Can a building be design in away that offers all the best in energy efficiency to the best of current technology but also offers true harmony with its environment?

Can we design buildings that work only by natural daylight and fresh air without reliance on fossil fuel technology and resources? What if this building could also adapt itself to certain weather patterns, seasons and natural user patterns?

Yes it can be designed, and such an intuitive building has in fact been recently built by NASA. NASA’s ‘Sustainability Base’ is a building which is one step closer to making bio inspired architecture a sustainable mainstream reality. Using technology originally developed for space travel, NASA has designed a 50,000 square foot (4,650 square metres) testing base and workspace right here on Earth to showcase the best of sustainable technology and to establish a living testing ground for innovative sustainable green technology.

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The result of a 2007 competition, the Sustainability Base has been designed by NASA in collaboration with architects William McDonough + Partners and AECOM to be one of the greenest federal buildings in the US. The approach takes the design beyond environmental stewardship and conservation taking the leap towards contribution offering benefits back to nature and humans. Through a combination of innovative design and leading-edge technology, Sustainability Base generates all the power it needs to operate and uses 90 percent less potable water than traditional buildings of similar size.

The narrow plan and building’s orientation take advantage of the sun and prevailing winds to allow for natural ventilation and lighting virtually year-round using ancient but simple (and often overlooked) passive design measures. The building also generates most of its own electricity through a variety of photovoltaics, wind turbines and the use of a highly efficient and innovative fuel cell that converts natural gas into energy to supplement periods of high energy use or low generation.

The designers claim that the building goes beyond being a ‘smart building’ and moves into the realm of intuitiveness. The building is able to anticipate and react to changes in sunlight, temperature, and usage.

As is expected by the involvement of Bill McDonough, the Sustainability Base is Being Designed with Cradle to Cradle principles in mind. Cradle to Cradle is an approach to the waste free design of systems. To the extent possible, the materials used in its contraction will go back to either nature or industry at the end of their life cycles to create virtually no waste.

» Principles of Cradle to Cradle Design

Some of the innovative Technology Used in the building is:
Intelligent Building Controls to control manage an adjust building’s systems to suit specific needs and usage patterns.
Forward Osmosis Water Recycling System to recycle grey water and reuse it to flush toilets and urinals
Computational Fluid Dynamics to optimise the buildings ventilation movements through and around it.
Prognostics to reduce the building’s running costs.

The building is now complete and is being tested to highlight NASA’s technology and ingenuity and to evaluate the latest in sustainability approaches. The hope is to allow these technologies to dominate and disseminate these design principles to ultimately benefit the people of planet earth as we seek for more sustainable solutions and we move forward and deeper into the critical 21st Century.

More info : NASA Sustainability Base.