Ideas Lab

Thomas Gentry approached one of the biggest problems of anyone we have talked to so far. The goal of making buildings more sustainable has been a research goal for a while now, with each researcher taking a different approach to the problem. For Thomas, this meant breaking the problem down into three different focus areas, economic, cultural, and technological. While this doesn’t make the problem any smaller, it allows Thomas to orient his research to one of those areas, and make it much less abstract than just the overall goal of green architecture. With each individual project that the IDEAS lab pursues he can hack away at a small part of the problem with the ultimate goal of contributing to a greater solution. The only disadvantage to this approach is that it makes any summation of the individual projects seem disjointed.

I appreciated that his approach focuses on solving small attainable problems, such a low income housing as an alternative to the unified “fix all our problems” theories that architectural research usually seems to pursue. Unlike most design problems that typically revolve around the better way to make spaces the research of the IDEAs lab is measurable, quantifiable, and can thus be optimized. With each project Thomas focuses on optimizing the problem just a little bit, to get people to pay closer attention to how much energy they are using, or reducing the potential energy usage by spending a little bit more on appliances. It’s all much easier to swallow then the usual hand waving that goes along with solar, wind, geothermal solutions.