This semester, I am teaching a 25-student elective course on sustainable (“green”) building design within the Department of Architecture. It is a research-based course where the students and I investigate various aspects of sustainable design, including materials, processes, local built works and construction details. When I first taught this course two years ago, students presented their research using Powerpoint. The presentation files were then loaded onto the course’s WebCT site for the class to utilize. Although this process made the information available to the students in the class, its usability unfortunately ended there.

Sustainability is an extremely important topic in current architectural design. It is being integrated into the Department’s curriculum at all levels, reflecting the profession’s growing concern for the environment. When I saw the website developed by Prof. Andrew Johnston and LTS’s Monique Fuchs for a fourth year course, I saw an opportunity to make my students’ research beneficial to a greater audience. Now, students in the course are building a shared website to contain their research and allow it to be available for use by other students who may be integrating sustainable design into their studio projects. In addiAs the research projects are not printed but instead presented and graded on-line, the class becomes almost paperless. Though a “paperless” class isn’t a probable solution for every course, it works well and seems particularly appropriate for a course on sustainable design.

The introduction of website design (using Adobe GoLive software) into the architecture program started only three years ago, so many of the older students in the course had little or no experience with it. To solve this problem, I followed the fourth year course website as an example; I created a general structure for the site and template pages for the students to design and fill with their own information. In this way, students who had little background in website design could learn just a few basic tools and effectively build their own web pages. OIT set up the server space with a name provided by the class, and all students can access the server space as needed using a common password. Two students in the course are also involved with the design of the site, and in fact created the initial concept for the graphic format.

Currently, the first two of four projects are complete and posted on the site: sustainable building materials (wood, earth, etc) and sustainable building processes (day-lighting, passive cooling, etc.). Two more projects on local sustainable buildings and their construction details will be added in the upcoming weeks.

Though the site is up and running, it is in a continuous process of development, so you’ll have to forgive the blank pages and incomplete graphics. It can be found at myweb.wit.edu/viridis. Viridis, Latin for “green,” will continue to evolve until the end of this semester and hopefully through future semesters. Though the site developed a little too late to be a full resource for other students this semester, I hope that it will provide easy-to-access sustainable design information—written by and for students—in the semesters to come.