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In some senses, the term ‘green’ has achieved moderate success in recent years.
Once reserved more for academics, scientists, and ‘environmentalists’, this one-word term has at least managed to engage a broader spectrum of people in a discussion about a very complex set of relationships.
If you can make it through one week of radio, television, print media, shopping, or even a cursory glance at business websites and not come across this term – you must have dozed off for a minute.
I even use it myself – but sparingly.

A raft of well-meaning systems exist to attempt, with varying degrees of success, to codify and quantify what a ‘green’ building means, from Architecture 2030 to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED.

However, as with any term, whether applied to an art movement or an entire political philosophy, the term itself has little significance.
What is important is the perception of a term, and whether that term hinders or helps achieve underlying goals, or, at least, illuminate a path toward those goals.

Far be it from me to suggest a panacea replacement term for ‘green’, but it’s worth thinking about.

A good candidate might be simply ‘Architecture’, but that term is anything but simple, and fraught with complication. After practicing architecture for over twelve years, I leave it to others to decide whether I have ever been involved with a true piece of Architecture, in the full-blown, capital “A” sense, but I hope my work has included things that were at least well-built and suited to their environment.
The relationships between Architecture, building, and good building seem equally complex.
The question “if the roof leaks, can it be Architecture?” reinforces the requirement that buildings must first satisfy the needs of shelter, but is a poor criteria, since rain could easily enter the open oculus in the dome of Rome’s intensely moving Pantheon, for example, and no one dares question its architectural pedigree.
Is a building necessarily Architecture? Is Architecture good? Is Architecture always good building?
All slippery slopes indeed, and to be avoided at all costs.

One might humbly suggest the term ‘good.’
I am well aware that this term implies a value judgement, but as James Howard Kunstler wrote in The Geography of Nowhere “…when the arts and humanities no longer deal with questions of value, of what constitutes a life worth living, they give up altogether the responsibility for making value judgements.” And, if we give up the attempt of making of homes, buildings, and places of value, we court irrelevance as a society.

It seems we often know good when we see it, since buildings that are good are still with us.
And, if permanence be a suitable starting criteria, why not strive for ‘good’ rather than ‘green’?

New versus old

According to Architecture 2030, the nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental think-tank initiated by master passive solar architect Ed Mazria to encourage the transformation of the building sector from the major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions to a central part of the solution, older buildings will have quite an impact in the United States. Of the 300 billion square feet of existing building stock, 50 billion will be demolished (with 250 billion remaining), 150 billion renovated, and 150 billion newly built by 2035.

Demolition and the fascination with the new is deeply engrained in American culture.
Our nation was founded, in part, by those escaping “broken” societies and searching for a clean slate on which to begin anew.
Entire states worth of majestic old-growth forest were decimated to clear land for growing beans and cabbage.
If it’s broke, don’t fix it – buy a new one (despite what your grandparents did during the Great Depression).
If it’s new, it must be better, right?

Needless to say, our existing buildings are a tremendous opportunity, and could be a serious concern if ill-adapted for the future.

Those who have read Stewart Brand’s insightful How Buildings Learn is familiar with how far a well-built older building can lend itself to flexible adaptation.
The embodied energy of the material contained in those buildings, not to mention their cultural and historical significance, is critical to retain to the greatest extent possible.
A growing movement called building deconstruction, or the systematic disassembly of a building to recover materials or components or materials for reuse or repurposing, is gaining ground as an alternative to demolition when older buildings have met the end of their useful life or cannot be otherwise preserved.

Building envelopes – more than just surfaces

When the building envelope – those components comprising the exterior surfaces of a building – is not painstakingly detailed and properly built (or maintained, or renovated) to keep the water out and the conditioned air in, the building can fail – fail miserably and sometimes catastrophically, with consequences for liability. There is even gaining precedent for lawsuits tied to poor thermal performance of buildings not related to mechanical systems.

Not all green building ratings systems have stringent enough standards governing envelopes of new and existing buildings. Some systems defer to local codes to regulate insulation values for slabs on grade, walls, and roofs and values for windows and doors. With some local energy codes written to meet standards as creaky as 1998, building performance in contemporary terms becomes meaningless in many places.

