As editorial content goes we are pleased with this one; it is packed with—as we like to call them—‘projects with punch’. These are more than buildings; they offer us a point of view on what it means to be sustainable in Asia.
This bumper crop of projects comes, in part, from the newly launched competition: the BCI Green Design Award. This Award, in its first year of competition, was an open call for submissions of recently completed projects in Asia and Australia. Over 100 online registrations were made early this year when judging commenced. In the emerging milieu of submissions there appear to be two schools of thought on the ‘what and how’ of Green design. The first is that of assertive technology; of deep energy cuts and carbon emissions. The other speaks of local sensibility—climate, materiality, community—of ‘making more with less’. These are complementary views of course—one an engineered approach, the other with an architectural slant—which reflect two distinct shades of Green in the building industry today.
The new Award is sibling to the more established FuturArc Prize, now in its third year. Entries to the 2010 cycle offer us glimpses of life in the coming decades when we must grapple with the effects of climate change which, in some parts of Asia, will be hard-hitting and severe. In answering the brief—a prototype for ecological living in the future—some seem to say “let’s optimise what we have, make the most of what we know, and show sensitivity to context”. Others paint dramatic visions of a world of rising seas levels and food shortage. This latter group seems to suggest that “life cannot continue business-as-usual, we need new paradigms to survive”. It's noteworthy that these visions of devastation (and yet hope) are from countries which are already seeing changing weather patterns and hydrology. This year’s entries seem to speak simultaneously of anxiety and commitment towards a future of uncertainty.
The pages in the Green issue are—as any editor will say—all thought provoking. But if you have time for only one read, do check out the FuturArc Interview with Amory Lovins. Our US correspondent, Jalel Sager, spoke with him on a wide range of questions concerning our energy future. Lovins, for anyone unfamiliar with the Rocky Mountain Institute at which he is Chairman and Chief Scientist, is a thought leader and visionary on the subject of energy. No one quite matches his breadth of knowledge and insight. In 2009 he was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
For more of what the 3Q 2010 Green issue offers, visit www.futurarc.com.
