mind body planet

Cornell madness

So this week has been a lot of fun and I wish you all could have been here with me in the wonderful Ithaca, New York, but unfortunately we can’t all be in paradise or it would be quite crowded. I finished off my final day today with a very interesting trip on to the campus where my friend Mckenzie will be getting her masters degree. This was an invitational so different departments were set up around campus handing out promotional items and pamphlets about their programs. The Cornell campus is amazing. It is probably the most beautiful college campus I have ever seen. The whole campus is built around a lake and the gorges that have rivers carving through them. The main path is a big loop around the whole thing and it is mostly shaded and surrounded by rivers and beautiful plants that are native as well as planted. There is one section of campus just devoted to gardens and each one has a theme. Each one displays plants of the various seasons. Of course the spring garden did not look so well since it is quite hot right now, but the rest looked really beautiful. May favorite was the one called the plantation which was devoted strictly to those plants one would find on a Caribbean or South American plantation style farm. That was the first time I had ever seen a banana tree or a coffee bush, and when I saw them I was sort of struck by the influence these sort of invisible plants have had on my own life. As we walked around the campus we came upon her building where she will have her office and take most of her classes. Right behind the building is a huge construction site and I was a little curious so I asked about it.

The building that is going up on the campus is what is called a Leed certified building. Basically this building was designed to fit the criterion of the LEED certification of energy efficiency. The United States Green Building Council has laid out a strict set of guidelines that are meant to constraint the building design to make it as clean and efficient as possible. The certification goes on a scale from just certification all the way up to a platinum status for the best designs. The rating goes on credits given for things like Sustainable sites, Water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovation and design. All of these things are weighed together to see what kind of impact this building has during its construction as well as what kind of impact it will have as it stands. I think that this is amazing for Cornell and I hope to see more buildings doing this in the future. For now though this is the first one that I have seen.

I just wanted to leave that trip for you all with a nice pleasant note for the future of Ithaca. It will just keep getting better up there are hopefully here as well.