Needed: Leadership From Architects and Designers
We need new leadership from architects, planners and designers.
Yes, we need them to design better buildings, streets and public spaces. But what we may need most from them has little to do with the act of design itself. That’s because we need a massive change in the very way buildings and places are planned, regulated and seen by the public. We urgently need people to re-imagine their cities in very directly political ways, and no one else is as prepared for that job as the talented few who’ve been trained to understand form and space and place.
When Ed Mazria first started getting vocal about buildings and climate change in 2003, his message became a rallying cry that professional groups, politicians, designers and journalists could stand behind: If we want to fight emissions, we must fundamentally change the building sector, the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Mazria and his non-profit research organization, Architecture 2030, posed the famous 2030 Challenge: make all new buildings carbon neutral by the year 2030.
The tools and knowledge we needed to build carbon-neutral buildings already existed in 2003. Mazria called on architects and developers to use those innovative design strategies, building practices and on-site renewable power (as well as a small amount of purchased renewable energy and/or certified offsets, if needed), in order to achieve a net fossil fuel-based/GHG-emitting energy usage of zero.
People everywhere jumped on board. The American Institute of Architects, the leading professional association in its industry, adopted the Challenge on behalf of its now 85,000 members. In November 2006, the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution adopting the 2030 Challenge. And so on.
But such adoptions have been largely aspirational, with little enforcement. Now we’re nine months from Architecture 2030’s first incremental goal: by 2010, the Challenge expected all new buildings and major renovations to meet a 60 percent fossil fuel reduction standard, with an equal number of buildings retrofitted to the same standard as those built new.
Look around. We’re not going to be celebrating in 2010. Green buildings are breaking into mainstream culture – in fact, a film about Boston’s first LEED project is now touring indie and environmental film festivals. But green buildings are still a novelty to nearly everyone, still the stuff of awards ceremonies.
Awards are good motivation, but a handful of award-winners at the head of the movement won’t be enough to reinvent the industry in a generation. As Worldchanging ally Dan Bertolet of design firm GGLO wrote Monday on his urban planning blog, HugeAssCity:
Like most in the endless parade of green lectures and meetings in Seattle, the AIA event this Tuesday will be overflowing with big-brained folks who possess piles of knowledge, skills, and desire to make green development happen. But the vast a majority never get the opportunity to implement all their great ideas in real projects. And that is our integral predicament: we know what to do, but we’re not doing it. Green building is not a design problem or an engineering problem, it is a people problem — institutional, political, economic, cultural.
Part of the solution will be to get regulators — and voters — on board. Outdated zoning codes can stop designers from incorporating new technologies. One story making the rounds has a team of city employees in a Washington town designing a theoretical dream green development, and then seeing how well it met local code — they found, so the story goes, more than 50 rules that would prevent the project from moving forward before they stopped counting.
“Our land use code, and the building codes to some extent, are an accretion of 75 years of reactions against things, as opposed to a vision for how we want to live,” says architect and former Seattle City Council President Peter Steinbrueck. “Those sets of problems don’t apply anymore. So now what we need to do is rethink all that, and that’s a really hard thing. We need to go to performance-based codes, and form-based codes, that recognize the place and its uniqueness and character and authenticity, and quality of life, and the values of compact, walkable communities. Our codes work against that right now. And people are still very fearful. If they remove parking requirements or allow retail with the housing project, or allow a slightly taller housing project, people freak out.”
Policy change, particularly energy policy, also has potential to open new doors with lenders. As Richard Conniff wrote for Yale360, the final stretch can be the most discouraging for designers who would reach the farthest. “There’s actually a sweet spot, said Bill Browning, a partner in the sustainable design firm Terrapin Bright Green, where going aggressively green gets to be cheaper than a more modest approach…But that sweet spot fades away, Browning added, as you get beyond an 80 percent improvement in energy efficiency.” The costs of equipping a building with all of the technology to generate its own renewable power is still the deal-breaker for most developers behind these would-be neutral projects.
“The technologies that allow you to produce energy onsite are still not competitive with fossil fuel,” says Robert Peña, associate professor of architecture at the University of Washington. “That would change overnight if we had some kind of carbon tax and some predictable sense that energy isn’t going to be as cheap as it is now. The world is the way it is because we’ve had breathtakingly cheap energy for so long. And we know that’s not going to be the case in the future, but markets need clear signals. It’s an incredibly risk-averse profession, from the design profession to the construction profession, because the margins are relatively small and the risks are relatively large.”
The solution begins with education. Later this month, AIA Seattle will launch its AIA + 2030 Professional Series, a 40-hour continuing education program that will address strategies like integrated design, passive lighting/heating/cooling, and even staff training and post-occupancy performance monitoring, to help designers reach a 50 percent reduction in fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the first course in the nation specifically addressing the 2030 Challenge goals. If it is successful in Seattle, the program may roll out in other states or nationwide.
But architects must educate others as well as themselves. Steinbrueck believes strongly that architects must lead at the policymaking level, and with good reason. In his years on the Seattle City Council, he helped raise standards for green building with legislation including Seattle’s Sustainable Building Policy, passed in 2000, which requires all new City-funded projects and renovations involving more than 5,000 square feet of occupied space to achieve LEED Silver accreditation or higher. LEED standards were still largely untested at the time, but in retrospect, Steinbrueck says that the policy has had a significant positive impact on Seattle’s building program.
(Many expected Steinbrueck would challenge Seattle’s incumbent Mayor Greg Nickels in 2009, but he has chosen to sit back from politics this year and instead will join Harvard University as a Loeb Fellow to conduct independent research on U.S. best practices for sustainability. When we talked, however, he hinted that he is considering a run for national office in the future.)
Policy could also encourage architects to veer into new territory when appropriate, rather than adhere to checklists for certifications such as LEED or Built Green. The standards have unquestionably raised the bar for green building since their introduction, and the USGBC works diligently to keep pushing the envelope further (you can help them by commenting on the new LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system in this forum, which opened today). But because LEED standards are based on a set of known strategies, they can become an anchor that encourages a baseline, instead of a propeller driving new innovation toward the goal of carbon neutrality.
And because many LEED points address issues separate from energy efficiency, simply building to accreditation standards won’t ensure we do the job. New dynamic policies can help spur innovation where certifications and building codes fall short. In a recent Worldchanging Interview, Amory Lovins described green building codes as “obsolete before the ink is dry,” and suggested feebates as a means of rewarding energy efficiency and encouraging designers and developers to continue pushing the standards higher.
Source:Julia Levitt, World Changing
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 8:49 am and is filed under Architecture, Engineering, Green Designs, Just Interesting, Landscape Architecture, Landscape Art, Sustainable Energy, Transport, Urban Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.