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Hillary Brown is out to prove that if sustainable buildings can make it
here, they'll make it anywhere.
By Tess Taylor
The Metropolis Observed
January 2002
At first glance, it was a toss-up which seemed less likely: that New
York City would become a national leader in environmentally sustainable
building, or that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani would champion the process. Nonetheless,
in June 1999 New York became the largest American city to publish comprehensive
green building guidelines for its public buildings and projects. And as
it happened, Giuliani hailed the opportunity. "New York City is not
only a leader in the use of green building principles," he said, "but
its work helps set standards for other municipalities and private-sector
firms." Collectively the High Performance Building Guidelines
mark a great green step forward for public architecture in this country.
And in large part, they are thanks to the work of former assistant commissioner
Hillary Brown.
Brown, who describes herself as a "bread-and-butter architect,"
doesn't wish to take credit for the greening of New York--a process that
required active involvement from every level of city government. But mobilizing
those forces was the key to success: Brown helped convince administrators
to create the Office of Sustainable Design, inspired employees to become
green experts, and constructed an argument that even a conservative mayor
could love--that building green is not only better for urban and global
environments, it's excellent fiscal management.
Now Brown is using New York as the model Mayor Giuliani said it could be.
She has left city government to develop New Civic Works, an organization
that will help other municipalities inspire green works in their public
and private sectors. She is currently working with Salt Lake City, Utah,
on a set of green guidelines. Meanwhile, NYC's Office of Sustainable
Design carries on under the guidance of new deputy director John Krieble
and deputy commissioner Anne Papageorge. "We're adding to the foundation
she helped create," Papageorge says. Recently Brown spoke with Tess
Taylor about the future of green design.
Tess Taylor: You became involved in writing some of the nation's most comprehensive
green building guidelines, but you wouldn't have called yourself an environmentalist
at the time?
Hillary Brown: No, I don't think I was consciously an environmentalist.
But by the early nineties, environmental degradation had become a compelling
concern. Global warming was making headlines. It was time to begin making
changes. In the middle of all this, I read an article about the work of
William McDonough. Something clicked. I was helping to administer large-scale
capital projects, and I recognized that the public sector is a major consumer
of design and construction services. I realized that by making small changes
in our business practices, we could have a great cumulative impact, and
that conceivably, across a whole real-estate portfolio, green public architecture
could leverage enormous change.
How did that enthusiasm spread throughout the Department of Design and Construction?
When I began thinking and talking about this, I realized how many other
people were hungry to make these changes. We began building wide alliances,
finding lots of support, and doing small feasibility studies. Armed
with that research, I presented the department's commissioner [then Luis
Tormenta] with the concept of creating the Office of Sustainable Design.
Later we built several important public-private partnerships: the New York
State Energy Research and Development Corporation helped us with technical
support, and the Design Trust for Public Space helped us find resources
to publish the guidelines, as did several other environmental advocacy organizations.
But I guess the thing that makes me proudest is that when we decided to
write the guidelines, we invited the staff within the Department of Design
and Construction to write chapters that applied to their field. We
had some skeptics, but as they educated themselves and articulated what
it would mean to green a landscape or improve building operations and maintenance,
there began to be a groundswell of enthusiasm. They became the experts.
Was it difficult to move the guidelines forward under the Giuliani
administration?
Actually we found the administration quite receptive, perhaps because we
made a strong basic argument: high-performance buildings affect the bottom
line. There's a punch there. New York's High Performance Building Guidelines
make it perfectly clear: in the long term it is more fiscally efficient
to have a green building. A great deal springs from making this argument.
It was a big step.
We're also looking at the threat of an energy shortage. So the city's been
willing to make interesting alliances. The New York Power Authority loans
the city the money to support the greater initial cost associated with green
design. The city pays the authority back with money it would have spent
annually on less efficient heating, cooling, and lighting systems.
Further, on the deepest level it is clear that ecological design is an excellent
fit with government mission. I found that the more public agencies
began thinking about green design, the more they saw it as a tool to serve
their constituencies better. As we talked to the Agency for Children's Services,
the point came home--specifically that improved environments, avoidance
of noxious materials, and use of daylighting contribute to the well-being
of children. We began to feel charged by our mandate to create good spaces
for them.
How do the guidelines work?
They're flexible. Each project is designed around a high-performance
plan; we prioritized the environmental attributes that might suit the project.
One building emphasizes chemically stable materials and renewable resources;
another looks at using geothermal heat exchange. In another project, an
architect explores a glass vocabulary: by bouncing light off of a horizontal
light shelf, daylight is vaulted deep into the building, and the city saves
money and energy on lighting. The guidelines also begin to offer some formulas
that show the potential benefits of good ventilation and lighting on
people's productivity. I'm pleased with that. It stands to reason that providing
people with environments that stimulate the senses and put us in touch with
our sense of existing in a place will make us more productive and will increase
our physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.
As an architect, what excites you most about green design?
I think it makes a compelling argument for an embodied architecture. Architects
are taught to privilege the visual and be seduced by images. But the visual
is only one sense. We live in all five of our senses; if we reduce
experience to the visual, we impoverish our legacy. Learning to manipulate
sensory delight is part of the architect's mandate. At times I've become
disenchanted with the profession: I don't think architecture should just
be about putting one's personal imprimatur on spaces. Architecture should
be about harnessing environmental forces and giving them form--and about
designing solutions to social problems. My own career as an architect did
not make sense to me until I began this work.
As you move on to work with other government agencies, what do you think
are the challenges that green architecture faces?
I'd like to think that helping other cities adopt similar standards will
be a matter of going into an agency, finding the champions, and giving
them the tools to change their practices. For civic officials, one
of the obstacles to green design is simply investing the time to make those
changes. In the initial phases at least, green architecture can cost more.
But by articulating the long-term benefits that will offset the costs
and by keeping initial costs incremental, we set the stage for vast improvements.
And by requesting high-efficiency services, we shape expectations for
those services: we engage architects, designers, and civic managers in the
process of becoming environmental innovators. Although many people in the
design community share a sense of moral urgency about environmental issues,
sometimes there's a kind of academic hesitancy about embracing green design
as form-generating. But what if green design could become the generative
foundation for whole new vocabularies of design? We need designers to capitalize
on green technologies, even natural strategies, if you will. We've learned
from Janine Benyus's book Biomimicry that when compared ounce for
ounce, one strand of spider's silk has five times the strength of steel.
Our design communities might learn a great deal from that.
»
More on sustainablity in our Sustainable Metropolis section
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