David Orr, professor and chairman of Oberlin College's environment studies program, said that at current rates, more buildings will be built in the next 50 years than were built in the last 5,000 years of human history.
These buildings must be eco-friendly and use resources responsibly, he said to the more than two dozen audience members in the Tate-Tuner-Kuralt Building.
Orr spoke about the benefits of creating environmentally friendly, or "green," buildings and said these buildings can be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. In his speech, Orr said the purpose of green buildings is to "cause no ugliness, human or ecological, somewhere else or some later time, (either) downwind or downstream."
Orr said that in 1995, he and other professors and students in Oberlin's environmental studies department decided they wanted their new environmental studies building to be eco-friendly. The group was able to decide what features the building would have by raising their own money.
The Adam J. Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, which cost almost $7.4 million, is home to its own solar power plant and waste water system. It also contains its own self-sustained wetlands, forest and a flag pole that indicates the winter and summer solstices as well as the equinoxes by its shadow. The building consumes less than 15 percent of the energy consumed by the average building in the country, he said.
Not including the power plant and water treatment system, the price tag of the building was roughly $250 per square foot, which is considered average, he said. But Orr said the building actually makes a profit because it can sell back the excess power it produces.
UNC officials said they have taken the Lewis building into consideration during this period of mass construction.
"Whenever we hire an architect, we take into consideration the amount of green building experience he has," said Cindy Pollock Shea, UNC's sustainability coalition coordinator, after Orr's speech. "In fact, the architect we hired for the Morrison (Residence Hall) renovations has extensive green building experience."
She also said three new buildings that will be built in the next couple of years will be green buildings: an addition to the Carrington Nursing Center, the Visitor Education Center at the Botanical Garden and the Global Center.
