ABOUT SMART BUILDING AND COMMUNITY DESIGN
The Center Serves To:
- Provide knowledge and information on achieving energy, water, and waste independence in community planning and development
- Conduct research on designs that reduce construction and maintenance costs while reducing environmental impact
- Engage the university community in reducing campus energy use and water consumption and introduce green building practices
Resulting In:
- Communities that are economically viable and environmentally sustainable while supporting social and cultural diversity
What is Smart Building?
“Smart Building” is the process of designing and constructing a structure while considering how it will interact with its inhabitants and its environment. Is it a nice place to work? Is it an efficient place to work? Does it take advantage of natural lighting or does it block natural light and require artificial lighting? Does it use natural ventilation or does it require expensive mechanical ventilation? Does it improve, remain neutral to, or negatively impact the surrounding landscape and ecosystems? Is it energy and resource efficient? Will it last? These are all important questions when designing a building.
What is Community Design?
“Community Design” takes a holistic approach to development, and is mindful that neighborhoods, towns, cities, and even larger systems can be made or broken by their design. Community design not only benefits the human users of a space, but helps preserve and enhance the natural environment as well. Community Design includes the concept of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) which takes advantage of and promotes mass transit systems by placing appealing districts that mix housing, retail, and office space around rail stations and making these systems easy to access and use. A very important facet of community design is that they are developed with extensive community input to ensure that they best serve the people who will live in or interact with these designs on a daily basis.
Learn more about the Smart Building & Community Design.
Center for Smart Building & Community Design
2525 Correa Road, HIG 205
Honolulu, HI 96822
Phone: (808) 956-2861
Director
Wendy Meguro
meguro@hawaii.edu
Project and Partnership Coordinator
Eileen Peppard
epeppard@hawaii.edu
Each pattern represents a Center of Excellence. Learn more about the cultural connections and meanings behind them.