Why is Green Building still so hard?

[Amanda_931]

from Grist magazine.   Definitely the author, Auden Schendler is on his soapbox.  I wonder if he's not right about the certification subculture.  I once got some newsletter on the subject, and was not impressed.  That was a couple of years ago, when the advertisements--and articles--were for waterless urinals and certification, but not the big picture.  It might have changed.  In part of the Grist article I didn't put in, there's a mention of Mick Pearce and his shopping center in Harare Zimbabwe--pictures second link, more information in the third.

http://grist.org/comments/soapbox/2006/06/08/green-building/index.html

http://www.pearcemccomish.com/eastgate.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastgate_Centre,_Harare

Recently, Colorado Company magazine highlighted a developer who believes in nothing but "green" building. It was a wonderful article, but it gets at an underlying question: why is this still a story?
..........
Meanwhile, even good green builders often come up short. In the environmental building community here in Colorado, everyone's got a story of a disastrous effort: one that uses 10 times as much energy as it was supposed to; a micro-turbine that wasn't so cost-effective after gas prices spiked; a south-facing community college that needed its air conditioning retrofit in the winter.

Green building was supposed to be the road to the promised land, where good design meshed with stewardship for the benefit of all, while the bottom line remained intact. But if Moses were an architect, he would have come back from the mountain with 10 tablets of screw-ups and cover-ups

This all sounds good, until you look around. Try to buy a green home in any major subdivision in America, for instance -- it's as rare as a flower in the desert. Some of the reasons for the slow pace of the movement's growth are obvious: cost; cultural and structural resistance; lack of talent or expertise; lack of research, funding, and awareness; and perceived trade-offs between quality or security and sustainability. But there are two less obvious reasons to consider.

The first is that stakeholders are afraid to challenge the myth that green building is cheap and easy. Once you've gone through the process, you're scared to point out the warts, because your work is now a model, getting enormous publicity. But ultimately, the lack of willingness to admit failure prevents the industry from learning from its mistakes. Until that changes -- until there are conferences about mistakes and pitfalls, not brilliant successes -- the learning curve will remain flat.

As renowned green architect William McDonough said after Environmental Building News reported on problems with the environmental studies center he designed for Oberlin College, these are new projects. The point isn't that they work perfectly at first, it's that they eventually work well. And, I would add, that we learn as we go.

The second reason green building hasn't become more mainstream is that it's often discussed in a secret language, the code of a cabal. For instance, talk of "biomimicry" -- the idea that buildings should be modeled on natural systems -- is nearly inescapable. But as Michael Brown, an environmental consultant and editor at the Journal of Industrial Ecology, points out, biomimicry seems mainly to be about making something straightforward (avoid toxics, strive for closed loops, minimize energy) into something that requires a consultant.

LEED, the U.S. Green Building Council's certification system, has its own cabal-like nature too. The message is, you have to know LEED if you want to build green. But LEED is not how you get a green building -- it's how you certify one. It is not a blueprint. If it's treated as one, then certification concerns begin to trump performance, and drive the process.

Here in Aspen, we're proposing new affordable housing that will run on lake-source heat pumps and use structural insulated panels. It would be very hard for this building not to beat energy code by 40 percent. We'll need things like passive solar orientation; envelope efficiency, including superinsulation and tightness; and an efficient and right-sized heating system. What we won't need is a consultant, a biologist, a Ph.D., or a translator.

[Billy Bob]

I keep coming back to this one, Amanda, and mulling it over.

Certainly there is no single answer at this point in time.  I believe part of the equation is just how "Green" is green?  Beating energy code by 40% is admirable, for example, but is it enough in the long term?  How many hidden energy costs are involved in achieving this saving? (Manufacture of the requisite technology, transportation costs, etc.)

There can be no single approach or standard, either, as regional differences are a huge factor.  Straw bale construction for instance looks pretty attractive, but if you have to import straw from 500 miles away the "Green effect" is somewhat ameliorated versus use of local material.

At least people have begun to think this way, and hopefully will develop an effective methodology.  That said, as PEGG has frequently pointed out, certain well established procedures, e.g. proper flashing, are not being followed in too many instances.  A specific "Green" case in point is the "passive solar" design which has 50% too great heat gain compensated for by central air conditioning retrofit.  The information to avoid this kind of scenario is readily available, and yet it happens, and not only to DIY designers.

As is so often the case, it will take alot of trial and error to arrive at the best compromise solutions.

p.s. Here's a link to an article:"What makes it Green?" You might also follow the link from there to Pliny Fisk's site; sustainable building is his thing, from the academic to the practical. ( Also a distant cousin of mine . [smiley=thumbsup.gif])
http://www.architectureweek.com/2001/0516/news_3-1.html

[Amanda_931]

I'll take a(nother) look at Pliny Fisk's site tomorrow.  He's pretty interesting.  A lot of people are not happy about fly ash.  I've no idea what if anything the truth is on that subject.

