Regeneration architecture

Abstract

In a world of excess, people rarely stop to realize their impact on their environments. Our built environment is especially feeling the effect of our irresponsibility, and the solution is only a matter of re-wiring our perceptions of energy usage. Many technologies make it possible to have the impossible, but nobody stops to question whether or not these advances are beneficial. A presumably sustainable system turned out to be one of the most energy wasteful ones in existence. In the complex process of getting food from the field to your house, the best solution is to simplify. Nature will do most of the work; we need to learn to work with it. Current building practices can benefit greatly from this concept, to rethink the existing process by simply cutting out the unneeded steps and using the free energy available to us every day. Our values need to change. Because the corporation controls so much of our daily lives, they are the ones that will bring about the change in consciousness we desperately need. By re-designing Sysco headquarters to do everything that the company claims to do (and currently doesn't), and interact with the public in a new and radical way, not only can we make changes to how we think about the built environment, but we can also start to show that a change in awareness is entirely possible. If we can change the values of those that make the biggest differences in our world, then we've effectively changed an entire populations' way of thinking.