LIFE+STYLE


 * Building Green AND Building For Our Needs**

One important thing architects must remember when designing green buildings is that PEOPLE ARE GOING TO USE THEM! I'm saying this because a number of green buildings seem to be built as a showcase for the green technology not as a living or working space.

Here is an anonymous example of a Case where this happened:

The urinals don't use water. Instead they use a liquid that is administered once and a while. This causes the urinals to get stinky and all the middle schooler students- er... people who go there are grossed out. > >>
 * The lights are ONLY motion sensing. This is great for conservation of energy, and I don’t mind waving my hands around once and awhile to keep the lights on, but there is no obvious way of turning off the lights in rooms to make the rooms dark for presentations. Either the building should be rewired so the lights can be turned off manually orsomeone should tell the employees how to turn the lights off using the weird buttons on the walls.
 * The CLC... er... big multi-purpose building has a few problems
 * During the 8th grade dance... er... big social gathering, the lights cannot be dimmed. (This is not a major flaw due to the fact that the architect didn't know this was necessary. Besides, I only heard about this due to the fact I was watching Star Wars: Episode III with my friends at the time.)
 * There were about four electrical outlets for the robotics and technology lab. Think about it: the computers for programming the robots need electricity with more than twenty computers in the room... Hmm… Either the architect did not know the building was going to be for robotics, or he forgot about it. Either way, bad design.
 * The entire complex doesn’t have AC. It has something that is much more expensive and complicated called "climate control". The climate control is designed that all the rooms have freezing air coming in from a state of the art frozen piece of ice even when it raining and cloudy outside. Why can't we control the temperature of the room? I'm not exactly an expert on climate control, but I am pretty sure you could at least add some sort of flap that you could control to keep the cold air from entering the room.
 * And what about using that block of ice to cool the building? When people were there at night preparing for a competition the next day, the entire CC system shut down. Yes, I know that it is cooler at night so we didn't need the AC as much, but it was still quite warm and the evening was muggy.
 * The lights in this complex are left on all night. I thought the lights were motion sensing. One would think that this would be for security reasons, but looking at the older buildings (including the building that used to be a girls' dormitory a long time ago) many of the lights in the classrooms are off. The only lights that are on are the ones where cleaning people are cleaning (Where would we be without these people?)

All in all, the building is very nice. It looks like a mall... A really NICE mall. There are, unfortunately, a few "bugs" that should have been fixed (I mean, who's idea was it to not add a covered area at the two main pickups?)

In conclusion: Punahou School should build greener buildings, which would save money, however we should also cater to the people who work in these structures. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice the ability to work and play in these buildings. I propose that not only we think about how to use technology to make our campus greener, but to also ask the people "what do you need?". This wiki is the perfect place to discuss this matter along with the environmental concerns. We (and more importantly, the administration) must remember that the building doesn’t matter as much as what is going on in them.

//(In case you didn’t realize, the building I was mentioning was Case Middle School. If some of the bugs were fixed, oops, sorry. Just telling you from what I remembered from my half year of being in the building.)//