be reduced. Pairing these energy efficient strategies with renewable energy sources such as wind or solar create the buildings that we see be classified as “sustainable.” Another trend of sustainable architecture is recycled materials and the increase of natural materials. Lumber is becoming more prevalent in new buildings to shy away from concrete and steel which emit fossil fuels when being built. In cities, where new structures are constantly created, contractors are utilizing bricks and stone from torn down buildings in the new replacement. This repurposing decreases fossil fuel emissions and produces less waste. In more rural areas, when trees need to be cut down for new buildings, architects are making an effort to use these same trees to create the new building. This type of recycling reduces the manufacturing and transportation of new materials which would usually leave a substantial carbon footprint. Architects are the visionaries of building the modern world; without them our great cities wouldn’t be built, so it’s up to them to design a future where our expanding cities and population don’t destroy the only planet that we can survive on. Designs that are nature-driven offer more appeal and keep sustainability in mind for all people. Sustainable architecture drives people to start thinking about eco friendliness and the revival of nature, which leads to people wanting more eco friendly designs, and thus to cities majorly decreasing their carbon footprint. With sustainable architecture, our world can start to revert the harmful effects of global warming and create a world where we can live in harmony with nature.

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Works Cited 1. Chan, Sue. Personal interview. 1/5/20 2. “Green Roofs.” GSA, 30 Sept. 2019, www.gsa.gov/about-us/organization/office-of-governmentwide-policy/office-of-federal-highperformance-buildings/resource-library/integrative-strategies/green-roofs 3. Gendall, John. “How U.S. Cities Can Learn From Amsterdam in Becoming More Sustainable.” Architectural Digest, Architectural Digest, 15 May 2020, www.architecturaldigest.com/story/how-us-cities-can-learn-from-amsterdam-becoming-more-sustainable. 4. hmc_admin. “The Top 6 Sustainable Architecture Strategies for Public Building Design: Thought Leadership.” HMC Architects, 17 Jan. 2019, hmcarchitects.com/news/the-top-6-sustainable-architecture-strategies-for-public-building-design-2018-10-03/. 5. Kurrle, Christopher. Personal interview. 30/3/20 6. McCann, Adam. “Greenest Cities in America.” WalletHub, 8 Oct. 2019, wallethub.com/edu/most-least-green-cities/16246/ 7. McIver, Bridget. Personal interview. 20/3/20 8. “Our Green Headquarters.” The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, 20 July 2017, www.packard.org/ about-the-foundation/our-green-headquarters/. 9. Schwartz, Anne. “Trends Transforming America’s Urban Parks.” Gotham Gazette,www.gothamgazette.com/index. php/archives/1424-four-trends-urban-paks. 10. “Sustainability in Architecture: Environmental and Social Impacts of Built...” Build Abroad, 15 Aug. 2017, buildabroad.org/2017/08/15/sustainability-in-architecture/. 9. “Sustainable Practices.” The High Line, www.thehighline.org/sustainable-practices/. 10. “The Best Green Architects in San Francisco.” San Francisco Architects and General Contractors, 6 Mar. 2020, sanfranciscoarchitects.org/the-best-green-architects-in-san-francisco/.

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I’m Matthew Waldbusser and am a Design student at Freestyle Academy. I play baseball for MVHS and love to do photography outside of school. I love to travel to new places, but at home I enjoy spending time with my friends. I plan to study architecture at college. I love playing baseball and I work hard to try to play for many more years to come. I am grateful to have the opportunity to be a student at Freestyle. 10


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