He notes that the bias against the “aesthetic” runs deep in our profoundly utilitarian age. But as we are beginning to realize, it’s that this most “utilitarian” civilization in history is paradoxically one of the most blind.
Aesthetic concerns actually get at the functionality of a system, at the very essence and meaning of life.
For example, by eliminating the smaller, human scale, modernist architecture has created both an aesthetic and a practical problem simultaneously. The architectural norms of hulking glass and soulless concrete plazas were neither scientific nor progressive; they were totemic, an expression of abstraction and ideology rather than real efficiencies of scale.
Polycarpou ends by reframing the question of industrial agriculture versus relocalization:
Given that industrial agriculture and suburban sprawl are based on scales which are so unnatural in both organic and human terms – so disconnected, so structurally compromised – maybe the proper question should be, how is something so dysfunctional sustained? So far the answer has been: with massive financial capital, huge expenditures of energy, and sheer force of will. What will happen when at least two of those three forces start to dry up? Maybe we should look to aesthetics to give as a clue.
In this 22-minute film architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account “all children, all species, for all time.” He explains his philosophy of “cradle to cradle” design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics. He also shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world’s largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the entire sustainable cities he’s designing in China.
Energy use is at the heart of global warming. There are two sides to energy use, supply and demand, so any viable solution must address both sides of this coin. On the supply side, Mazria there must be first a US and then a global moratorium on the construction of any new conventional coal plants, and the gradual phasing out of existing coal plants by 2050. On the demand side, there’s the 2030 Challenge – a global initiative calling for all new buildings and renovations to reduce their fossil-fuel greenhouse-gas-emitting consumption by 50% by 2010, and that all new buildings be ‘carbon neutral’ by 2030.
Nationwide, about 50% of energy consumption and resultant greenhouse gas emissions come from heating and cooling buildings – mostly from electricity generation, which is heavily coal-dependent.
But in the west and more specifically the Western Climate Initiative states, more than half of all fossil fuel emissions come from transportation. Electricity generation represents 26 percent of fossil fuel CO2 in the region – only about half of the emissions from the transportation sector. If the WCI region is to reduce its emissions by 80 percent by 2050, it will have to start dealing with transportation as soon as possible.
Case-Shiller prices for Charlotte, Seattle, and Portland compared to the Case-Shiller composite 10 price index.
All three cities had less appreciation than the composite, the significant price appreciation started later than other areas, and prices appear to be falling in recent months. It appears that all three cities (and all 20 cities in the Case-Shiller index) will be showing year-over-year price declines by spring 2008.
“[W]ith today’s technology, we know how to make new buildings net energy generators, and we know how to retrofit existing buildings to reduce their energy consumption by well over 50%, in some cases 90-95%. We just need someone to pay for it.”
He notes that an investment in green construction or retrofit is capital intensive up-front and the payoff is slow and modest – but it’s a sure thing. But capitalism being what it is, the first two factors suffice to discourage green investment.
His solution?
“[I]t seems like an obvious place for government and civil society to step in. Figuring out financing mechanisms for such investments is a public policy with guaranteed payback, considerable social benefit, and built-in political support – a gimme.”
He asks:
“Why doesn’t every city [or county] do what Berkeley, Calif. is doing? The city loans money to homeowners to add solar panels; the homeowner pays the city back over 20 years via a small addition to their property tax. The city makes a modestly profitable loan, the homeowner pays nothing, and all owners of the home from the 20-year mark on get a permanent reduction in energy costs. Oh, and let’s not forget you get a reduction in greenhouse gases and a homeowner who can strut around his neighborhood bragging about his solar home.”
Glenn Scherer has written an article about his experiences building an “eco-friendly” house in Vermont.
The roadblocks started with obtaining financing. Banks weren’t willing to lend money for an “off the grid” house. No matter that using solar photovoltaic cells for all electricity needs is hardly experimental construction – it’s been done for decades. Banks can’t take a risk on “unusual construction. This policy leaves solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative energy technologies in the dark.
Next roadblock: building codes. Many electric, water and septic rules preclude green building. Take, for example, straw-clay walls. The technology is tried and true – thousands of years old and utilized from ancient Persia to modern Africa, and even in England (think Tudor-style cottage construction). However most building codes around the U.S. would forbid such construction in favor of Sheetrock, Fiberglas insulation, Portland cement and other non-green materials.
So too with septic systems. While rules are meant to protect groundwater and wetlands, they are also the product of lobbying by interests who make an excellent living designing and constructing traditional-but-wasteful septic systems.
Then there’s a lack of knowledgeable contractors and inadequate research and tax incentives.
