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 Page 3 Their counterparts in the green movement have yet to achieve even a fraction of that cultural power. When I spoke recently to David Gottfried, a cofounder of the USGBC, he told me proudly that sustainable architecture was "along the same pathway" as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In other words, he suggested, new buildings will soon be green in the same invisible and ubiquitous way that they are accessible to the handicapped. This comparison to the ADA points to a continuing problem for green leaders. The ADA's arrival in 1990 presented architects and builders with a singular opportunity to bring design to the forefront of public consciousness. Unfortunately, it was an opportunity missed: we got some new handrail designs and wider bathroom doors, but we didn't get a conversation on the role of design in public life. Green design faces a similar dilemma. We can only hope that the growing awareness of how buildings contribute to environmental degradation will lead the way to more conspicuous, even delightful, design solutions rather than push ecologically responsible architecture toward an understated utilitarian role. Just because a building makes only a faint impression on the land--as all green architecture aims to do--doesn't mean it needs to make a faint impression on the eye. In fact striking design can be green in one very important way: if a building is beloved, it will be maintained and preserved--and there is nothing more environmentally friendly than longevity. As Wines has pointed out, "Buildings that last because they are adaptable and aesthetically pleasing are arguably more green than a whiz-bang green building that nobody wants to live in in twenty years...People will never want to have an aesthetically inferior building around, no matter how well stocked it is with cutting-edge thermal glass, photovoltaic cells, and zero-emission carpeting." Arup's McGregor agrees: "If you end up creating a building that nobody likes or enjoys, no matter how intelligently it's designed, it's not a sustainable building." The design press, of course, shares a good deal of the blame here. "It's unfortunate," Sim Van der Ryn says, "that architecture critics have such a narrow view of the world. They're always pushing the anointed circle. I don't think most architects pay attention to it, but I think it does do damage in the schools, because students read this stuff." The vast majority of writing on new architecture (including much of my own) fails to devote even a single, lonely sentence to issues of sustainability. We all need to think about writing stories that consider buildings at various points in their life cycles--that return to see how structures are performing a generation after they were erected. And when we interview famous architects, we need to ask pointed questions about why they're not using their bully pulpit to promote green principles. In the end, it may be futile to expect the current crop of famous architects to undergo a sudden ecological change of heart. We may simply have to wait for a new generation, one that has been steeped in green principles since the earliest days of its design education, to combine fame and commitment to sustainability in its practices. The example of Cesar and Rafael Pelli [see Enterprise] illustrates the kind of shift I'm talking about: it's the younger Pelli who has made green design a priority for the firm that bears his family's name. Harrison Fraker, dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley and a longtime leader of the green movement, makes an unusual--and I think persuasive--point about why so few celebrity architects talk openly about sustainability. "Star architecture has a lot to do with mystery and keeping things hidden," Fraker says. Many architects, he suggests, fear that revealing too much prosaic information about double-paned windows or recycled carpeting might begin to pull back the curtains of that mystique. So even those designers who are savvy about green principles and utilize them in their work are reluctant to draw attention to that focus. They fear, Fraker says, that being tagged environmentalists might jeopardize their standing as lone visionary practictioners of some enigmatic design alchemy. "Herzog and de Meuron have produced some very green buildings," Fraker says, citing their Dominus Winery in the Napa Valley. "But they worry that talking about green design will make environmentalism the center of their public reputation." It is a great irony of sustainable architecture that it retains a status as being somehow mired in the past, for holding on to a nostalgia for the counterculture. In reality, what's more forward-looking than truly green architecture? Still, a blinding-white palace of light and air by Meier or a streamlined blob by Greg Lynn immediately says "cutting-edge," while most green architecture says either "back-to-the-land" or "good corporate citizenship" if it says anything at all. "The problem is that the green movement hasn't created a language that people can easily identify with or even understand," Sim Van der Ryn says. The challenge now is to find a formal language for sustainable architecture that is as forward-looking as the technology and efficiency systems that make up its structures--what Van der Ryn calls "a kind of transparency in terms of how buildings relate to nature." This doesn't mean a one-size-fits-all approach to aesthetics or some new International Style on behalf of the environment. Sustainable design is by definition sensitive to context and climate--factors that promote a flexible, regional approach rather than a universal one. But a symbolic architectural language for green buildings, one that promotes--even shamelessly hawks--sustainability on irresistible aesthetic terms, would energize the movement in some especially valuable ways. It would help green architecture make up some of the PR ground it's lost to celebrity architects in the last five years. When you consider that the vast majority of people who are influenced by an important building these days never set foot inside of it--are seduced only by two-dimensional images of its architecture--you begin to realize how powerful a green symbolism could be. And with the growth of media generally and the design press specifically, that is truer now than ever before. Probably one hundred times as many people have seen the Guggenheim Bilbao in newspapers and magazines as have walked through its galleries, for example. To have wide influence, green buildings will need to advertise their sustainability in ways that register in photographs shot from helicopters zooming by overhead. Conveniently enough, there's a perfect example of what I mean going up right now on the south bank of the Thames River. The Greater London Authority building--designed by Norman Foster and Partners and scheduled to open in July of 2002--is one of the first buildings from a celebrity office to hit the note I'm talking about. The striking thing about the scheme is not just that it's both green and formally groundbreaking, or that it's both sustainable and the product of a celebrity office, but that it draws its environmental benefits directly from its form, and vice versa: it's aligned like a slightly warped egg, tilting toward the south, to draw in natural light and reduce the amount of energy necessary to heat and cool its 183,000-square-foot interior. Its energy requirements will be a quarter of those for a typical office building with air-conditioning. In the words of the firm, the goal of the building aesthetically as well as technologically is "a fully integrated environmental agenda." The GLA looks poised to do what few sustainable buildings have done in recent years: to vie for a prominent spot in the public imagination and the public dialogue, to elbow its way into the glossiest design magazines and create instant buzz on the cocktail party circuit. If it manages to do all of that, it will mean more for the sustainability movement than a thousand buildings meeting green standards in noble anonymity. |
