Restoring Meaningful Energy Performance to the AIA CoTE Top Ten Awards
The AIA Top Ten sustainable buildings award has been a beacon for 12 years, but many of the latest crop of celebrants are not sufficiently deserving of the accolade, because they are mediocre in their energy performance. This is an award intended to honor excellence in sustainable design, but the three cold climate winners, for example, report total annual energy usages of 62, 68 and 79 KBtu/sf/annum. These are two or three times the consumption of what the best buildings are now achieving in this climate. Two or three times!! — not at all inspiring, and hardly sustainable, even by the present laxness of the definition, and nowhere near where the leading projects need to be today if we are to have any hope of meeting the 2030 Challenge. And the trend is downward. Last year (2008) had five cold climate awardees with total annual energy useages (TAEU) of 28, 40, 34, 53, 33 KBtu/sf/year. As noted above, this years cold climate awardees TAEU of 62, 68, 79 KBtu/sf/year
….. the worst performer last year was 10 points better than this year’s best!!! Not a good trend.
We understand that design elegance and enchantment are important – as important as verified high performance. Ten years ago, our concern that green building design in this country was being reduced to a checklist of features drove one of us (Bruce, in company with NESEA colleagues Marc Rosenbaum, Andy Shapiro and Nadav Malin) to Europe to visit and report on the fusion of design elegance and performance that was then evident on that side of the Atlantic. For years afterward — initially as an inaugural Public Forum at the 2001 BE conference — using this body of work, we repeatedly made the case for green Architecture with a capital ‘A’ (rather than a capital ‘G’). But now the pendulum seems to have swung back too far.
In the coming decade we are facing two enormous global changes: galloping climate change and the advent of global peak oil production. Each threatens our global and national security in new and profound ways that will push us harder and harder toward national energy independence requiring harnessing renewable sources and previously untenable levels of consciousness regarding energy efficiency. The AIA, through the leadership of Ed Mazria et al, has made a noble and conspicuous commitment to have the architectural profession be a major player in this heroic transition. In connection with this ambition, the Top Ten cannot afford to be populated with mediocre performers — it is a travesty that demeans the program and diminishes the stature of the AIA as a serious promoter of its 2030 Challenge. Top Ten accolades ought to be given to those projects that achieve BOTH, not one or the other. That was why this award was special.
Let’s push the AIA to restore that specialness.
Name: Bruce
Reader Comments
Bravo, Bruce, for noticing this trend, alerting us to it, and for your efforts to remind AIA/COTE what sustainable building is supposed to be about. This “award-winning” work is eclipsed by the fine work your firm is doing, and by other outstanding work being done by NESEA members. The choice between architectural elegance and engineering proficiency is a false dichotomy – a dichotomy we should refuse to accept.
Sounds like a “mea culpa” for pushing “green Architecture” with a capital “A”. It doesn’t surprise me that the AIA would be moving in the direction that Bruce advocated all these years, for the field of architecture is mostly antithetical to truly green (which, among other things, is vernacular) building.
“The choice between architectural elegance and engineering proficiency is a false dichotomy – a dichotomy we should refuse to accept,” cries David.
Unless one defines “elegance” as functional simplicity, then elegant sustainability is often a contradiction in terms. Sustainable housing grows organically from sustainable cultures, and sustainable cultures are those which don’t relegate essential tasks to “experts” and “specialists”. Division of labor (while mechanistically efficient) produces a divided community in which no one possesses the skills for basic survival, a hierarchy of roles and status and a stratification of wealth and power.
I’ve been building super-insulated homes for nearly 30 years and, for the past 20, designing and building cold-climate homes in the 20 KBtu/SF range with the homeowners participating in every facet of the projects. The least attractive and most functional of them won a Citation of Excellence in the 1993 EEBA/NESEA Energy/Resource Efficiency Design Competition. At least at that time, NESEA recognized the simple elegance of an architecturally inelegant building which was green ahead of its time.
Far too often, what passes for architectural “elegance” is excess and ego, and part of the excess is the role of the architect. Because sustainable housing is affordable housing which serves essential needs.
Robert, I couldn’t agree more that “architectural elegance” is an oft-misused phrase, covering over an excess of ego. But I don’t think that’s what Bruce meant, nor what I meant in my comment. It takes real skill and dedication to build the kind of high-performance buildings you’ve been devoting yourself to. It also takes real skill, practice and work to make spaces that are pleasant to be in, efficient with space, well-proportioned, cognizant of history, speaking to our hearts as much as our brains. I think we might be in closer agreement than you suggest in your comment. We don’t want to abandon efficiency for the sake of arbitrary architectural “visions” – but we don’t want to fill the world with grim, soul-deadening places either, no matter how technically proficient. If all we are is efficient, but we fill the world with places people hate, then we won’t be sustainable.
There is no good existing structure present to get Architects and Engineers the training they need on the scale that is needed. How would an AIA member learn how to do better, even if they wanted to?? Take a class?
The only solution I can come up with is an organized large scale intensive mentorship process where project teams get mentors who see them through a given project. After completion and measured results, the newly educated teams can become mentors, and so on, and so on. Now’s the time while we are in this slow down to get this going.