A BRIEF HISTORY OF GREEN BUILDING

摘要

What is green building? The Office of the Fed-eral Environmental Executive defines green building as "the practice of 1) increasing the efficiency with which buildings and their sites use energy, water, and materials, and 2) reducing building impacts on human health and the environment, through better siting, design, construction, operation, maintenance, and removal ― the complete building life cycle."Although green building, or sustainable design and development, has gained currency in the last decade, it harkens back more than a century, according to David Gissen, curator of architecture and design at the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C. As far back as the nineteenth century, Gissen notes, structures like London's Crystal Palace and Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II used passive systems, such as roof ventilators and underground air-cooling chambers, to moderate indoor air temperature. In the early twentieth century, skyscrapers like New York's Flatiron Building and the New York Times Building employed deep-set windows to shade the sun. Still later, Rockefeller Center (1932) utilized both operable windows and sky gardens. New York's Wainwright Building and Chicago's Carson Pirie Scott department store had retractable awnings to block the sun, and other commercial buildings of the period were outfitted with window shades.