Green UnseenEnvironmentally friendly buildings don't need to look like cheese wedges.

Remarks from the Fray:

I was happy that Witold made a distinction that has clearly been lacking in much of the green architecture hype from the last few years, namely the difference between designing a building in the eco-friendly style (so that it looks its part) and designing a building whose technology actually conserves building materials, makes the building energy efficient etc. Witold takes the not unreasonable position that a large amount of energy savings can be generated from a combination of Vitruvius and unintrusive technologies. The idea of orienting according to solar patterns and climate goes all the way back to the Romans; we've just forgotten about it since the invention of air-conditioning.

Nevertheless, there may be a perfectly good reason to design a building that adopts an eco-style, as well as eco-technology. If we turn back the clock to the first machine age, we see modern architects adopting a machine style that sought to participate in the spirit of new technology and industrialization and project into the future a radical new society organized around and by these technologies. Their buildings were meant to look shocking, because they wanted to push people towards a change of consciousness that was necessary for this new way of life. These ideas, that architecture could radically transform a way of life, that technology would usher in a utopia, may look naive now. On the other hand, technology did transform the way we live, just not in ways anticipated by the architects, and not necessarily for the better. And further, the visual impact of many of the buildings still resonates today.

It is just this kind of revolutionary attitude that is behind the "look" of buildings like William McDonough's at Oberlin. McDonough is not content to merely make our buildings more energy-efficient; in the long run, he doesn't think that's going to save us from imminent global catastrophe. He wants us to radically transform our way of life, and his buildings, which look radically different, symbolize that, just as buildings in the machine age pointed to a new way of life.

In this sense, it's wrong for Witold to evoke "sustainability" in a critique of McDonough's architecture. McDonough himself eschews the word, because it suggests status quo, rather than radical transformation. In his book Cradle-to-Cradle, McDonough envisions an alternative social and economic system at odds with our current wasteful one, in which items are truly recycled rather than down-cycled, our mailbox becomes our trashbin, etc, etc. His buildings symbolically point to this new way of life. […]

Indeed how does Witold determine what form a building should take?

Judging from the buildings he holds up as exemplars, if it's an institutional building, like Stern's, it seems we should turn to the historical styles, to reap the associations that go with the style, namely good, wholesome American values. If it's a house, make it look domestic according to already established social codes. Thus, if it's in the suburbs, apparently it needs to blend into the bland builder-erected subdivisions that sprawl across our continent. […] If you're making an office building, apparently all you have to do is make sure the building "is a nice place to work."

These are the games of an architect who has no social purpose, but to prop up the status quo, no matter what the status quo is.

--slippedvoussoir

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It's hard to judge progress by looking at big-name examples, such as that truly bizarre Hearst Building. Big-name public architecture seems to be designed first and foremost to create a brand for the architect rather than meet client needs. And the trickle-down of this attitude is widespread in architecture.

The residence building at the Hotchkiss school was much more encouraging ... incorporate the green functionality in well-established classic designs. An even better step would be if the architect's name wasn't even on it, to reduce the chance of an ego-trip.

--bubba_barry

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While I found this presentation interesting starting with research buildings and moving to more conventional designs, I must point out that the energy consumption per square foot in many green buildings seems to get less value than the green materials and the environment that the building creates. Typically, the use of clear glass creates severe overheating problems requiring cooling and in some cases heat from fluorescent lighting can require air conditioning year round in a tall tower office building.

I hope that the new buildings are provisioning themselves for the future by including elements like structural mounting points for roof-mounted solar collectors thus eliminating the need to cut holes in the roofing, daylighting lighting tubes or fiber optics can bring in natural light, and heat recovery/ fresh air makeup can also be preheated reducing winter energy use.

--Peter Lowenthal

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(7/18)

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