Sustainable living is one of the big buzz words in our modern culture, with new and fascinating ideas for buildings and architecture popping up everyday. I was first introduced to the idea of sustainable living when a friend told me about a new building design concept that friends of his had been designing for agriculture and food production. The building was to be twenty stories tall, with an acre of space on each floor. Each floor of the building would house its own unique environment for growing different kinds of foods and raising animals. All the water would be recycled from the top down and the building, if it worked right, was supposedly able to generate a daily allotment of 2,500 calories of food for 50,000 people.  They were hoping to build these buildings in arid countries where farming is difficult as a philanthropic endeavor.

When I first heard the concept, I was completely blown away. I had never thought of vertical farming or sustainable agriculture before. I had no idea that using a controlled environment like that could produce such a large amount of food, or that using new technologies of agriculture and farming, you could minimize waste and maximize food production.  From there, I had to do more research.  I had to see what other kinds of sustainable architecture designs were jumping out of people's minds and onto the drawing board.  I wish I would have saved some of the images I found awhile back.

But that's on a large scale. On a smaller scale, communities and regions are starting to go green, learning and educating themselves about waste prevention through composting and recycling, and using solar energy instead of plugging into the grid. There's even a new occupation in the workforce called a "green consultant"; a specialist responsible for the planning for a home or even for the layout of a city on how to maximize its energy efficiency and space usage, while minimizing its waste, using green technology programs and resources. It's very impressive.

But methods like these have only brought some satisfaction to the masses crying for sustainability. With the current designs in the architecture of urban homes, it's nearly impossible for homeowners to have an urban sustainable garden. There simply isn't room for it in an urban setting. That's why I love all the new ideas for sustainable building design that are coming out, like the picture above. It's almost space age in its complexity, but probably more than a little remarkably efficient. How cool would it be to have a garden on the roof? It would make sense. That's where the maximum exposure to sunlight is after all. Though Home Owners Associations at present would probably stone a poor homeowner to death for trying to put plants on their roof, the movement is pushing for things like that to start happening.

It will be interesting to see the synergy we come to in the future between old fashioned, traditional housing design, and the newer space aged designs coming out for sustainable architecture of buildings and homes. Though I can't see whole neighborhoods popping up in the style of the picture above anytime soon, as a culture, we're definitely moving more in the direction of sustainability. In some ways, a synergy already has arrived. Dome houses are beginning to pop up more and more across the country, like the one pictured to the right. Though they do look quite out of place the first time you see one in person, dome houses are remarkably more efficient, especially in saving electricity from heating.

As far as sustainable living goes, I'm not convinced that building sustainable houses and buildings for ourselves is the right direction for the future. In a lot of ways, I can see similarities between the spirit that drives sustainability and the idea of simplicity that Henry David Thoreau often advocated through his lifestyle and writings. I've heard that living simply is the new green, and I think there's a lot to be said for that. As Thoreau said best: "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity... We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without."

In the meantime, while we're all waiting patiently for sustainable architecture to build us space age homes and buildings, voluntary simplicity is something that we all could keep in mind. I'll end with another quote by Thoreau, one of my favorites. He said simply: "My greatest skill has been to want but little."