Tom Hartman, Chris Benedict, Andy Shapiro, and I are in the midst of a 2-week tour of high performance buildings in Saxony and Upper Austria. We’ll be presenting our findings during three sessions at Building Energy. Here’s a very quick taste of some of the things we’ve seen.

Andy, Chris, and Tom talking with architect Gunter Lassy at the offices of Lassy Architects in Linz, Austria. Gunter represents the 4th generation in his family to work at the 18-person firm. Gunter’s not sold on Passive House, having tried it. But, based on weather trends over the last 10 summers or so in Linz, he’s getting really worried about the region’s ability to handle increased cooling loads.

Sunset view of part of Solar Village, a 5-year-old development on the outskirts of Linz; Lassy Architects designed some of the apartment blocks in this development. Built to Passive House standards (as defined by the Austrians, anyway — there’s an interesting conversation in and of itself), actual performance data shows a very broad range of energy usage, with some units consuming as much as five times the energy as other, similar units. Bottom line: If you leave the windows open all winter in a high-performance building, it becomes a low-performance building. Who’d have thought?

A view of a delightful Kindergarten in the tiny Austrian village of Schneegattern. One of the first schools in Austria inspired by Passive House strategies, it uses wood pellets for heating. Our host Herbert Nagl told me, “We believe in investing heavily in our children here.”

Here Chris, Tom, and Andy admire the underground wood pellet storage in the school’s backyard. To get a view of just what they’re looking at in there, you’ll have to come to our March 9th sessions.

Herbert also showed us the community music school. Here’s where the village’s two volunteer wind ensembles practice (the town has two bands, five fire brigades, and 4800 citizens). This is a photo of a music stand — note the beer glass holder. Herbert said the typical practice regimen for the bands consists of 2 hours of rehearsing and 6 hours of drinking beer, with considerable overlap between the two activities, apparently. Nonetheless, the local bands fare very well in regional competitions.

I think the green building movement has generated so much enthusiasm because of its comforting message that we’ll be able to change just a few relatively small things, avoid any real sacrifices, and everything will be just fine. In this way, “green building” gives us a framework for doing trivial stuff and thinking it’s a big deal. This, to me, is a dangerously misleading message, even if promulgated by some very fine, well-intentioned people.

If we want to stand any reasonable chance of meeting the energy and environmental challenges that are coming our way, we don’t need a few feel-good changes, but a radical transformation of how we think about buildings.

As I touched on in my previous post, the first step towards creating profound change is to acknowledge to ourselves what a building really is. Only then will we be able to figure out how to transform the way we “cultivate” buildings to the degree that we need to (the agricultural simile is intentional, and I’ll come back to it).

So, to set the stage, here is what I hope is an honest description of a building:

In general, we humans find that what our biosphere has to offer on a day-to-day basis is not all that comfortable. So when we build a building, our goal is to capture some of the biosphere and create a volume in which we can impose much more comfortable conditions than what nature provides. In these isolated volumes, we can enforce a very narrow range of temperature and humidity and severely limit access to all but an extremely small range of plants and animals. Often, we create something of a “moat” (in the form of lawns or paving) around these buildings as a first line of defense against intrusion into the volume by other species.

Additionally, not only do we do our best to keep almost everything that nature has to provide out of these volumes, we typically prevent these volumes from giving anything back in any useful way. For instance, we generally suppress the refueling mechanism of biodegradation, certainly within the volume itself but also in its close vicinity (compost bins being the only common exception I can think of, off hand—the relative triviality of which sort of makes my point for me).

To maintain a volume in such splendid isolation from the natural world—so aggressively out of balance with the surrounding biosphere—requires significant energy flows and correspondingly complex systems. These complex systems tend to be inefficient, so the energy flows need to be very large—much larger than we have even tried to produce on site, at least in the past century or so. All that additional energy has to come from somewhere else (first law of thermodynamics) and a lot of energy is wasted in the transfer from source to end use (second law of thermodynamics).

This, I believe, is an honest assessment of what a building is—that is to say, about as inefficient and unnatural an act as our species does on any similar scale. This may sound like an anti-building sentiment, and it can certainly be taken that way, but I don’t necessarily intend it as such.

Many “green building” practitioners these days don’t really like to think of a building the way I have described above—it makes too many things too inconvenient. Any description of a building that even hints that it might be better to have fewer rather than more of them can feel pretty threatening—especially these days, when a lot of stuff feels threatening in our industry.

Even in light of the above, I think there is a way to transform how we think about buildings in a radical enough fashion that it just might get us where we need to go—without threatening jobs in the design and construction industry (not to mention all the jobs in other industries that depend on a vibrant design and construction industry). It has to do with the idea of cultivation that I mentioned at the beginning. As Copeland Casati anticipated in her response to my first post, I think we need to start treating our building stock (both existing and new) as analogous to a natural resource—and start viewing those of us in the building industry as stewards of a vast, invaluable treasure. In sum, we builders, remodelers, architects, and engineers need to be less and less like “conquerors of the biosphere” and more and more like gardeners, farmers, and arborists.

We can start to figure out just what this really means in my next post.

Green building is dead. Its time has passed. We lie to ourselves when we think we can build any number of new buildings in a green, environmentally sustainable way. We need to acknowledge that every building is an unnatural act. We want a building to be warm when it’s cold outside, cool when it’s warm outside, dry when it’s wet outside, and light when it’s dark outside. Although rot and decay is the essential refueling mechanism in nature, in a building, rot and decay is the surest sign that something has gone seriously wrong. Looked at this way, every building is an environmental mugging.

Don’t get me wrong. I live in a building, I work in a building, and my whole livelihood depends on there being buildings. I’m generally in favor of buildings. I just don’t think we should delude ourselves into thinking that they can possibly be “green” in any meaningful way. The best we can do is to make the mugging that each building represents as gentle as possible. The USGBC should re-name itself the US Gentle Mugging Council, in my opinion.

Why do such semantics matter? They matter because if you understand that each building is an act of environmental violence (gentle or not), then you look at our building needs very differently. “Green building” becomes the belief that our buildings should be as few, as small, and as efficient as possible. This in turn means that any new construction becomes an absolute last resort. The 4000-square-foot seasonal vacation home becomes an impossibility. An addition becomes necessary only if absolutely everything else has failed. The first choice always will be making the best use of what we already have—and making what we already have as efficient and adaptable as possible becomes the most important endeavor we can undertake.

Deep energy reductions to existing structures pose serious challenges—both technical and economic. As one who tries to sell and implement such retrofits at market rates, I am more keenly aware than anyone of both the short- and the long-term challenges. In future posts I will outlines these challenges, as well as possible ways to confont them successfully.