Turning Down the Global Thermostat
A veteran of green design has studied global warming and sees its cause--and
possible solution--coming from the same unlikely source: architects.
By Christopher Hawthorne
October 2003
It would be tough to argue with the suggestion that the sustainable-design
movement has made significant, even dramatic, strides over the last
decade. For architects, for industry, for the media, and for the general
public, green design has moved from the fringe to the mainstream. We might
not have reached the proverbial tipping point that would bring forth a massive
shift in the way buildings are designed and built. But compared to, say,
the automobile industry--which is actually regressing when it comes to energy
efficiency, with average miles-per-gallon figures ballooning back
to where they stood a generation ago--architecture looks downright progressive.
That's the conventional wisdom we comfort ourselves with, anyway. But in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, an amiable six-foot-six-inch-tall, 62-year-old architect
named Edward Mazria is engaged in what can only be called a personal crusade
to convince the members of his own field that the conventional wisdom
is dangerously out of touch with reality.
For Mazria the way the human race is changing the environment, specifically
in terms of global warming, suggests nothing short of coming catastrophe.
Already quantifiable results like melting ice caps, rising sea levels,
and disappearing species, he says, should be enough to prove his case. Of
course, environmental doomsdayers are a dime a dozen, but Mazria's sky-is-falling
theory has a twist. He places both the blame and the responsibility for
turning things around squarely on the shoulders of one profession: architects.
During the last year Mazria has studied the existing data and come to a
startling conclusion: architects--together with the building industry--are
responsible for just about half of America's energy consumption and half
its greenhouse gas emissions, which are produced by burning coal, gasoline,
and other fossil fuels. (Cars and trucks, by comparison, do roughly one-sixth
as much damage.) Most scientists who've studied the issue will tell you
that greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth's atmosphere lead to global warming--and
that unchecked global warming is capable of causing everything from killer
heat waves, withered crops, dying species, and melting ice caps to rising
seas that would submerge most of the world's present-day coastline under
water. Mazria has produced a traveling multimedia presentation and a sort
of white paper entitled "It's the Architecture, Stupid!", parts
of which were published earlier this year in Solar Today magazine,
laying out his case in urgent, accessible prose.
Because Mazria is a member of the tribe he is now trying to shame into action
(he's a principal in a successful architectural practice in Santa Fe, Mazria
Riskin Odems Inc.) and an old veteran of the green design movement (he wrote
the beloved Passive Solar Energy Book in the late 1970s, which has
sold around 500,000 copies and has been translated into Spanish, French,
Japanese, and Italian), people began to notice his newly intensified
environmental activism fairly swiftly. But not swiftly enough for Mazria.
"This is the most important moment in the history of architecture,"
he says. "I want to get this news to people as quickly as possible
to establish the threshold between knowing and not knowing--a doorway from
this world to an entirely new world in architecture. If architects don't
attack this, then the world doesn't have a chance."
The story of how Mazria came to this late-in-life conversion from mellow
to rabid environmentalism began innocently enough. Every Friday afternoon
at about 3 p.m. Mazria and the rest of the architects and staff in his office
leave their desks and convene. "Somebody runs to get beer and chips,
and we sit around a conference table and catch up on the week," Mazria
says. "It's a social thing. A couple of people in the office even
make their own beer, and sometimes they bring that in.
"One Friday last fall one of the younger architects said, 'You know,
Ed, a lot of times you come over and give us a desk crit, and you tell us
what to change or do to help make the building more sustainable, and usually
it just works. But we want to understand why--why you suggest those
particular choices, and what experience leads to them, and all that stuff
you did in the 1970s and 80s.'"
The staff asked Mazria if he'd consider using Friday afternoons to lead
them in a seminar in the particulars of green design. Mazria agreed, but
realized he needed to give himself a refresher course. He had plans to take
his four-year-old granddaughter to Disneyland that weekend, so he grabbed
an extra bag and packed it with books. He hadn't picked some of them up
for years.
"I wanted to start the seminar when I got back, and thought we would
look at big picture first and then go down into the architectural nitty-gritty,"
Mazria recalls. "So I took the big-picture books with me." Many
of these were books he'd added to his library in the 1970s while he was
researching his famous 1979 book on solar energy. They included classics
of environmental literature like The Limits to Growth, the text of
a report by several noted experts first published in 1972.
Sitting in his hotel room, Mazria came across projections in the books he'd
brought along about population growth, the amount of carbon dioxide in the
Earth's atmosphere, and other threats to the environment. Many of them ended
with projections for the year 2000, which at the time they came out, Mazria
notes, had seemed like the distant future. Since then some of those texts
have been tagged as part of the so-called "pessimist" school of
environmental thought, challenged from time to time by neoconservative analyses
suggesting that human inventiveness and technological development will combine
to take care of whatever ecological problems we might bring upon ourselves.
But Mazria found that, if anything, the projections in The Limits to
Growth and other books had been frighteningly accurate.
Barely recognized in the 1970s, global warming is now undeniable. Since
worldwide temperature measures began in 1867, the 15 hottest years have
all been since 1980. Each of the top three has come in the last five
years. Some scientists think average world temperatures will increase by
ten degrees by 2100, a jump that would do almost unfathomable damage to
the planet. Even the more conservative estimates of a rise between one and
three degrees over that time promise changes, in the form of floods,
drought, disease, and lost ecosystems.
"Here I am in fantasyland with this kid," Mazria recalls, "reading
this stuff! Can you imagine? This is a huge experiment on the part of mankind
that we're in the middle of. The stakes are so high. We talk about terrorism
day in and day out, we talk about Iraq 24-7, but very little is being discussed
about this global experiment that we're conducting on a scale that's absolutely
unprecedented."
While the Bush administration continues to counsel patience in face of what
it claims somehow to see as contradictory science--their favorite word when
it comes to the global-warming threat is uncertainty--world temperatures
keep going up. Atmospheric scientist Michael McCracken told Knight-Ridder
newspapers this summer that Bush's tack of continuing to ask for more study
of the issue rather than beginning action to combat it "is a little
bit like somebody sending a letter to the fire department trying to
find out their capabilities when there is already smoke coursing through
the house."
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Edward Mazria
Photo by Doug Hoeschler |
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U.S. Energy Consumption by Sector
A reorganization of existing data--combining the energy required to run
residential, commercial, and industrial buildings along with the embodied
energy of industry-produced materials like carpet, tile, and hardware--exposes
architecture as the hidden polluter. |
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Total U.S. Energy Consumption
Despite the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which
promised to restore greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to 1990
levels, US energy consumption increased by 17% through the 90s. Experts predict
an additional 37% rise in energy consumption by 2020. |
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U.S. CO2 Emissions by Sector
While levels of carbon dioxide emissions produced by industry remain steady,
those produced by architecture are soaring, signaling a pressing need for
widespread change in the way architects design buildings. |
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Global Temperature Variation
Since 1900 average worldwide temperatures increased more than an entire
degree--a statistic that Mazria sees as a call to action for architects.
Charts: Data from Ed Mazria; graphics by Criswell Lappin |
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Mazria's 1979 book on the fundamentals of passive solar design has sold more
than 500,000 copies worldwide. |
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