Integral Sustainable Design, [amazon.com] reconciles divergent knowledge arenas and priorities while establishing integral sustainable design as a unique practice, ideal for this time of environmental and communitarian crisis. It’s author, Mark DeKay, prods the profession and asks, what design challenges lie beyond whole systems design? And how can we shift our focus from ‘doing’ design to ‘being’ design? DeKay, a professor of architecture and director of Graduate Studies, College of Architecture and Design at the University of Tennessee, has crafted an accessible introduction to the fascinating emerging field of integral studies as applied to the practice of architecture.

What is Integral Theory and why might it be useful to designers? Integral Theory is a powerful critical approach, actually considered a meta-theory due to its breadth, its applicability to interdisciplinary studies, its integration of the truth claims of the arts, sciences, and humanities as well as its integration of the perennial philosophy across Eastern and Western, sacred and secular views. Ken Wilber, the American writer, scholar and framer of Integral Theory, first began writing in the early 1970’s in his area of specialization, developmental psychology, and its intersections with spirituality and the spectrum of consciousness described throughout history. Wilber has published over 25 books. His influential ideas have found application across a range of disciplines, spawning the young but expanding global interdisciplinary movement in scholarly and practical applications of his ideas now referred to as integral studies, inclusive of but not limited to the research and writings of Wilber himself.

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What is sustainable?  More to the point, what does the word mean when applied to a school? The MUSE school, founded by Suzy Cameron, offers some insight. The new campus in the Malibu hills opened with the help from Ecovations, a design firm that has re-envisioned the possibilities, indeed the very definition of sustainability. This is not an “expensive” or “faddish” place. At the Muse school, sustainable means healthy, integrative, and economically self-sufficient. The mission, according to Cameron, is to combine culture with sustainability and language and its name, Muse, which was her husband’s idea, epitomizes the philosophy of the school: inspiration.

Treehouse.  Photo: Sherin Wing

While its primary goal is to educate children from Pre-K to 8, its edifying influence extends to everyone involved with the school: staff, teachers, parents, and even the community. All are involved in the school’s ongoing evolution. Indeed, many of the adults find that here they learn about the small and large interventions they can make in order to achieve a more healthy approach to living precisely because many of the MUSE strategies are inexpensive (composting and growing food), and can be practiced at home (drinking filtered water in glasses rather than buying bottles).

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U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, left, celebrates with the University of Maryland team after they placed first in the overall U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2011, alongside Richard King, right, Director of Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C., Saturday, Oct. 01, 2011. (Credit: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon)

The Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon 2011 is now officially in the books. Despite the sub-par sunshine and weather throughout the week, the competition ended with success. Nineteen student teams from universities around the United States and elsewhere competed to the final day. They were challenged to design, build, and exhibit solar- powered homes during a weeklong competition. The homes had to do everything you would expect from a typical house while striving for net positive energy balance and remaining affordable. Hot water, temperature and humidity controls, home entertainment, and appliances were all measured for performance while architecture, engineering, communications, and market appeal were judged for excellence in design and promotion.  Standings shuffled daily and sometimes hourly, but in the end it was The University of Maryland’s entry, WaterShed, that took home first place overall.

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Among the many challenges for architects today has to do with technology: How do you apply new technology that can improve the quality of life cost-effectively, socially-conscientiously, without hogging resources (i.e. it is sustainable). The Changing Places research group at MIT Media Lab is working on the problem, developing several projects to address these issues. Their goal, as they state, is to “understand and respond to human activity, environmental conditions, and market dynamics.”

Design solutions as set of inter-changeable components

The Home Genome: Mass-Personalized Housing project exemplifies all these goals. Here researchers begin with the premise that the home is now a center of everything from “preventative health care, energy production, distributed work, and new forms of learning, [to] entertainment, and communication,” according to the brief. They identify and quantify those activities, needs, practices, and even values. From there, they provide solutions based on building blocks, or the “genes” in the title of the project. These can be reassembled in a myriad of different ways to accommodate specific needs and activities of the occupants. These ideas are combined with new approaches to more cost-effective, resource-conserving supply-chains and production.

By themselves, such ideas are not new; we’re familiar with architects’ proposals for reconfiguring storage containers, for example. Read more…

My background prepared me for the Solar Decathlon competition.  But I wasn’t sure how to apply my interest in sustainability and architecture in a meaningful way until the Solar Decathlon challenged our class at RISD to build  a house that produces all its energy needs. For us as students, this was an unparalleled opportunity to use architecture and design to address global energy issues, environmental concerns, and learn essential practical skills to address them. It also showed me that it takes leadership and collaboration to understand and engage the world around me. It changed my DNA as a designer.

Growing up in a South American country where petro-politics shaped the culture and the economy, I was acutely aware of energy issues. The country’s abundance of oil fueled its development for the past century. It has also, unfortunately, become a political weapon that’s led to regional instability, corruption, and many social ills. Our dependence on fossil fuels has restricted our ability to advance in many other areas. Tom Friedman refers to this condition as a “resource curse.” For me petro-politics generate social issues that translate to an architecture of dependence.

Started in 2000, and every other year subsequently, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon challenges collegiate teams from around the world to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that consume only the energy they produce. These net zero-energy homes need to have all the modern conveniences for our everyday lives while incorporating the latest technology. And, of course, we must make these homes beautiful, engaging, and relevant.

