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Sustainable building design evolves with help of annual MUM EcoFair
by Global Good News staff writer

Global Good News    Translate This Article
19 June 2012

In a tour of the new Sustainable Living Center on the Maharishi University of Management campus, architect Jon Lipman spoke of the building's history.

The design was created with the head of the university's Sustainable Living academic degree programme, David Fisher, around seven years ago. At that time, the programme only had a handful of students. Mr Lipman was unsure the building would ever be constructed, but he remarked that Mr Fisher was completely committed to the vision.

The idea came to fruition with the rise in popularity of the Sustainable Living programme and with a fresh wave of designers.

Mr Lipman said, 'Then a fantastic team of people joined in the design, most notably a firm called Innovative Design, which specializes in high-performance buildings. They did the construction drawings and engineering for the building.'

Help also came from Lonnie Gamble, a professor in the Sustainable Living programme and great authority on photovoltaics and energy-efficient design.

Over the course of the seven years since the building's conception, the design changed and evolved. Whenever they came into contact with new information, Mr Lipman said, they would rush to update the design.

Of special inspiration were the speakers at MUM's annual EcoFair, an education conference organized and hosted by Maharishi University of Management students to highlight the latest developments in the world of sustainability. Four speakers in particular greatly shaped the final direction of the building. (Upcoming articles will highlight these contributions.)

Though the design evolved, Mr Lipman revealed that the goal of the building stayed the same.

'[Mr Fischer] wanted a building that would completely honour sustainable living, which is to say that it would be built of local materials as much as possible, have an extremely low carbon footprint, be made of natural materials, and would be a building that would teach the students. There would actually be things about the physical structure of the building that could be used to teach sustainable living to the students. [The building] would also demonstrate the unity of environmental design, energy-efficient design, and Maharishi Vastu' architecture.

© Copyright 2012 Global Good News®



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