This Sunday I ventured into DC to visit the National Building Museum. I spent most of my time in an amazing exhibit, called "Big & Green: Towards Sustainable Architecture in the 21st Century." The exhibit sought to demonstrate just how much large buildings contribute to the environmental problems we are facing right now. Not only do they consume large amounts of water and energy, but they also release a large amount those resources back into the environment as unfiltered waste.

Despite a lot of alarming statistics, the tone of Big & Green was not negative or accusatory. The bulk of the exhibit's content showcased modern buildings that are using cutting edge sustainable architecture. It was reassuring to see so many buildings - many of them here in the US - that were taking issues of energy, waste, and sustainability into consideration.

From the buildings featured, I learned that there are several common strategies used in sustainable architecture. Many of them are so simple and low-tech that you wonder why they haven't been used before. The plans for the future Jets stadium in Manhattan, for example, features vertical wind turbines lining the top of the stadium's bowl. They will generate power to support not only the stadium's electric and heating needs, but could actually contribute surplus power to the surrounding power grid as well.

Many of the solutions presented at Big & Green were alike in this type of simplicity. The technologies were often adapted from heating and cooling techniques that were developed thousands of years ago in African and Arab cultures. In the 20th century we cast aside these traditional methods in our rush to make our tall buildings airtight, efficient, and climate-controlled. The irony is that we have actually created buildings that are more wasteful and less comfortable for the people inside. The challenge of sustainable architecture is to reverse this trend by adapting ancient methods to work with modern technology.

I walked away from the exhibit with a large collection of brochures and lists of additional resources, including the exhibits namesake book: Big & Green. I skimmed through it at the gift store (aside: the National Building Museum's book store is by far the most comprehensive collection of high quality architecture, art, landscape and urban design books I have seen) and was impressed with its quality and depth of information.

For those interested in this book as well as the others, I created an Amazon book list here.