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THE TREND OF ‘GREEN’ ARCHITECTURE
There are a variety of methods and materials that go into designing any building. There are two programs that I know of that help to guide designers and home owners in making environmentally responsible decisions. The first is LEED and the other one is Earthcraft for homes.
Before I get into those, I’m going to go way back here.
Did you guys ever watch little house on the prairie? I used to love watching that show. Charles Ingles was the fathers name. He constantly struggled to keep his family feed and comfortable. They lived in a small house with a loft for the two girls and eventually some cousin or something.
Long running shows alway add in some cousin or something like cousin oliver in the Brady bunch. Another great show.
But back to Charles Ingles. So Charles built his own house with the help of his friends. They cut the lumber, moved the stones for the chimney, and busted their backs to build that 2 1/2 room cabin. They had a central fire place that was pretty much the separation between the dining/kitchen area and the “master’ bedroom. The loft where the two girls slept was above the bedroom. There was not really much of a living room.
If I remember correctly it was just a rocking chair and rug. I think maybe the chair was actually a dining chair, but whatever I can’t remember. The point is the house was; custom built by the family, sized to meet their needs, secure and relatively comfortable.
Of course what was it lacking; electricity and plumbing
Today that would be a deal breaker. Can you imagine living without electricity. I think I could do the outhouse thing at least for a while, but electricity would be really hard. Running water is pretty much a must. Just think about how far we have come over the 238+ years. From when the United States was created in 1776 to now. The advances in building and technology has been just unfathomable. If you consider every 25 years to be a new generation going from where we were in 1776 to now has taken 9 1/2 generations.
But it was a long time after that 1890 invention of electricity, pretty much every home and building started to get electricity in the 1930’s during the make work projects and the building of the electrical grid. We have been living (us common folk) with electricity for only 3 1/2 generations.
That is really hard for me to believe or really comprehend. I mean think about it. working by candle light. Heating our homes with a constant supply of wood. The preparation alone would take weeks to build up enough wood to last us through the coming winter.
Today we are blessed with convenances beyond our great grandparents wildest dreams. When you talk to the older generations, you often hear the stories of “back in my day” followed by some hardship. It usually involved some lack of transportation (walking 7 miles to school) or just busting ass and working hard.
Today we work hard, but in other ways. A lot of my listeners probably don’t spend hours a day doing physical labor to survive.
We have come to expect these convenance items and when that happens you tend to forget how they get there. It’s so common to just walk into a dark kitchen and flip a switch, bam there’s light. I don’t give it a second thought most days. I want the light on, flip the switch the light is on.
Obviously each time we flip that switch we are doing a couple of things. The first is we start pulling from some resource somewhere. And the second is we start the rolling clock slowly getting debited from our potential savings account.
I do believe in protecting our resources and keeping an eye on harvest and mining practices to ensure that we are not damaging our environment.
Things like fracking really do drive me crazy. I will not get into that today, but just wanted to give you my stance.
On the other hand, I do think that we can use our resources and get enjoyment and use out of our environment. If there is a particular stone that is really beautiful that you want for your bathroom vanity, I think that you should be able to get that stone. But, I think we all want for that stone to come from a place that is not doing major damage to surrounding landscapes nor harming the people that harvest that stone.
Well, I’m sorry I have gotten kind of side tracked from where I wanted to go I wanted to get back into the thoughts of the past. When I was growing up I always heard that a house needs to breathe. It needs to have room to allow air to infiltrate. The thought behind that was the fresh air was good for the house, a little fresh air was good for a home and allows for moisture control and helps to solve the “sick building syndrome”
Sick building syndrome created by all the chemicals in our products leaching out into the interior environment of our buildings making the people inside sick. Like breathing in VOC from a freshly painted room. Now we have low or no VOC paints. So 20+ years ago people believed the building needed to breathe.
As we started to study the systems running our homes such as the HVAC units and other items, the thought has shifted. It is now preferred to have the tightest house possible. Everything needs to be sealed. We even go so far as to foam the walls and floor as well as the roof to minimize air infiltration. What this does is it allows our new and improved hvac systems to treat the outside air and bring it into the house with lower humidity and better efficiency. The tighter the house the less waste reconditioning air. The less waste the lower the energy usage.
