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Third World Hospitals May Get Greener Before Ours Do
By Erica Westly | January 29, 2010
Credit: Golden Section Graphics
An article I co-authored on green hospitals for Fast Company is online now (it was for the Feb. issue, and looks way better in print than web, but so it goes). In the course of reporting the article, I got to speak to Perkins+Will architect Jean Mah, and one of the things I thought was really cool but didn’t make it into this particular piece was the fact that implementing sustainable architecture practices may actually be easier in developing nations than here in the US. Take, for example, the hospital Perkins+Will is helping design in Sri Lanka: There was no pre-existing energy infrastructure in place at the location, so Mah and her colleagues were forced (or maybe the right word is able) to start from scratch. They used biodigestors to create a sustainable energy source for the hospital, and there wound up being enough energy left over to power the community as well. This is not to say that the US would be better off without its energy infrastructure, but it’s easy to see how those layers of development can hinder new sustainable design practices, especially when the projects in question involve hospitals, one of the largest and most complex building-types.
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