Green Building and Sustainability Research Paper

Green Building and Sustainability - Research Paper Example The building life cycle entail; maintenance, design, renovation, operation and demolition. The United States green building council developed a set of rating system targeting operation, design and construction of such buildings. The rating system is called leadership in energy and environmental design (LEED). Green building focuses on finding the balance between sustainable and home building environment (Slessor & Linden, 2007).. The benefits of green buildings are unquestionable. The designers are able to develop harmless, environmentally friendly and energy efficient buildings. Unlike convectional building s which utilize too much of the natural resources, green building consumes renewable resources such as plants, rainwater and sunlight. Such buildings are usually certified by LEED. Some of the benefits of green buildings targets cost, energy efficient, water efficiency and material efficiency. Green buildings are usually expensive during construction period but many benefits are accrued during their usage. It has great benefit of reducing both the operating and embodied energy consumption (Gissen, 2003). Other forms of energy such as hydro and wind power are used to provide energy for consumption. Green buildings utilize rain water which is a renewable resource. The water used in the building is also recycled. On the other hand, green buildings present a number of limitations such as ineffective air cooling features. The materials utilized in building such houses are usually inadequate and may not be available in rural areas. The cost of constructing green buildings is usually high at the beginning even though it pays off during its lifetime (Engel-Yan et al,

The Turn of the Screw Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Turn of the Screw - Essay Example Hence, the prologue introduces the story as a long-kept secret that is about to be revealed. The secret as narrative strategy consists in the omission of information by the narrator, in order to maintain the narrative suspense among the readers, which can be compared to Douglas’s attitudes towards his audience. An atmosphere of mystery surrounds Douglas’s introduction of the story: his agitation, his reluctance to tell too many details (â€Å"You’ll easily judge†¦ you will† [24], â€Å"That will come out. I don’t anticipate† [28]) and his hiding of the governess’s manuscript before he decided to read it. From the prologue, it becomes obvious that the narrator is not only a subject who tells, but also a subject who allows herself/himself to remain silent. As soon as the narrator chooses â€Å"not to tell† everything, we notice that the great secret of the ghostly experience is made of a chain of â€Å"little† secrets, some of which are partially revealed (the cause of the former governess’s death, the reason of Miles’s expulsion from boarding school), whereas others remain untold, and the very ending of the story becomes a secret to the readers, that is, Miles’s death, a question that has generated a lot of interpretations among the scholars. Priscilla Walton assumes Miles’s death as a Pyrrhic victory of the governess’s over the ghost of Peter Quint, who possessed little Miles (315). She states that he died due to his conflict on sexualities. On the contrary, Teahan claims that Miles was strangled by the governess. The climax of the story coincides with the governess’s fatal â€Å"reading† of Miles: unable to tolerate the ambiguity of his failure to conform to her polarized stereotypes of the sexually innocent â€Å"angel† and corrupt â€Å"fiend†Ã¢â‚¬ ¦, she fixes his meaning by strangling him in a deadly literalization of the recurring metaphors of â€Å"seizing† and â€Å"grasping† that track her struggle