Essay on Design Awareness

From the story, the rationale behind the design of the Bullitt Centre in Seattle was the unsustainability associated with current cities given the continued shift to urban settlements by the majority of the people across the globe (News, 2018). In a nutshell, the design has been prompted by the necessity of solving inhabitance and environmental issues that have risen from the settlement patterns of the current population, which concurs with Herbert Simons definition of design. According to Huppatz (2015), Simon claims that every designers ultimate goal is to change the existing situations to preferred ones, and this is only made possible by devising a course of action to realize it. Simon further argues that a design is a problem solving and process-oriented action that uses these components to glue these parameters with social sciences.

The story shows that the main idea behind the Bullitt Centres architects is to create an environmentally friendly building that is able to reduce the amount of energy used by a third by produce generate its own solar energy. The buildings designers also aim at cutting down the buildings demand for external water supply by installing infrastructure that not only harvests maximum water from rainfall but also treats the wastewater produced inside the building. In addition to the mentioned limitations of current buildings in the cities, the designers also look to increase the design life to over six times the current design life of 40 years. This will make the structure even more sustainable because the proposed benefits can be stretched over a longer period of time, which translates to an improved utilization of resources. All these solutions proposed by the designers basically align with Simons primary definition of what design should be about, a problem-solving action.

According to Polllio (1914) on the Vitruvian triad of designing, the designer must ensure that a structure is able to exhibit solidness, usefulness and aesthetics. Regarding the solidness of the structure, the proposed office block possesses durability as the key-differentiating component from the current buildings. From the story, the buildings life is projected to be 250 years, which is way beyond the current 40 years. On the usefulness, the Bullitt Centre will mark a paradigm shift in terms of how structures can sustain their energy and critical resources consumption. On that, the Centre will have three distinguished components, that is, water harvesting, green energy generation and recycling of its wastewater. Regarding aesthetics, apart from the exquisite solar roof with extended eaves that forms a surround-canopy, the artistic impression of the proposed building shows a great usable space. The fact that the building does not have vehicle parking space, only bike racks, it does not only create a unique and beautiful use of space but also it introduces an environmental consciousness aspect to the building.

Perhaps the most critical component of the Bullitt design, from the story, is the sustainability of the key resources, that is, the water and energy consumption of the building. Essentially, if the designers objectives of solving a problem are to be fully achieved, these two components have to go hand in hand. It would not even be economically justifiable to invest on water harvesting and wastewater recycling if the building was still to use energy from the grid because of the wastewater recycling process consumes a considerable amount of energy. Therefore, to fully realize the design goals from Simons approach, I concur that these two components are fundamentally the subjects of concern as illustrated in the story.

References

Huppatz, D. J. (2015). Revisiting Herbert Simon's science of design. Design Issues, 31(2), 29-40.

News, U. (2018). Could this $30 million green tower be the future of world cities?. U.S. News. Retrieved 16 January 2018, from http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/03/20/10226909-could-this-30-million-green-tower-be-the-future-of-world-cities

Pollio, V. (1914). Vitruvius: The ten books on architecture. Harvard university press.