The Decathlon involves ten contests, each managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Through these contests, NREL monitors all aspects of energy production and consumption, as well as subjective grading for architectural design, marketability, and the teams’ communication skills. Though the competition occurs in the United States, it has spread to Europe and China. It is one of my favorite U.S. exports.

Photo: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon

It was in the fall of my third year of architecture school at RISD that I learned about the Solar Decathlon. The project was presented to us as a studio to design and build solar powered, modular, sustainable homes that would be displayed on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and put us in competition with universities from around the U.S. and the world. It sounded amazing.

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On September 23rd the Empowerhouse Collaborative’s building opens to the public on the National Mall in Washington DC. After a summer of non-stop construction on the Hudson River waterfront, our team, among the 19 competing in this year’s U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, is hard at work to make our design real. Ten days after the opening, when the competition concludes, most of the teams will pack up their houses and go home. Our house, however, will be moving to its newly poured foundation in the Deanwood neighborhood of Washington D.C, where it will be expanded into a two-family home for Habitat for Humanity families.

This is just one way that the Empowerhouse stands apart from the other Solar Decathlon entries. In addition to designing a high-efficiency, solar-powered home for the competition, our team of students from Parsons The New School for Design; Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at The New School; and Stevens Institute of Technology worked closely with the D.C.’s government and the local Habitat for Humanity, to create a new model for green, affordable housing for the city.

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During this year’s NeoCon, the largest contract furniture trade show held in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) introduced Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Pilot Credit 43, which applies to all Building Design and Construction, Interior Design and Construction LEED rating systems.

The pilot credit supports LEED’s objective of encouraging building owners and facility managers to implement measurable green building goals as these relate to maintenance and furnishings, specifically. LEED Pilot Credit 43 promotes the use of non-structural products, with known life cycles in LEED buildings, in order to set the foundation for continuous improvement. Also, for the first time, the USGBC recognized several third-party certifiers, which validate the sustainable attributes proclaimed by manufacturers about their products. Many of the methods of earning LEED Pilot Credit 43 revolve around the use of third-party certification.

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It’s impossible to overstate the impact that Ray Anderson—who died yesterday after a long battle with cancer—had on the built environment. An engineer and entrepreneur, he founded Interface Carpet in 1973 and spearheaded its growth into a multi-billon dollar enterprise. His now famous eco-epiphany in the mid-1990s set the company on a new course, one that helped transform not only Interface but the entire industry. Although his competitors like to grumble about all the ink we gave Ray—he was good copy, he knew the value of a powerful narrative—his example clearly inspired them to become greener, leaner, and ultimately more profitable. That sort of competition, Ray would argue, was healthy competition.

Ray told the story many times: how a late-night encounter with Paul Hawken’s seminal book, Ecology of Commerce, changed his life. Hawken’s argument was simple and direct: industry was responsible for plundering the earth and uniquely positioned to save it.  Our good luck? Ray took up Hawken’s challenge and set a daunting goal for his company: zero environmental impact by 2020. He called it “Climbing Mount Sustainability.” Although the goal remains a work in progress, the company remains dogged in its pursuit of the challenge. Ray’s enduring legacy will be the roadmap he created for future “recovering plunderers” (as he liked to call himself). His message: it can be done.

Related: For our July 2004 issue, Ray Anderson spoke to Martin Pedersen about “Climbing Mt. Sustainability.” His company, Interface, was later featured in Metropolis for their LEED Platinum-rated Atlanta showroom. In 2003, Anderson received the International Interior Design Association’s Star award, and in a 2007 interview, Paul Hawken told us that history may well find that Ray Anderson was the Rosa Parks of green building.

Mesa Verde Balcony House. Courtesy National Park Service, nps.org

The term sustainable has become one of those buzzwords that can easily be lumped in with granola and yoga. While it is hip to be sustainable, what exactly does this entail? Does buying green stuff like a hybrid and re-useable shopping bags make me more sustainable? Or is it about buying less? But isn’t that bad for the economy? Being sustainable is supposed to be good for the economy, right? What happened to the green economy?

Sustainable and it’s related terms like green and eco-have been made so ubiquitous that it becomes difficult to tell what is sustainable and what isn’t . We hear a lot about green-washing. So much of what is green actually isn’t.

Add to this confusion a much larger problem. We are now living in what many in the sciences are calling the Anthropocene in which “humankind has become a global geological force in its own right.” Read more…

We at Metropolis have a great fondness for Pliny Fisk III. When we first visited him at his nascent experimental compound on the outskirts of Austin, TX there was no USGBC, no LEED, no Energy Star, and only a few of us talked about environmental sustainability and the necessity for great and far-reaching innovation in everything from building materials to super intelligent software. Now as Pliny’s Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS) celebrates its 35th anniversary, we caught up with him and his brilliant partner, Gail Vittori, to talk about their new book, some highlights of their many activities in green building systems, and the generations of creative people they attract to their unique encampment.

Susan S. Szenasy: Let’s start with the book: Its subtitle, 35 years of Serious Commotion, is fabulous. Rather than me explaining it, can you both pipe in about how you interpret this statement?
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