Environmental Architecture
Environmental Architecture or otherwise known as green architecture is a field of engineering that includes architecture, geography, urban planning, landscape architecture, and interior design. Environmental Architecture explores the relationship between architectural form, materiality and environmental performance, and how this relation should evolve in response to climate change and emerging technical capabilities. It’s a way of addressing surrounding environmental parameters when devising plans, programs, policies, buildings, or products. Classical prudent design may have always considered environmental factors; however, the environmental movement beginning in the 1940s has made the concept more explicit.
Skills / Processes:
This discipline of architecture is a form of applied arts and sciences dealing with creating the human-designed environment. These fields include architecture, geography, urban planning, landscape architecture, and interior design. Environmental design can also encompass interdisciplinary areas such as historical preservation and lighting design. In terms of a larger scope, environmental design has implications for the industrial design of products: innovative automobiles, wind power generators, solar-powered equipment, and other kinds of equipment could serve as examples. Currently, the term has expanded to apply to ecological and sustainability issues.
Career Opportunities:
As an environmental design/architecture major, your task is to consider the larger aesthetic picture when planning and creating your spaces, structures and other projects. Each of four variables (and their relationships to each other) will be considered when engineering your designs: architecture (buildings); landscape (including parks, gardens, and recreational surfaces); interiors (spaces within existing buildings); and environmental graphics (signs and information boards). As an environmental design/architecture major, you’ll also learn how to construct structures and spaces that are both ecologically sustainable and environmentally safe.
Environmental designers and architects work on both public and private spaces, used for leisure, recreational, commercial, or living purposes. Examples of their work include parks, garden centers, green roofs, courtyards, and public squares.
Environmental Architecture Schools to Consider