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.
About Paul Eldrenkamp
Bravo, Paul. The difference between what we’re doing and what we need to be doing is vast. When we pretend that the difference is small – nothing we can’t fix with a little tweaking – our efforts are small and uninspired. Acknowledging the real difference will drive all our efforts to a more profound level – provided we don’t succumb to despair and paralysis. Despite the enormity of the challenges – and because of them – we need to act, concretely, every day, with the best that’s in us. “Yes We Can” needs to be matched by “Yes We Must.”
It’s a very interesting time to be alive – what we do in the next 20 years could very well determine humanity’s fate for the next 3000. We’re being called upon to be the very best people we possibly can be. Yet we have to deal with the world as it is right now, with all its weirdness, imperfections, majesty and wonder.
Fortunately, we have some good models to study: there have been cultures more oriented to being “gardeners, farmers and arborists” than conquerers. Their architecture has usually been vernacular, attuned to a specific place, and, above all, reverent. We have better technology than they did, but we’ve used it mainly with the “conquerer” mentality. If we can combine reverence with technical mastery, long-term thinking with short-term dirt under the fingernails, we might just yet succeed at making a world that would be really, really great to live in.
Paul,
I am not convinced. Much in nature is concerned with one species or another finding or creating niches that work best for them. Isn’t that what buildings are for us? Niches — albiet niches that proceed for ensuring survival to providing comfort.
Comfortable niches. How comfortable? Maybe too comfortable? — careful, because now we are headed toward Reagan’s characterization of all that we are about as “freezing to death in the dark” — i.e. not comfortable enough… for some.
Eventually we will be forced to evaluate how much comfort we really need. I am actually looking forward to that…… though I expect there’s going to be quite alot of precious indignation from the pews.
Bruce, as usual you’re offering thoughtful, insightful comments. I’m not sure I read Paul’s post through the same lens, and your thoughts are stimulating my own.
Of course we’re creating niches for ourselves, in order to provide for basic needs and decencies. But unlike the rest of nature, we’re not relying on current solar income, we’re not using closed-loop processes and we’re not seeing to the health of natural capital and ecosystem services. We’re incredibly inefficient in providing for our fundamental needs – then we compound that error by larding more onto our built environment than can possibly bring us any genuine welfare. Thus, the difference between what we’re doing and what we need to be doing is profound – far more than we’ll resolve with a bit of “tweaking.”
Certainly none of us wants to be seen as advocating “freezing in the dark.” But I don’t think we want to be tepid advocates of sustainability, soft-pedaling the profound changes we need to make. I honestly believe that about 90% of what we need to do to move toward sustainability will lead to genuine increases in our happiness, health and prosperity – after we’re well underway, we’ll ask ourselves why we took so long.
At any rate, that was the underlying message I read in Paul’s post – but your comments are making me consider other points I hadn’t considered. Thank you!
Radical change or minor tweaking….Paul is making the case, as others have, that we cannot be satisfied with just high performance windows. As he rightly notes, this position “threatens” the existential beliefs of conservative minded folk like Reagan, that lash back with fear based arguments that are not ultimately useful for the development of the issue which requires more understanding. This is politics, we are designers that work to make great solutions. So…
What can we agree on first…1. that we want to create comfortable niches. 2. That we don’t want to soil the bed we sleep in.
The debate begins over what “comfort” means and this is subjective. Our culture comfort factor in the US is particularly high at the moment. A recession seems to be a good remedy for this. A good conversation about what it really means to be comfortable, could be a useful thing in this day and age.
The debate continues with the argument of what’s our tipping point in terms of “soiling” our environment and therefore what kind of limits we need to design our habitation to. Where to begin…..?
Though we may never agree, the more we understand, the better decisions we can make in relation to making a good life.
Paul makes the case, and I agree, that when we look at the above two issues, we need to make radical change to avoid soiling our beds and to be “more” comfortable by using less. (maybe I expanding that last one?)
One of the issues that is tricky in the debate over whether buildings are to disconnected from nature, is this subjectivity thing. Some people like the idea of a techno future. I find the writings of Freud and Yung on this matter fascinating. Yung believed so fervently that the human psyche could not process technology well, that he regularly practiced cooking food over a fire. While this may be quite absurd to the efficiency engineer, it is very interesting food for thought.