What is Green Architecture?
An introduction to Green Building and a description of the way in which the ARC Design Group strives to meet the goals of Green Building.
First and foremost, a green building serves the needs of the people who inhabit it. It supports and nurtures their health, satisfaction, productivity, and spirit. It requires the careful application of the acknowledged strategies of sustainable architecture — non-toxic construction, the use of durable, natural, resource efficient materials, reliance on the sun for daylighting, thermal and electric power, and recycling of wastes into nutrients. An elegant architectural integration of these strategies produces a building which honors the aspirations of those who use it and engages the natural world. And it must be more.
We recognize that the conversion of our culture to a sustainable basis involves a fundamental transformation of the human spirit. We must rediscover our interconnectedness and interdependence with something much larger than ourselves: the natural world (on the material plane) and the spiritual realm which transcends it. Bo Lozoff has called the first community and the second communion, and he suggests that we must have both to be truly at home in the world.
Community supports sustainability. Certain key strategies of a sustainable society can only be sensibly implemented at a larger scale than a single building. Examples of this in the Northeast bioregion are annual cycle solar energy storage and district heating, solar aquatic waste treatment, bioshelters, and clean cogeneration of electrical and thermal power from biomass. Given this, ARC has been actively involved in community building in the areas of cohousing, sustainable business, and in the architectural design process itself.
We believe that excellence in environmental design can only arise from a truly integrated design team — a community of designers. ARC has taken the first step by forming an architectural partnership which consists of an architect, an engineer, and a designer/builder/businessperson. Ultimately the community of designers must include all the stakeholders in the project — everyone becomes a designer, and contributes a unique wisdom to the whole. The participatory design process becomes a powerful method of community building. It is a central aspect of our work with our clients. Most buildings are designed as a settlement between the various designers, each defending their own turf. The settlement is produced by compliance. But co-operation — inviting others to the table — yields a different result, and we replace the current relay-race approach to design and building with an integrated approach.
We’ve discovered important aspects of this system which are different from the conventional design process, such as:
• Schematic design should occupy roughly 40% of the design rather than the conventional 25% because systems and envelope design are so interrelated with massing and siting;
• The process is messy, thorny, and bumpy, and therefore it takes time. Integrated design requires complex thinking and testing up front, so we need to resist schedule compression;
• You can’t just plug in new technologies — synergies have to be developed, nurtured, and woven into a seamless fabric;
• The construction process requires similar integration. The adversarial, low-bid approach is a disaster, and systematically yields poor results. Builders must be brought into the design process and should be selected using the same criteria we use to select other professionals: for their skill, experience, and integrity.
• Post occupancy concern and tuning is an essential missing factor in the modern day building equation. Green buildings must be commissioned to make certain systems are operating properly, especially as we incorporate technological change and improvement.
Sustainability is so much more than solar heat and non-toxicity. The struggle to achieve it demands that we question each part of the process, while remembering that, as Paul Ehrlich says, the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
A green building is often described as one which minimizes its negative environmental impact. We seek to turn that around, and aim for buildings which improve the quality of the air and water, produce surplus power and food, and convert waste into nutrients and useful products.
The Community as Client
A critical part of the success of green buildings is the client. A client is almost always made up of a community, and usually several.
One of the strengths we bring to this project is our ability to work with groups and our interest in this process. We don’t make the decisions. We design, we guide, we tug, we forage, and we elicit the community will. "The first responsibility of a leader," writes retired Herman Miller CEO Max duPree, "is to define reality." We help the client community create an insightful sense of current and future reality.
We have devoted ourselves, in recent years, to the discovery and practice of effective ways to help groups articulate who they are and what they need. Through cohousing projects, through employee-owned business ventures, through our work with a Tribal community, and our work with large communities of interest, we are beginning to learn to get the best out of group endeavors. We have witnessed charrette situations which failed to take advantage of the collective intelligence gathered for the purpose. We therefore insist on thoughtful facilitation, whether it be by us or by others whose competence exceeds our own.
