Green Design
- Posted by ryan on March 10th, 2009 filed in Cities, Environment
Friend of the Bellows Kriston Capps has a piece at the American Prospect on the crisis for architecture posed by green design requirements, and he’s already earned a testy response from Clay Risen at TNR. I’m in no position to adjudicate this debate, but I will make a couple of comments. First, architects have always labored under material constraints and have nonetheless managed to produce beautiful buildings — and ugly ones. It’s certainly possible that a crisis for architecture has everything to do with architecture, in other words, and little to do with green-ness. Kriston also notes how different architects struggle with what it means to be green. If you shop materials a long way, is that bad? What if you build an efficient building in the exurbs? And so on. If this is the problem, then the solution is easy — architects need to throw their weight behind carbon pricing. It’s nearly impossible to gauge how green a building actually is without it.
But focusing strictly on the direct impacts of design for a moment, I want to draw attention to this statement:
The field of architecture is experiencing a design crisis, with clients ranging from private owners to cities demanding that architects prioritize sustainability above all else — as if design itself were an obnoxious carbon-emitter.
Two words for you Mr. Capps: Le Corbusier. Frankly, I don’t care what materials designers build with, so long as they stop for a moment and think about how their buildings affect the street and the people that populate it.
March 10th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Now, I know no one in DC is going to agree with me on this. And I’m probably the only person who got through high school reading the collective works of Corbusier, and while Corbusier might have made some poor assumptions about what makes cities work — assumptions that plenty of others were making.
His work and theory was and is decidedly human centered and focused. From the very beginning his work was focused on relating the buildings to the proportions of the human body. ANd using matierials to create environments that were organicly reflective of human biology.
March 10th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
While I would certainly agree with your characterization of Corb’s Radiant City you seem to forget that this is not all that he has done. The Marseilles Block is one of Modernism’s greatest examples of high density public housing that actually works.
Design itself also has a very large impact on the total carbon footprint throughout the life of a building that shouldn’t be ignored in favour of materiality. Compare Jeanne Gang’s more recent design for an urban apartment building that incorporates a brise soleil, and then compare it with the glass curtain wall and core taking up half a city block designs that surround it. Her’s is going to cost a lot less to keep comfortable and lower the ecological impact, even if it were built entirely out of redwoods and baby seals.
My own experience in the industry would point to there being a crisis in design, but it isn’t one of sustainability; it’s one of reduced billings. Every firm I’ve tried to get a job at is either cutting back or frozen. That has nothing to do with finally being able to approach sustainability without having a client strip it bare, and everything to do with the current economic crisis we’re in. How buildings approach the environment will come along with time and experience. It wasn’t so long ago that Buckminster Fuller asked designers how heavy their buildings are. We’re finally starting to address that, and the learning curve isn’t nearly as steep as you might think.