Renowned Danish Architect Jan Gehl Advocates for Reducing the Energy Consumption in Buildings

Jul 12

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This video shows an interview with Danish architect Jan Gehl who is an urban designer consultant based in Copenhagen and whose career has focused on improving the quality of urban life by re-orienting city design towards the pedestrian and cyclist. He is a founding partner of Gehl Architects. Gehl received a Masters of Architecture from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Gehl advocates a sensible, straightforward approach to improving urban form: systematically documenting urban spaces, making gradual incremental improvements, then documenting them again. He has received many architectural awards among others Landscape Institute Award, NYC Award, Civic Trust Award. He is also a Honorary Member of American Institute of Architects. During the interview he advocates for reducing the energy consumption in buildings.

The architect explains that first we form the cities then they form us and our quality of life. He adds that for many years all over the world we have build our buildings as if that were endless access to resources and calories to heat them and electricity or power to supply them. Because this is the major source of energy use in this world he thinks it is very necessary to address the issue and build the buildings of new kind. They consume much less energy, have a better indoor climate and a number of other things. He adds that also we have to go back to the best old buildings which we have inherited and make sure that those buildings are being renovated and made more sustainable.

Gehl convinces that it is very obvious that as time goes by more and more architects, developers and clients become more interested about demanding highest standards as regards to sustainability and the new buildings. He thinks that is really worldwide movement towards that the new building are much better than the old ones.

He thinks that people will have to push for sustainable buildings even if we have finical crisis in these years. Because we have to save all that uniqueness of old type of buildings and that is really a must. This is also a great savings in economic perspective. He convinces that this is also something which could be an agenda in a time in economics.