[Next entry: "Eye from Albany December 2007"]
10/20/2007: "Going green isn't enough"
October 2007
Eye from Albany
Durability or lack thereof continues in the new green society
By Paul M. Bray
I recently read a book by Ved Mehta about his building a home on the Island of Ilseboro in Maine. Early in the process of designing his home, he asked architect Edward Larrabee Barnes “why do people use Sheetrock”. Mehta is blind and very sensitive to noise. Sheetrock walls are not great noise barriers.
Barnes replied: “It’s cheap, it’s easy to install-you just stick it on the studs and tape over the joints of the boards and paint it. And it gives the house a nice, clean, uncluttered look. And contemporary architecture is mostly about appearance. I just built a palace for a land in the Hamptons. She’s tickled pink. The poor dear doesn’t realize that she’s living in a cardboard palace whereas someone of her ilk a hundred years ago would have livid in a stone or marble palace.”
'
In the 70s I remember an article in the New York Times entitled, "The Jungle Law of the Shopping Center". It was about shopping center on Long Island when it was not uncommon to see a deteriorating and mostly empty center on one side of the road while across the road a brand new center was opening. While traditional downtowns evolved slowly, the auto dependent world of shopping centers is another part of our disposable society with a useful life sometimes as short as 15 years.
Even though we have passed the tipping point to into a period of becoming a "green" society emphasizing sustainability, we can't give up being a disposable society. LEED or the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Green Building Rating System "is the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high performance green buildings". It "promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection, and indoor environmental quality".
It sounds good and green, but is it also short sighted when it comes, for example, to preserving historic structures. It fosters the same short lived building we accustomed to since the end of World War II.
Conservation underlines both historic preservation and the sustainable principles behind green technologies. Historic preservation is sustainable by its reuse of existing structures and interior components and to the extent it is associated with walkable, mixed-use and transit friendly land use patterns. It has been pointed out that the “embodied energy” in the bricks an historic or just old building can save the equivalent of scores or more of gasoline tanker trucks of energy. Green building has shifted the attention away from embedded energy in old buildings and in use durable, renewable natural materials that conserve resources in the long-term.
Losing sight of the value of historic buildings is an American cultural thing. We like what is faster, cheaper and newer and if we can wrap the virtue of sustainability around it all the better. But faster, cheaper and newer are not the qualities we need in the 21st century as we have an aging population and abundant environmental, resource and security threats.
We need to do is slow down enough to rebuild the caring communities associated with traditional neighborhoods we can romanticize but find so hard to replicate.
In other words, green including clean energy and recycling is good, but only if we anchor it with our best traditions and in caring communities. Otherwise we are just fooling ourselves as we continue to live in card board palaces.
Paul M. Bray is an Albany attorney. His e-mail is pmbray@aol.com