The misconstrued view of sustainability and its certification

It has been about two decades now since the idea of sustainability and building ‘green’ has strongly emerged at a global level

- ROMI SEBASTIAN

In the current times, it is quite evident that the term ‘green’ is certainly misused and misconstrued by most of the architectural and engineering domain. It is slowly turning into one of those transient trends set up to support marketing of related fields of construction activity.

We are well aware that all natural living systems possess designs/mechanisms/processes that are inherently triumphant in their instinctive intent of sustainability because they relate with the environment in holistic manner and aim at optimisation and reduction. There are numerous lessons on sustainability that can be learnt from nature. On the contrary, in my view, many of the current green building rating systems, such as LEED (US), Greenstar (AUST) and BREEAM, are predominantly structured to support solutions that are in majority additive in nature and encourage consumption over conservation. This is simply because the rating systems in my view are initially conceived to have set of sections for sustainability; that are then packed with technologies and products to achieve it. Architects and engineers now depend greatly on these intelligent products/service systems to make up for their neglect of basic building design.