Sunday, 18 May 2008
Environmental friendly business in canada-10 Ways to Make Your Business Environmentally Friendly
Green Business is Good for the Bottom Line
Operating a green business is not only good for the environment but good for your business's bottom line because conserving resources and cutting down on waste saves money. The good news is that whether you run a home-based business or an off-site enterprise, there are simple things you can do to run an environmentally friendly business.
Recycling is the first thing that comes to mind when we think of being environmentally friendly. And recycling is important. But recycling is only one part of the environmentally friendly business equation. We can also take a large step towards being more environmentally friendly by reducing the amounts of waste in our offices and business operations.
Here are just ten easy-to-implement ideas for running a green business from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade's Greening Operations guides that you can put into practice right now to make your office a more environmentally friendly place:
1. Turn off equipment when it's not being used. This can reduce the energy used by 25 percent; turning off the computers at the end of the day can save an additional 50 percent.
2. Encourage communications by email, and read email messages onscreen to determine whether it's necessary to print them. If it's not, don't!
3. Reduce fax-related paper waste by using a fax-modem and by using a fax cover sheet only when necessary.Fax-modems allow documents to be sent directly from a computer, without requiring a printed hard copy.
4. Produce double-sided documents whenever possible.
5. Do not leave taps dripping; always close them tightly after use. (One drop wasted per second wastes 10,000 litres per year.)
6. Install displacement toilet dams in toilet reservoirs. Placing one or two plastic containers filled with stones [not bricks] in the toilet's reservoir will displace about 4 litres of water per flush - a huge reduction of water use over the course of a year.
7. Find a supply of paper with maximum available recycled content.
8. Choose suppliers who take back packaging for reuse.
9. Instigate an ongoing search for "greener" products and services in the local community. The further your supplies or service providers have to travel, the more energy will be used to get them to you.
10. Before deciding whether you need to purchase new office furniture, see if your existing office furniture can be refurbished. It's less expensive than buying new and better for the environment.
Celebrate Walter Gropius's 125th Birthday
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of Bauhaus. Along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of "modern" architecture.
Life
Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third son of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber. Gropius married Alma Mahler (1879-1964), widow of Gustav Mahler. Walter and Alma's daughter, named Manon after Walter's mother, was born in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age eighteen, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her (it is inscribed "to the memory of an angel"). Gropius and Alma divorced in 1920. (Alma had by that time established a relationship with Franz Werfel, whom she later married.) In 1923 Gropius married Ise Frank (d. 1983), and they remained together until his death. They adopted Beate Gropius, also known as Ati. Gropius, like his father and great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, was an architect. But all sources agree that Walter Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters all through his career. In school he hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. In 1908 Gropius found employment with the firm of Peter Behrens, one of the first members of the utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Dietrich Marcks. In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin. Together they share credit for one of the seminal modernist buildings created during this period, the Faguswerk, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe lace factory. The glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflects function and Gropius's concern with providing healthful conditions for the working class. Other works of this early period include the office and factory building for the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) in Cologne.Gropius's career was interrupted by the outbreak of the first world war in 1914. Called up immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years, was wounded and almost killed.[1] Ironically the war provided an opportunity which would advance his career during the post war period. Henry van de Velde, the master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar was asked to step down in 1915 due to his Belgian nationality. His recommendation of Gropius to succeed him led eventually to Gropius's appointment as master of the school in 1919. It was this academy which Gropius transformed into the world famous Bauhaus, attracting a faculty which included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbet Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky. Students were taught to use modern and innovative materials and mass-produced fittings, often originally intended for industrial settings, to create original furniture and buildings.
Also in 1919, Gropius was involved in the Glass Chain utopian expressionist correspondence under the pseudonym 'Mass'. Usually more notable for his functionalist approach, the "Monument to the March Dead", designed in 1919 and executed in 1920, indicates that expressionism was an influence on him at that time.
In 1923, Gropius aided by Gareth Steele, designed his famous door handles, now considered an icon of 20th century design and often listed as one of the most influential designs to emerge from the Bauhaus. He also designed large scale housing projects in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Dessau from 1926-32 that were major contributions to the New Objectivity movement.
With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to get out of Germany in 1934, on the pretext of making a temporary visit to Britain. He lived and worked in Britain, as part of the Isokon group with Fry and others and then, in 1937, moved on to the United States. The house he built for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US but Gropius disliked the term: "I made it a point to absorb into my own conception those features of the New England architectural tradition that I found still alive and adequate" (see [1]).
Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé Marcel Breuer both moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on the company-town Aluminum City Terrace project in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, before their professional split. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
In 1945, Gropius founded The Architects' Collaborative (TAC) based in Cambridge with a group of younger architects. The original partners included Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, Robert S. MacMillan, Louis A. MacMillen, and Benjamin C. Thompson. TAC would become one of the most well-known and respected architectural firms in the world. TAC went bankrupt in 1995.
Gropius died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86. Today, he is remembered not only by his various buildings but also by the district of Gropiusstadt in Berlin.
In the early 1990s, a series of books entitled The Walter Gropius Archive was published covering his entire architectural career.
Important buildings
- 1910–1911 the Fagus Factory, Alfeld an der Leine, Germany
- 1914 Office and Factory Buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition, 1914, Cologne, Germany
- 1921 Sommerfeld House, Berlin, Germany designed for Adolf Sommerfeld
- 1922 competition entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition
- 1925–1932 Bauhaus School and Faculty, Housin, Dessau, Germany
- 1936 Village College, Impington, Cambridge, England
- 1937 The Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA
- 1942–1944 Aluminum City Terrace housing project, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, USA
- 1949–1950 Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (The Architects' Collaborative) [2]
- 1957–1960 University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
- 1963–1966 John F. Kennedy Federal Office Building, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- 1948 Peter Thacher Junior High School,
- 1958–1963 Pan Am Building (now the Metlife Building), New York, New York, with Pietro Belluschi and project architects Emery Roth & Sons
- 1957 Interbau Apartment blocks, Hansaviertel, Berlin, Germany, with The Architects' Collaborative and Wils Ebert
- 1961 The award-winning Wayland High School, Wayland, Massachusetts, USA
- 1959–1961 Embassy of the United States, Athens, Greece (The Architects' Collaborative and consulting architect Pericles A. Sakellarios)
- 1967–69 Tower East Shaker Heights, Ohio, this was Gropius last major project.
The building in Niederkirchnerstraße, Berlin, known as the Gropius-Haus is named for Gropius' great-uncle, Martin Gropius, and is not associated with Bauhaus.
Monument to the March Dead (1920) in Weimar, Germany.
Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
A late work of Gropius:The Embassy of the United States in Athens
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