But, building envelopes involve more than simply energy performance.
Poorly conceived, executed, and maintained building envelopes flirt with irrelevance financially, as well as culturally and historically.

A broader relevance

Like your grandmother’s ring or your grandfather’s pocketwatch, older things fascinate and attract us.

Let’s face it – older buildings, more often then not, are cool.

The more of them we have around, the more lessons we learn about how to build well for the future. Also, in many cases, to keep them around requires thinking about their shortcomings and coming up with ways to make them work better than they ever have before.

Think of the many beautiful buildings along traditional Main Streets during the energy crisis in the 1970’s that were slipcased – the practice of covering facades with metal siding, masonry, stucco, or other materials, rather than replacing leaky, inefficient windows, transoms, and doors. Original facades are now being reclaimed from the slapdash of short-term fixes and rediscovered for their attention to detail, unique materials, and their relation to the scale and grain of the communities of which they are a part.

As another example, the gorgeous dome and clerestoried pendentive arches of the Main Reading Room in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress began to reappear a number of years ago, emerging after decades of obstruction by office cubicles and dropped ceilings with dim fluorescent fixtures.

To keep older buildings relevant, one must consider the forces that first drove a building’s maladaption and whether those forces may arise again.
Some questions to ask when working with older buildings or designing new ones may be: is this building relevant? Will this building remain relevant? If so, how? What will it take to keep it relevant?

Context: your great-grandparents would be laughing

In an age when new buildings designed with operable windows, using natural light, and with better indoor air quality are being singled out for awards and promoted as cutting-edge design, something is terribly wrong.

Admittedly, I make a living striving to make buildings with the same attributes, but how did it come to pass that society valued the alternative?
What got us here? What prevailed over time-honored tradition, over common sense, over the centuries of subconscious data collection, problem-solving, and design synthesis known as wisdom?
The answers seem clear, as demonstrated in a wide range of excellent studies (and impassioned pleas), from the aforementioned The Geography of Nowhere and How Buildings Learn to From Bauhaus to Our House and The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
The real question is, rather, are we making strides towards correcting the profound mistakes made over only two or three generations?
Are we making buildings that are ‘good’?

Building envelope is essential, but one must also extend further into a building and examine what drives it from the inside out – physically, spatially, conceptually, and even spiritually, in many senses of the word.

Did your great-grandfather wear a suit when he went out?
Mine did.
The way people viewed buildings during that time was similar.

Again, recall the Main Reading Room in the Library of Congress: the high, naturally-lit ceilings were more than a nifty daylighting scheme for a building with a substantial floor area.
The suitability of such a magnificent design for a civic building in our nation’s capital in which thousands of priceless documents may be viewed by the public seems self-evident as we visit it today, especially if one has been less-than inspired while reading in a low-ceilinged, lackluster contemporary branch library.
Yet at one time, the short-sighted goal of maximizing space by effectively performing a
dome-ectomy seemed acceptable.

The forces that drove us away from reading under natural light are complex and interrelated – just like the elusive search that ‘green’ attempts to describe (actually, the Main Reading Room does rely heavily on electric light). But, to the extent to which we have allowed those forces to lead us astray is the extent to which we must reimagine and remake our built environment.

People movers

As high-performance buildings and homes become the norm, and distinctions between a ‘green’ building and a ‘good’ building (or simply just a building) fade, how will the still-nascent ‘green’ industry be viewed? Surely, there will be little fanfare over the christening of the nation’s 247th ‘green’-certified building – unless it moves people to something other than glancing at a plaque on the way out.

As we once again face an energy crisis (one which will never again truly recede), we must meet the challenges of providing spaces and places worthy of our efforts which not only use (and hopefully generate and re-generate) resources wisely, but also stir the soul and the imagination.

The goals sound slightly lofty, and the example of the Main Reading Room used above is closer to capital-“A” Architecture territory, but ‘good’ buildings (not necessarily designed by an architect) come in all shapes and sizes, and more likely than not you’ve lived in one at some point in your life and remember it well.
These buildings were likely designed not to impress, not to be ‘green’, and possibly not even to last the ages – they were designed and built simply to be, and to be loved, and in so being, they are good.

And that may just be good enough.