Customer Reviews

Designing the Sustainable School

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Good for architects and for clients.

1)Architects:
This book is an excellent resource for sustainable architecture in general in addition to sustainable school design. It looks at 40+ buildings from around the world and in various architectural styles, discussing natural lighting, innovative HVAC systems, rainwater capturing and re-use, siting, natural ventilation, solar heating and cooling and many other systems. The buildings range from a community built clay brick building in rural Africa to modern high design.
A great resource when designing your own project (house, school, whatever building type) in terms of brainstorming how to incorporate sustainable design systems. Also excellent for taking the next research step of comparing a variety of approaches to each individual system, and the book ends with a list of websites for further info. A valuable and inspiring find!

2) Clients:
A very helpful review of a wide variety of sustainable systems, it covers buildings of all budgets and styles. There is a list of the architects of each of the buildings, but the book can also be used for getting some useful background to help in working with an architect of your choosing.

This book highlights 45 real high-performance K-12 school designs from across the U.S. and internationally, complete with brilliant photographic images, floor plans and elevations. It is not a technical manual on green school design but rather a highly visual presentation of sustainable practices that have successfully been implemented in schools with the learning environment in mind. Too often we find ourselves incorporating high-performance building features into schools with the bottom line guiding our clients' decision-making process: How can we reduce energy costs to save money in the long-term? What is overlooked is the way green school design can actually enhance the learning environment to create an enriched, positive academic experience for the child in addition to being eco-friendly and the energy-saving benefits thereof.

The author writes, "Imagine a school where indoor air quality reduced the risk of exposure to disease, where the acoustics were such that learning was enhanced, where the quality of the finishes and architecture made you feel welcomed... where test scores improved..."

Through the use of bullet points, the author creates a snapshot of each case study that demonstrates the extent of the sustainable features and concepts employed by the architects represented in this book. While perhaps lacking in how-to detail, "Designing the Sustainable School" inspires through images and examines the breadth of what architecture firms are doing to embrace not just high-performance building design but high-performance learning: creating schools that are both sustainable AND habitable.

The book was a little pricey for my budget - but turned out to be well worth the expense! The range of school designs and locales provide great examples and were extremely helpful to me as I am working on a dissertation about school design. Finding up to date school design information - especially high performance school design, is quite difficult. This book made that so much easier. I also recommend the Prakash Nair Design Patterns for schools book.

This book is a set of case studies of schools that have tried to incorporate sustainability into their design. Some appear to be in the design phase, some only just completed, and there is little information about how they are performing or how they actually got built. This is more of a book to inspire form, less of a how-to, very scant on numbers or measurement of any kind.

It also has a few of those irritating issues that appear often in "green" building books- for instance, the lights are on in bright naturally-lit spaces in MANY of the pictures (how is that saving energy!?!). Also, many pictures show over-daylit classrooms where glare is an obvious problem, and only a handful show any properly drawn heat transfer or light transfer diagrams. Of course, I can appreciate that the author was not always responsible for these faux-pas, but there is little otherwise in the book to comment on in terms of substance.

If you need pictures of green-ish schools, this is a great set of eye-candy. If you need information about how to design and build a sustainable school, look elsewhere (Fielding Nair's books, HOK Guidebook for Sustainable Design, etc).

Working with our local schools in a town which is growing quickly, this resource has been used in many of our meetings for us to someday imagine! I am on the local board of our sustainability/schools/garden etc. group and we have spent much time drooling over these types of books! Also as a photographer myself, the composition of the photos is quite lovely.
However, it is feasible in certain conditions, which we need to assess as pertains to our schools specifically in our region. But as far as dreaming, this book is excellent as it shows many possibilities for the future. A great idea I hope will continue to grow as it has in our school district! There is evenmore out there now than in 07 when this was written!