So long as outdated policies and technologies are codified in our regulations and building codes, green building will be unable to move ahead apace in most areas. State and federal governments should be helping cities and towns to rewrite their codes to include all kinds of green alternatives.
For all the bad mouthing we dish out to the auto, our homes gobble up 25 percent of the world’s energy and are to thank for 19 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions – and that number is growing. The U.S. residential sector is the largest single consumer of energy on Earth, and American homes spew out 25 percent of global home-related greenhouse gas emissions.
So where is this need for energy coming from? Basically, from all the things we feel we can’t live without – our fridges, microwaves, air conditioning units, heating systems and dishwashers. But mostly, it’s our heating and cooling systems, which use up 60 percent of a household’s energy needs. Home appliances are the fastest-growing consumers of energy in the world, after cars – although houses still emit more greenhouse gases overall than cars.
Our power stations and manufacturing plants waste a staggering amount of energy – in the U.S., two-thirds of the energy they produce. The waste heat is enough to power the entire Japanese economy.
Capturing the waste heat in Combined Heat & Recovery (CHP) plants would dramatically increase energy efficiency and decrease usage of fossil fuels. Holland and Denmark now both get at least half of their energy from CHP plants. But electricity utilities typically perceive CHP as a competitive threat, because it reduces their electricity sales and hurts their profitability.
Have 50 years of suburbs delivered on their promise? The book How to Build a Village, by New Zealand author Claude Lewenz, offers solutions to the problems facing modern suburbs through the design and construction of a different type of living arrangement – a village founded on improving quality of life.
Responsible architecture implies responding to present needs without harming future generations’ ability to respond to their needs – and we have been irresponsible for a very long time.
Good management of five resources: the soil, materials themselves, water, air and energy. One must use the least land possible, increasing the density of and satisfaction to be derived from existing infrastructures. Renewable, recoverable and recyclable materials should be favored. Water needs must be minimized: Use rain. Don’t pollute the air outside with waste like that from air conditioners. Finally, there comes the energy question, the most complex one.
The energy consumed by the building and its maintenance must be limited, through insulation and by producing complementary and renewable energies, solar especially. But one must also take into account what is called “gray” energy, consumed by the materials themselves from their production up to their treatment after use. Wood has very minor gray energy; aluminum is very bad. Concrete comes somewhere between the two, but it is not recyclable, which is a big handicap.
While designers and builders expend significant effort to ensure that buildings use as little energy as possible, what is mostly ignored is the fact that many buildings are responsible for much more energy use getting people to and from those buildings. For an average office building in the United States, commuting by office workers accounts for 30% more energy than the building itself uses. For an average new office building built to code, transportation accounts for more than twice as much energy use as building operation.
Factors largely within the control of planners, designers, developers, and regulators dramatically affect the transportation energy intensity of buildings. Those factors include: density, transit availability and access, mixed uses and access to services; parking management; walkability, traffic calming, and site design; connectivity; and bicycle accessibility.
We need to pay far more attention to location and land-use planning as a part of green development. The transportation performance of buildings is all about location.
Stan Cox at Alternet writes that the recent mansion boom produced millions of energy-wasting homes with thousands of square feet that Americans don’t need. This is not the behavior of a society that’s thinking about a sustainable future.
The housing bubble and a new generation of big, deluxe, under-occupied houses were bulked up on low-interest steroids. 42 percent of newly built houses now have more than 2,400 square feet of floorspace, compared with only 10 percent in 1970. In 1970 there were so few three-bathroom houses that they didn’t even to show up in NAHB statistics. By 2005, one out of every four new houses had at least three bathrooms. And these bigger houses are being lived in by smaller families. In the America of 1950, single-family dwellings were being were built with an average of 290 square feet of living space per resident; in 2003, a family moving into a typical new house had almost 900 square feet per person in which to ramble around. Read the rest of this entry »
Unless a “green” building actively remediates its local environment. For instance . . . a high-rise that off-sets some of its power use through the installation of rooftop wind turbines is great: it looks cool, magazine readers go crazy for it, and the building’s future tenants save loads of money on electricity bills. But once you factor in these savings, something like the new Castle House eco-skyscraper still ends up being a net drain on the system. It’s not good for the environment; it’s just not as bad as it could have been. Read the rest of this entry »
Jim Kunstler in his on-line magazine Civitas fires off a blistering critique of the new dorms at Skidmore College:
Skidmore College had a chance to create an ensemble of buildings deployed coherently on the landscape, but opted instead to build something like a Houston subsidized housing complex using a method we call train-wreck urbanism. Read the rest of this entry »
The most common solution to providing relief from the heat of summer—and the most expensive—is to add more air-conditioners, exhaust and electric fans. Read the rest of this entry »