As we write, one of our partners, John Abrams, is preparing to leave for an intensive session with Stewart Brand, and others, working to discover how scenario planning — a process developed to help corporations and governments understand the future — can be applied to the design process. And surely the Oberlin project will include a community of participants envisioning the future. Another partner, Bruce Coldham, has just returned from the third North American Cohousing Conference. The simulation game he invented has become a standard training tool for resident-developer cohousing groups (see illustration).
A description of our approach to a recent project may be the best way to convey our sense of the community design process.
The Northeast Sustainable Energy Association has begun a project in Western Massachusetts with far-reaching goals. ARC Design was hired to lead the organization through the visioning and schematic design process for the Northeast Sustainability Center. We began by holding a week-end session with staff, board, and members — about 80 persons — to establish the vision, the dream, the parameters of the project. The workshop organized, filtered, and prioritized the community’s thinking and produced a photographic record of the collective voice of the group. It was a provocative educational experience for the participants.
After the vision workshop, ARC worked with the Building Committee to create the program and a set of design objectives for the project, and then formed a Technical Resource Group. The idea was to engage a group of experts in the various realms of ecological design and request their help in testing our design objectives and suggesting how they might be achieved. From a long list of possibilities, we pared down to 15, from across the country, and one from Norway. We asked them to commit themselves to a one day meeting in the Northeast and an additional 10 hours of consulting time. We would pay their expenses only. None refused the invitation. The workshop was a day long discussion of what this project might be. Seventy five NESEA members attended. The day was a combination of plenary activity and small group work. Ideas were recorded on cards and organized on a giant pinboard. They became the basis for a series of 40 schematic design solution concepts.
All this happened before we had a site. Armed with program, objectives, and design concepts, we needed a place to go. The site search began in earnest. This would be a major test. Did the project have enough appeal that a low-overhead organization with zero equity and a few wild ideas would be able to secure real estate? Who knew? One of the project objectives was to align with local educational institutions. Another was to take advantage of existing buildings and infrastructure. Another was to be the beginning of a sustainable community. Before long, we had three solid offers — a piece of land at Hampshire College, a piece of land at the New England Small Farms Institute facility, and a building on the University of Massachusetts campus. All were attractive; all promised important affiliations and bridge building.
Then something happened. Greenfield, where NESEA has been located, is a small city whose main economic activity (tool and die manufacturing) had died. The town leaders got wind of the project and didn't want NESEA to leave. They offered to donate a 6,000 sq. ft. downtown building for NESEA to re-hab and occupy. Part of the deal was that NESEA would design and become a partner with the town in the construction of an ecological park adjacent to the building. The project extended, and some of its objectives began to be realized (re-hab a building, stimulate economic re-vitalization, integrate building with landscape and urban agriculture).
The most compelling part of the story is the developing relationship with the town of Greenfield. This unexpected twist strengthened the project immensely and sprung directly from a broad, open process that had room for new ideas. All signs point to an enduring and synergistic collaboration between the town and the organization. The park has become an important part of the project and the town’s future. As it proceeds, it may energize downtown Greenfield, it may change the transportation system, it may attract new businesses and visitors, and it may re-awaken Greenfield's strong sense of pride. This is an example of a community design process in action.
Architectural Solutions to Environmental Problems
Practiced this way, green architecture becomes a significant part of the path to a sustainable future. It brings people together in community, and thereby demonstrates and deepens our connection to each other and the natural world. These qualities uplift and nurture the human spirit — they help us discover and honor our purpose and our selves.
The development of a competent architectural integration of ecological principles promises to assist environmental restoration and healing. It also promises buildings that endure. Only buildings that endure — ones that are loved, and cherished, and cared for — will be solutions rather than problems.
Environmental problems are, above all, complex. It takes multi-level, well-linked biological inquiry to achieve understanding and resolution. If the architectural community can offer a systematic collaborative approach to such understanding, we will have built something more dynamic than just buildings. The emergence of a coherent new process might provide an important tail wind to push the long march to sustainability.
Friday, May 4, 2007
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
