Nationally renowned architect Robin Guenther stressed the need for greener health facilities across the globe in her lecture Wednesday.
Guenther is responsible for helping design a number of health care facilities in New York City and was named the No. 1 designer in health care by Healthcare magazine in 2009.
In her presentation, titled "Sustainable Health Care Architecture: How Health Care is Responding to Ideas About Buildings and Health, Both Nationally and Globally," she said there are a few main reasons that make building sustainable hospitals so difficult.
"Sustainable buildings are about maintaining what we have," Guenther said. "It's not just about the buildings. It's about the stuff. Hospitals won't build sustainably if they still have styrofoam cups in their cafeteria."
Guenther said society has reached a point where it now has a fundamentally flawed cycle of consumption and production.
Landscape architecture graduate student Stephanie Donovan said she thinks it's important for professionals like Guenther to come to campus to share their expertise.
"We hear about these things in class or in books, but we need more exposure to it to really get it ground into us," she said.
Donovan said she enjoyed Guenther's message that everything should be regenerative and that materials, energy, plants and people should all be connected in some way.
That connection is important to the future of construction of sustainable buildings, especially in the medical field, Guenther said.
"We are losing our emotional bond to the natural world," she said. "Hospitals feel like they have a greater social responsibility than being green."
Guenther said buildings such as hospitals are the biggest consumers of energy and materials in the world and have to be made to have less impact on the environment.
According to a news release from the College of Architecture and Planning, Guenther has been working for more than 30 years to design environmentally sustainable medical facilities that allow medical officials to work as effectively as possible.
For more information about Guenther and the green projects she is involved with, go to gghc.org.
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