Origins of Green Design

Green design or otherwise known as sustainable design originated from ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese in 500 BCE. The evolution of sustainable design focuses on the position of the sun. Houses where designed in ways that the sunlight during summer was diffused light and during the winter direct light. This caused the practice of solar architecture to be popular among the citizens of each region. Current sustainable design is a form of building or design using your resources of the location as well as the materials to the environments advantage. The practice of solar architecture continued with the Romans, who similarly had deforested much of their native Italian Peninsula by the first century BCE. The Roman heliocaminus, literally solar furnace, functioned with the same aspects of the earlier Greek houses. The numerous public baths were oriented to the south. Roman architects added glass to windows to allow for the passage of light and to conserve interior heat as it could not escape. The Romans also used greenhouses to grow crops all year long and to cultivate the exotic plants coming from the far corners of the Empire. The green houses supplied the kitchen of the emperor and everyone in the town during the year.

The ancient architects have left more than just buildings. After the epic industrial revolution era buildings were design to ornate the streets of the world. Ever since than much of the green house affects has cause the 21th century population to rethink the idea of building and retrieve to the roots and ideology of architecture from ancient Roman, Greek, and Chinese. For example the state of California has implemented to their most current building codes to in force sustainable design. The influence that ancient architects left are use to benefit the environment and the population. Today, energy efficiency, appropriate technology, land restoration, and ecologically sustainable energy and waste systems are recognized considerations or options to construction, architecture and design. Currently in the United States the LEED building rating system rates the structures on their environmental sustainability.