From the course: Green Building Concepts Foundations

Green building components

From the course: Green Building Concepts Foundations

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Green building components

- If you think about a building as some concrete, steel, windows, doors, you'll be missing an opportunity to bring all these beautiful systems together to create a better, more efficient, healthier, and productive whole. Buildings are almost like living organisms all working in harmony with a mission to provide safe, healthy, comfortable spaces for their occupants to live, work, learn, shop, eat, be entertained. When we talk about a green building, don't just think about just a building as an island in the middle of the ocean but as a structure that is a part of the whole including its surroundings such as its parking lot, landscape; the infrastructure surrounding it such as roads, utilities; and a diverseness of use of serving its needs. Throughout this chapter we'll be looking at what makes a building green in five categories: location and site design, resources, health and well-being, resiliency, and leadership and innovation. Later on when we discuss some of the various green building rating systems, you'll see that each rating system categorizes the green aspects of a building in their own way, yet all of them come back to the most common major impact areas that buildings have on the environment. Let's get into the details of what each one of these green building components entails while keeping in mind how they all relate to one another. In this way the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts.

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