Special Supplement to the October 2001 issue: A report on the proceedings of the Metropolis West Conference, February 7+8, 2001, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, "Finding the Thread of Sustainability."

Metropolis West Supplement
October 2001

 
Ricardo Legorreta When I compare medicine with architecture I see that in the twentieth century, medicine has increased life spans and eradicated diseases. And I ask myself if architecture can make the same claim? Are we really making people happier or just playing games?

Green Dialogues
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Harrison Fraker: Although much has been learned about how buildings interact with their environment and how to reduce energy consumption by as much as 60 to 80 percent, some of these buildings just didn't work well-and that's not surprising for a new technology. Either they depended on temperature swings that were too wide for comfort, or they depended too much on user participation and maintenance to work. In some cases the HVAC systems and controls were not sophisticated enough to take advantage of the more dynamic environmental envelopes and filters. Unfortunately, many new buildings were also architecturally awkward, if not just plain bad design. Yet with the zeal of the environmental movement, their authors-me included-argued in favor of their designs on ethical grounds as a new aesthetic of environmental responsibility.

All these circumstances provided a field day for critics from the area of design in which Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves operate. They attacked early sustainable design on multiple grounds, accusing it of being a design ideology promulgated under the rubric of ethical responsibility. They labeled it environmental moralizing and dangerous. And in some cases they dismissed it as nostalgia for the vernacular or an excuse for bad architecture. But the most damaging critique came by defining it as outside the responsibilities of an architecture student-marginal to the discipline of architecture.

Tim Duane Every day, including today, we will save as much electricity from improved refrigerator energy-efficiency standards as all the nuclear plant output in the United States.
This stigma has haunted sustainable design for almost 20 years. It was leveled at a time in the history of architecture education when the discipline had given up much of its empirical base to engineers and was rebelling against theoretical constructs, especially from the social sciences, which had been imported into the discipline as theory. The avant-garde focus was on architecture's formal aesthetic constructs. How buildings actually worked-the empirical, measurable data on performance at most levels, including the interaction with the environment-was not theorized as part of the core discipline. At best, energy-conscious design was relegated to the realm of isolated support courses, accompanied by the occasional studio project if there was student interest or some type of energy-conscious design competition.

Ricardo Legorreta: The basic things we try to achieve in architecture: happiness, poetry, love, meditation, and peace. In the end, these are the things that make us happy in life.

William McDonough: I asked how many people at a large gathering of architects at a recent AIA Convention know how to find true south? I got four hands. When did we forget where the Sun is?

Harrison Fraker: Architects in Holland, Switzerland, England, France, and Italy and Germany, automatically integrate sustainability into the core of what they're doing. They don't hype it; they don't brand themselves "green architects." They do it.

Ricardo Legorreta Suddenly we have new types of glass, new kinds of air-conditioning, new this and that. And we feel obliged to use those things rather than ask technology for things we would like to have. In Mexico we look at technology as the only way to progress. And there we are, trying to use the new materials just because they are new, just because they are available, just because they are shown in magazines.
Air-conditioning is a wonderful thing, but we overdid it. Now we want air-conditioning everywhere; we want to live inside buildings that are exactly the same, to go without a jacket, to be in a shirt all the time. And when we decide we want to have fun, we go to the beach to sweat. What's wrong with working in a sweater in winter and a shirt in summer? I'm not advocating bad working conditions, but there's nothing wrong with two degrees above or below the ideal comfort zone.

William McDonough: We must obey nature's laws. Architects must obey gravity. Gravity is not just a good idea, it's the law. If we obey nature's laws, then growth is good. Is a tree growing good? Ask any six-year-old. The fact that we would disobey nature's laws or ignore them, using brute force, comes out in Modern design with a large sheet of glass and cheap energy. Architects have forgotten where the Sun is. We can build anywhere. If it's too cold, you add energy; if it's too hot, you add energy.

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