Reducing our office footprint: Continuing the discussion from Landscape Architecture Magazine

What oath? I attended school and I had to to pay a boat load of $$$ to take the exams. I don’t remember taking an oath. Did you? I worked in a landscape architecture office in 2004-2007. The principals bought “company” cars. One was a Ford Expedition and the other a full size pick-up truck. I was dumbfounded. I thought landscape architects would make more environmental choices but Bush offered a big tax break for vehicles over a certian GVW. They went with the biggest car because of the tax break.

I haven’t read the article yet.
In the dry western states, it can sometimes be fairly easy to heat and cool a building passively. A lot depends on the design of the building, of course. In the first office I worked in, cooling the place was just a matter of opening doors and windows in the early morning and closing them before it got hot. There was no humidity in the air in Reno, so this worked fairly well. There was no air conditioner, but we were never uncomfortable in the summer. It wasn’t just that we were used to it, either. We got plenty of comments about how cool it was by people coming into the office for the first time. The problem was heating the building in the winter, because it was downstairs and got very little sun.
At the second office I worked in, I never bothered to try passively heating or cooling, since I probably would have been laughed at by my coworkers. But I did try it in my apartment. It took some experimentation, but I finally realised I could cool it in the summer by opening the windows during the day, then closing them before I went to work and keeping the door to the south facing kitchen closed during the day. It worked fairly well, and I never needed an AC. The building wasn’t even designed for passive heating and cooling.
I admit this works best in areas with very little humidity, but there are probably strategies for it in other parts of the country. Otherwise, our ancestors would have boiled or frozen, and we wouldn’t be here. I also admit it works best in a building designed to do it. In some cases, this sort of thing would probably have to be supplemented by heating and air conditioning. Even if that is the case, every little bit that you can passively heat and cool takes some of the load off the heaters and AC’s. Once you have a strategy, it’s not too much more complicated than switching on a AC.

I would actually echo what Andrew stated in the first part of his reply. I’m also not sure if this issue isn’t merely a diversion from the more important and meaningful issues regarding the practice.

I’m not sure where landscape architects fit into ‘office greening’ when our palette is primarily outdoors. Also, I would agree that our work, collectively, is more impactful than ‘changing a few light bulbs.’