The Ultimate Environmental Design Quiz

Environmental Design: A Process for Creating Sustainable Spaces

• Environmental design involves addressing environmental parameters in the development of plans, policies, buildings, and products, with the aim of creating spaces that enhance natural, social, cultural, and physical environments.
• The concept of environmental design has been in existence since ancient Greece, where solar heating was used to capture the sun’s energy and warm homes during winter.
• Environmental design encompasses fields such as architecture, geography, urban planning, landscape architecture, and interior design, as well as interdisciplinary areas like historical preservation and lighting design.
• The practice of environmental design continued with the Romans, who used glass to windows to allow for the passage of light and conserve interior heat.
• The early roots of modern environmental design began in the late 19th century, with William Morris and John Ruskin rejecting the use of industrialized materials and processes.
• From the middle of the 20th century, thinkers such as Buckminster Fuller catalyzed a broadening and deepening of environmental design concerns, leading to the development of energy efficiency, appropriate technology, organic horticulture and agriculture, land restoration, New Urbanism, and ecologically sustainable energy and waste systems.
• By integrating renewable energy sources, it’s possible to create zero-emission buildings, where energy consumption is self-generating and non-polluting.
• The LEED Green Building Rating System rates structures on their environmental sustainability in the United States.
• Environmental design and planning is the multidisciplinary approach to the built environment, addressing architectural history or design, city or regional planning, landscape architecture history or design, environmental planning, construction science, cultural geography, or historic preservation.
• Social science methods are frequently employed in environmental design and planning programs.
• The following universities offer a Ph.D. in environmental design and planning: University of California, Berkeley, University of Colorado Boulder, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Arizona State University.
• Large-scale environmental design projects include the Masdar City project in Abu Dhabi and the Dongtan Eco-City project in China.
• Environmental design seeks to blend nature and technology, regarding ecology as the basis for design, with strategies of conservation, stewardship, and regeneration applied at all levels of scale.