These days thought and feeling about sustainability seems to be arising from every conceivable corner of the world these days, from neighbourhood community action groups to corporate strategists. Meanwhile design professionals who are inundated with demands for product and services in increasingly short time horizons are also now called on to be experts in sustainability.
Many architects, landscape architects, interior designers, and engineers are genuinely attempting to provide competent information to their clients – either directly or through specification of materials and suppliers. However LEED http://www.usgbc.org/ (and similar programs) notwithstanding because of the amount of information available many professionals often find themselves too busy producing “sustainability stuff” without genuine attention to examine and evaluate – “not enough time to think”.
Regarding "time to think" about sustainability here are some interesting and worthwhile websites.
http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/
http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/
and http://www.treehugger.com/ also has an architecture and design section.
Such websites aim to collect ideas, designs, and plans for sustainable architecture. Basically it seems that these websites are leveraging the power of the internet and social networking: the internet makes the information accessible to many people and the social networking applications allow those people to upload and share files and ideas - and not incidentally thereby create a "buzz" and group of users whose size and common interest can attract advertisers and investors.
The tendency of such websites may be toward something like an architectural "wikipedia" in which anyone can say or present any idea, some of which are actually buildable and being constructed and some are little more than Gulliver’s Travels fantasies. User beware! But this is where architectural practice and experience may come in: an important role of an architectural professional these days may be to provide sound judgment on what is real versus what is some well-meaning but starry-eyed wishful dream or worse a manufacturer's hoax greenwash – as much as to provide professional design services and products.
Still the buildable along with the fantasies on such websites may be worthwhile because they might spark thinking which leads to buildable projects, or provide ideas to be built into real projects. Whether any of this has any staying power time will tell, as we seem to be in the middle of a green bandwagon bubble.