Since our buildings are becoming more efficient many of the systems had to change or adapt. HVAC units now have variable fans. When a house becomes extremely efficient, so efficient that the air does not need to be conditioned constantly to keep up with heat gain or loss, you have to adjust for moisture control. So the variable speed unit allows the unit to kick on and stay on for a considerable amount of time. This keeps your air from kicking on and off, on and off constantly. Consistent moisture control is the key.
Remember the little house on the prairie example I gave earlier. Do you remember any of the episodes when they would be moving before they finally settled down in walnut grove. Every time they moved they would torch their house. They would burn the whole thing to the ground. Why would they do that?
Are they mean people and just don’t want any other people to stumble upon their house and use the work they put into it? No. They were so resourceful and limited in the resources that they did have, that they would burn down the house and literally walk through the ashes to pick up the nails. They would take the nails with them to their next location. That is recycling.
Today a builder might drop a box of nails and not even spend the time to pick them up. I understand a nail is just a nail. We can run to the hardware store and quickly get more for cheap. In the scheme of things the nails are cheap. What else do we think of in that way. Is granite cheap? Is copper cheap? Is walnut cheap? No. Compared to the little house on the prairie nothing in our houses are cheap. The item that they valued the most, we value the least.
That might be driven by our advances in recycling of metals, but mainly because of our increase in ease of production. It is so much easier to forge a nail than it was years ago. It is so much easier to deforest old growth timber and produce amazing pieces of wood for our homes. Prices on our natural resources are going up. Prices in general are going up. A lot of those prices are driven by the resources depleting and becoming more scarce. When something becomes scarce it gets highly desired
People will pay more for it but they want to make sure that it was produced in an environmentally friendly way.
They don’t want to think about how the ground is being damaged by scraping back large amounts of rock to get to that one particular vein of granite. They don’t want to feel they contributed to such devastation to the landscape. So therefore the ‘green market’ was formed.
A lot of the focus that comes from the green products usually talks about how they were mined environmentally or sourced from recycled material. It eases our minds and lets us believe that we are not damaging the earth with the building of our home. A lot of people have jumped on the feel good bandwagon.
I think that people are starting to realize this and become more aware of it. But when any market starts to get larger, people start to sell to it. Every product out there is coming out of the woodwork and offering some kind of green incentive. It is becoming a large marketing effort for thousands of companies. Over the last 10 companies I have talked to about their products, I would say at least 9 of them were really strongly marketing as a green product. And these are not products that I sought out as green products, these are products that I would have researched anyway and they happen to be green.
The younger generations have been impacted with this green message much more than the older generations. Recycling is a way of life for most children today and people are starting to almost feel bad for using resources. It has almost become stigma. Several companies have latched on to that and taken the approach of selling to your feelings. Taking advantage of your interest in protecting the environment and therefore charging large premiums on products just to get the seal of approval on it. Or even worse stamping it as green when it is not.
The commissioning and approval of all these materials and buildings has become very political. Companies spend millions of dollars trying to get their products approved to be considered as part of the point system of LEED.
I was discussing a LEED project with another architect and he mentioned that with all the commissioning, paperwork, and fees involved with getting one of his projects LEED certified. They could have taken the entire building off grid with solar and wind power. Is this a good use of our resources. Should we be investing in the marketing of these buildings or should we be investing in the buildings.
Where should we go from here? I feel that we should stop trying to market and surround ourselves with all this green architecture and products. We should have never gotten away from truly green architecture to begin with. The architecture in walnut grove. It is time that we just design the right way and all the green will follow. Design with comfort and conservation in mind.
So, just like I always do on each episode, I wanted to end with one final take away for you. Although sometimes the ‘green’ architecture comes across as a fad or gimmick, it is very much necessary. Be smart with your decisions and consider the alternatives and how they impact the environment. A couple of years ago I was discussing a leed house with a contractor. He was telling a story about how one of his clients had selected a tile for the kitchen floor. They ordered the tile and the owner approved of it and then they installed it. Later the homeowner comes back and says that they found a more environmentally friendly tile they want to use. So he has to pull up all the tile in the kitchen and throw it away and install this new tile. That is not the best use of our resources in my opinion.
I wanted to end this episode with a quote from David Arkin:
“We firmly believe that in order for a building to be sustainable, it must be loved; it must touch the soul. People—not just the current owners, but future generations—must find enough value in a building to continue to occupy and maintain it. Some of this is aesthetic, some performance, some economics. The Roman architect Vitruvius told us that buildings must have “Firmness, Commodity and Delight”. True today more than ever.”
