What Makes a Building Green?

Green Design, Human Sensitivity, and the Next Step Toward Safe Spaces

By Troy Alan Cox

There is a lot of talk now about green building design. What defines a green building?

A green building is generally understood as an energy-efficient and environmentally aware structure, designed with consideration for its footprint, energy use, materials, sustainability, and impact on its surroundings. It is often part of a thorough certification process by which a building is rated for energy efficiency, environmental responsibility, and overall sustainability.

From what I understand, it takes a team of engineers, architects, designers, builders, and other specialists to oversee the design, construction, and completion phase of a building. The process may also consider the potential destruction or removal of the building one day and the impact that would have on its surroundings. It is quite an extensive process, and it is very much a team effort.

A green building is designed to be comfortable, efficient, and more closely aligned with naturalistic living. The team considers energy usage, comfort, usability, sustainability, longevity, and how the building interacts with the environment around it.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s main principle for architecture was not only about how sound or long-lasting a building would be, but how to bring nature into lived spaces. Green buildings take that idea to another level by also including energy efficiency, environmental responsibility, and the structural integrity of the space.

In the Safe Spaces Project, this is vitally important. Reducing waste, conserving energy, and being responsibly minded go hand in hand with the principles of creating a neurologically considerate and bio-friendly space for the humans who will be utilizing the building.

The idea of construction for longevity also meets the Safe Spaces Project beautifully. Once a space has been consciously designed around human sensitivity, there should be less need to worry about fashion trends causing the building to become outdated. A space designed around the nervous system, sensory awareness, and human comfort has the potential to remain useful, supportive, and relevant for a long time.

However, the Safe Spaces Project asks whether that green building goes one step further.  Does it also consider the human nervous system?

How are the people who use the space being affected on a daily basis in their central nervous system? Does the interior take into consideration what may be perceived as a threat to human awareness? Does it use sensory-aware surfaces and textures, or does it become cold and sterile while holding on to the outdated belief that hospital-type sterility is neutral and therefore does not affect the nervous system?

A green space may check all the boxes that are vitally important for healthy environmental concerns. It may be energy efficient and environmentally sound, and still be neurologically overstimulating if the interior does not take human sensory intake into consideration.

Bringing sensory-aware development and safety into the human experience can improve the quality of life for those utilizing an advanced green building space. Considering how the environment uses indoor temperature, sound, smell, lighting, texture, and the need for retreat or safe landing spaces can bring the building into a whole new era of design.

Our goal at the Safe Spaces Project is to help create sensory-aware experiences for those who will be occupying and utilizing these wonderful, consciously developed buildings.

As I wrote in the last blog, we are not only asking whether a building is energy aware and environmentally sound. We are also asking whether a person, especially a highly sensitive individual, can easily navigate the space without carrying a feeling of threat or overwhelm into the building from outside.

Can a person entr the space, cross the threshold, determine which way to travel, and remain calm, relaxed, aware, centered, and focused?

If an individual becomes overwhelmed, which can often happen in a new environment, where are the spaces within the architecture for them to retreat, recover, and reorient?

Green building is an important beginning. It asks how a building affects the planet, the land, the materials, the energy grid, and the future.

The Safe Spaces Project asks the next question:

How does this building affect the person standing inside it?

Is it environmentally important to you to know that a building has been designed and engineered to have minimal impact on its surroundings and to be energy efficient, or perhaps even energy independent?

If you have visited a certified green building, how did you feel inside it?

Did anything in the space make you feel safe?

Love and Light, 

True Alan Cox