Take a look at the new construction taking place on college campuses around the country. You'll see a combination of great design, engineering ingenuity, and environmentally sustainable practices.
For example, check out
Kroon Hall at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (across the street from Eero Saarinen's hockey rink), Cornell University's new Life Sciences building (
Weill Hall), the Rice University
Childrens' Campus, and Oberlin College's
Adam Joseph Lewis Center for examples of excellence in green architecture.
For example, all of the materials used and grown within Oberlin's Adam Joseph Lewis Center are recycled, reused, or sustainably grown and harvested. And the air conditioning, heating, and lighting are passive and energy efficient in as far as it is possible.
The center's interior and exterior landscaping incorporates a mixture of native northern Ohio ecosystems that provide responsible storm water management and capture/storage in addition to the food that's produced.
Oberlin proudly promotes the center's "Living Machine" which it describes as an "ecologically engineered system that combines elements of conventional wastewater technology with the purification processes of wetland ecosystems to treat and recycle the building's wastewater". Water that has been cleaned by the Living Machine is ultimately reused in the building's toilets and for landscape irrigation.
Success will surely be measured in the long term, but the beauty and innovation of these buildings is extremely exciting.