How much solar gain you can use depends on how much of the earth you can heat--or not as the case may be.  Which is why the thermal mass people and the insulation people seem to be talking at cross puposes a lot.

Just at the moment, too much heat--and humidity--is what I'm fighting.  I figure that I could sleep on a sheltered--rain or snow free--porch most of the time, say all but a month and a half total, summer and winter--if the "real" inside was warm, or could be warmed up easily, in the winter and not too awful in the summer.  Even if we did have a repeat of the summer of 1980--lows for July were in the 80's every night.  I remember only turning on the--truly vile--AC about four of those nights.  And outside was probably more bearable than in.  This might even be true now even though I don't handle heat as well as I did then.

Those winter days when it didn't get over 0 degrees F are another story.  Fortunately, they were mostly sunny.

I'm not tough, no "frozen logger" scenarios for me.  But I do enjoy being warm under a really thick comforter, when the temperature outside is right cold.

(the frozen logger was tough enough to stir his coffee with his thumb, and when the weather decided to get him, "it froze clear down to China, and to the stars above" before it did, leaving his devastated girlfriend to look for another logger stirring coffee with his thumb.  It's a song, a waltz.  Here--you may be able to listen on the second link--instrumental only:

http://sniff.numachi.com/~rickheit/dtrad/pages/tiFROZLOGR;ttFROZLOGR.html

http://www.midigal.com/frznlogger.htm

The Frozen Logger
(James Stevens)

As I sat down one evening within a small cafe,
A forty year old waitress to me these words did say:

"I see that you are a logger, and not just a common bum,
'Cause nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with is thumb.

My lover was a logger, there's none like him today;
If you'd pour whiskey on it he could eat a bale of hay

He never shaved his whiskers from off of his horny hide;
He'd just drive them in with a hammer and bite them off inside.

My lover came to see me upon one freezing day;
He held me in his fond embrace which broke three vertebrae.

He kissed me when we parted, so hard that he broke my jaw;
I could not speak to tell him he'd forgot his mackinaw.

I saw my lover leaving, sauntering through the snow,
Going gaily homeward at forty-eight below.

The weather it tried to freeze him, it tried its level best;
At a hundred degrees below zero, he buttoned up his vest.

It froze clean through to China, it froze to the stars above;
At a thousand degrees below zero, it froze my logger love.

They tried in vain to thaw him, and would you believe me, sir
They made him into axeblades, to chop the Douglas fir.

And so I lost my lover, and to this cafe I come,
And here I wait till someone stirs his coffee with his thumb

[Amanda_931]

Post in Treehugger today, in defense of LEED, or at least what it can be.  

What's being looked at also sounds a lot like A Pattern Language's description of a good community.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/06/inhabitat_makes.php

....Lets face it, LEED is boring. It is a prescriptive checklist of items that you put in your building and get points for. The more points, the better the rating. It is mind-numbing. It is design by spreadsheet, the victory of Excel over the pencil. Buildings that we would not have looked at twice get splashed everywhere, it is distorting our view of what is important about architecture and design.

That is why Inhabitat's new series on Green Building 101 is so remarkable and important.
........
For example, they turn "Minimize dependency on personal automobiles and associated environmental impacts by encouraging development patterns that allow for walking, biking, or transit as alternative means of transportation to necessary services. into "Live close to where you work, live close to where you shop, live close to where you party, and live close to the public transportation that can get you everywhere else cheaply, easily, and without firing up that SUV. This one choice is hugely beneficial for curbing global warming and decreasing air pollution. Its better for your health too."

It is also the Internet and the Blog at its best. In any other era someone would be doing this as a book, we would wait three years for it to come out, by which time LEED might have changed completely or become irrelevant. Here, the ink is barely dry on the new residential standard (hey, it is still in beta!) and we are seeing it analyzed and explained. Every week, those designing houses and looking for houses will get a bite-sized understanding of what all those points actually stand for. It is important work presented in serial form, not your usual ephemeral blog quickie.

[John Raabe]

Here is something I bring up at meetings about green building and sustainable architecture:

The first and most earth responsible thing we can do is to talk our clients out of building altogether.

Baring that, the second most responsible thing we can do is get them to build smaller...

The third most responsible thing we can do is to help them discover and take advantage of the free natural heating, cooling and psychological characteristics of the site.

After that we can get into the LEEDS stuff.

[Amanda_931]

Yes.