Environmental design

Sustainability - Minimizing the environmental impact of human activities through the use of renewable resources, energy-efficient technologies, and eco-friendly materials.

Today, environmental design is applied across a wide range of scales, from small-scale residential projects to large-scale urban planning initiatives.

The first traceable concepts of environmental designs focused primarily on solar heating, which began in Ancient Greece around 500 BCE.

At the time, most of Greece had exhausted its supply of wood for fuel, leading architects to design houses that would capture the solar energy of the sun.

The practice of solar architecture continued with the Romans, who similarly had deforested much of their native Italian Peninsula by the first century BCE.

The Romans also used greenhouses to grow crops all year long and to cultivate the exotic plants coming from the far corners of the Empire.

The Greeks, Romans and Chinese developed curved mirrors that could concentrate the sun's rays on an object with enough intensity to make it burn in seconds.

Early roots of modern environmental design began in the late 19th century with writer/designer William Morris, who rejected the use of industrialized materials and processes in wallpaper, fabrics and books his studio produced.

From the middle of the twentieth century, thinkers like Buckminster Fuller have acted as catalysts for a broadening and deepening of the concerns of environmental designers.

Fanshawe College in London, Ontario Canada offers an honours bachelor's degree called "Environmental Design and planning.