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Nick Hubof, senior architecture major at the University of Idaho is working toward a greener campus.
“What people don’t realize is that going green improves the quality of life,” said Hubof, who is also president of AIAS (American Institute of Architecture Students).
These benefits include anything from using passive energy and reducing costs to just being able to breathe better air.
AIAS recently won the National Architecture 2030 Reverberate Video competition, a competition rooted in inspiring individuals and architects to find ways to solve global
warming.
The team won a $4,000 prize for the silent production and they are planning to use the money in a variety of ways to be greener at a local level.
One of the ways proposed is to bring Edward Mazria, creator of the 2030 challenge, to campus.
AIAS vice president and senior architecture major, Jacob Dunn said the group might also install motion sensor lights to save energy or put more recycling equipment around campus.
At the National AIAS Forum in December, several AIAS students heard Mazria, present the impetus for the video and a challenge to address sustainable practices in architecture.
“We think of UI as a small school without much of a global impact. We just won a national competition,” Hubof said. “It’s amazing what we can do.”
The team entered two versions (one with sound and one without) of a film called “A Brighter Future.”
The 60-second film shows the team making an igloo, forming ice blocks with recycling bins.
It opens with asking the question “How do we free ourselves from coal?”
Dunn did the majority of the creative work for the video.
“We wanted it to be inspirational,” Dunn said. “It takes the right people, the right materials and the right attitude.”
The film uses glow sticks and fire to display different light sources and highlight messages like “Stop Coal” and “Architecture 2030” that flash periodically in the film. Hubof said that the film has several time lapses in it, making it very photogenic.
The soundtrack from one of the film’s versions was an original score written by a UI Architecture student using piano and sounds recorded of making the igloo.
“It’s a lot more fun to get people fired up about it,” Dunn said.
The competition also raised awareness about the “Architecture 2030 Challenge” that aims for everything from new construction to renovated structures to be carbon neutral (not using fossil fuels) by
the year 2030.
It is a nationwide movement — legislatures, cities, communities — to preserve the environment.
“It needs to come from the top down. Right now it’s coming from the bottom up,” Hubof said.
Dunn said that tax incentives would be one way to encourage being carbon neutral.
By 2010 the goal is to be 50 percent carbon neutral and to increase that percent yearly so that by 2030, everything will be 100 percent carbon neutral.
To follow the 2030 plan, any new renovations would need to meet criteria following green building initiatives.
“I’m optimistic,” Hubof said. “I believe it can happen.”
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