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ETD Abstract Container

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Toward a Poetics of Green Building

Hughes, Jonathan
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1427981120

Abstract Details

2015, MARCH, University of Cincinnati, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture.
Green design is tightly focused on efficiency, renewable materials, and waste reduction. While these technical solutions improve the relationship between a building and the physical environment, they neglect the human relationship to the environment in the lived experience of place and ecology. This thesis is a phenomenological re-examination of green design, seeking the roots of human concern for ecology and an architectural means to promote a deeper and more thoughtful experienced relationship with the natural world. These concepts are applied to the design of a classroom building for the Wendell Berry School for Ecological Agrarianism at St. Catharine College in Springfield, KY. This thesis begins from the premise that human action and thought is rooted in lived experience: unexamined immediate contexts and ordinary relationships often have a more profound influence on our actions, moods, and values than abstract thought or principle. Thus architects, clients, and occupants develop their ecological values from relationships to specific environments, understood as natural places. By identifying the qualities and connections that direct care and concern toward non-human environments, architects can build to “re-present” the nature of a natural place, shaping the attention, feeling, and perhaps behavior of occupants. The revealing of this overlooked reality of place might be called a “Poetics”, in a classical sense. This project takes up conventional approaches to green design and re-interprets them to reveal environmental qualities and character to our ordinary understanding. Thus reimagined, green design is focused through six areas: Site / Context, Ecology and Biophilia, Materiality, Light and Daylight, the Flow of Water, and Thermal Conditions. The design of a school for sustainable farming in rural Central Kentucky is explored through these categories. By transcending the technical and returning to a focus on human experience, these ideas point beyond mere green building to the possibility of a green architecture.
John Eliot Hancock, M.Arch. (Committee Chair)
Michael McInturf, M.Arch. (Committee Member)
125 p.
Architecture
Sustainability; Phenomenology; Poetics; Green Design; Rural Sites

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Hughes, J. (2015). Toward a Poetics of Green Building [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1427981120

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Hughes, Jonathan. Toward a Poetics of Green Building. 2015. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1427981120.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Hughes, Jonathan. "Toward a Poetics of Green Building." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1427981120

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1427981120
248
© 2015, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Toward a Poetics of Green Building by Jonathan Hughes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.