15 ms·

Why Green Architecture Hardly Ever Deserves the Name

63 points by dsego 13y ago

kcorbitt 13y ago
This is a good example of how the market can outperform centralized governing councils under certain conditions. the LEED-certifying body can't possibly hope to know all the 2nd- and 3rd-degree repercussions of different design decisions. But if we just increased the energy tax by 20% (arbitrary number), people would tend to find the global maxima of energy efficiency without having to conform to rigid standards. The same thing can be seen with cars. I think that raising CAFE standards for gas mileage is great and all, but at least where I'm from the trend toward buying more efficient cars is less about their lower upfront cost as a result of CAFE-induced supply reduction and more about the rising price of gas. A $1.50/gallon federal "negative externalities" tax on gasoline would do wonders for the nation's energy consumption levels.
- mjn 13y ago
  LEED and CAFE are a bit different: CAFE is a set of government-mandated standards aimed at reducing pollution (whether effectively or not), while LEED is a set of standards that originate with a private-sector trade group, aimed at promoting the brand of "green" architecture (and it's done that quite effectively). I don't see it as distinct from the market: LEED is an example of the market at work. It's just that it's optimizing for what the market optimizes for by default (profits), not optimizing for the actual environment. That process, where the market treats environmentalist sensibilities as just another niche market to cater to, is sometimes referred to as "green marketing", or more derogatorily as "greenwashing".
  - kcorbitt 13y ago
    Sure, I'm not saying that LEED doesn't work because it's government-run (it's not) nor even going so far as saying that government involvement in the market is necessarily evil. I'm trying to make the distinction between an incentives-based market and a central planning council, not between the government and the private sector. The government can plan things centrally or organize distributed exchanges, as can private companies and trade organizations.
- vy8vWJlco 13y ago
  I get your point, but promoting a tax to get the most out of the market is doublespeak. A carrot ("This is better because... and you can use it!") is more "free-market" than a stick ("Don't do that.") - even if I would prefer not to be tempted (or threatened) by either.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    It's not an incentive or a threat; it's a change in the rules of the game. When they patch Starcraft to increase the damage that a spore crawler does to biological units, that's not an incentive or a threat; it's a change in the rules of the game.
    - vy8vWJlco 13y ago
      I can't think of any rules that aren't enforced by threat. (The equivalent of patching Starcraft in the real world makes you rich or lands you in jail for tax evasion. The government's patch is only accepted because of the threat of force behind it.)
      - anonymoushn 13y ago
        Even if we all believe taxation is theft, we can still talk about which taxes and which expenditures are better than others. Given the choice between the state coercing you using the threat of violence and the state coercing you using the threat of violence in such a way that some public good is achieved, it seems natural to prefer the latter.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - saraid216 13y ago
        > The government's patch is only accepted because of the threat of force behind it. Uh, some of us accept the government's patch because we agree with it, or because we want to play the same game that everyone else is and the government happens to be a conveniently centralized entity for deciding which patches go in and which do not. Like Blizzard. We also accept that hacking your own patch in either means you can't play on the ladder with everyone else or that it's an action worth of receiving a ban in response. It's called "establishing a free market".
- cam_l 13y ago
  The issue particular to buildings is, as opposed to manufactured goods etc, buildings tend to stick around for quite a while and cost a lot of money for the build and a lot of money to operate. More than that, large capital outlays are required to reduce the operating costs by marginal amounts over the life of the building. Whenever you have a substantial delay between the outlay and the payback, market forces tend to be ineffective. Also, if we are talking energy costs, something like half the energy costs in buildings are in embodied energy - in the steel and concrete and materials used to build it. A broad scale energy tax would encourage reduction of upfront energy usage at the expense of long term operation. Any at the same time, may trigger the demolition of existing stock. Add to that most - something like 60-70% - building stock in the US is between 20-70 years old. If we take the example of making more efficient cars which started in the 80's, where the average age is less than ten years, we might expect to see the market delivering some real gains in building efficiency in 100 years or so.. Like it not, sometimes inefficient rigid standards are all we have. The standards are there to account for deficiencies in client requirements (or knowledge). There may be much better mechanisms to do this - one which better targets both the technical and motivational factors in energy reduction. But at the end of the day in an uninformed and long delay market, a blunt market mechanism is not it.
bluthru 13y ago
The LEED rating system isn't all-encompassing, but it is a good way for clients to buy into "sustainability". It's "less bad" and not truly "good", as William McDonough would say. As building information modeling becomes more sophisticated, computer models could potentially reliably calculate a building's entire embodied energy over its expected lifetime. It would be amazing if a project's BIM model was submitted to a rating agency an was given an all-encompassing environmental impact rating.
- brudgers 13y ago
  A simulation is not a building. Before I was licensed, I did a fair number of small residential additions in Florida. For a building permit, a Manual-J calculation in accordance with the Florida Energy Code was required. At that time, do to market conditions, 1.5 ton (18k BTU) heat-pumps were about 1/3 less than 1 ton (12k BTU) units. However, oversizing the unit to the cheaper size would cause the calculation to fail and permit to be denied. These were small projects and the difference in up front costs could be relatively substantial and the likelihood of long term payback minimal because the zoning assumptions upon which the calculations were based did not exist in the real world. So, instead of the default of one occupant for the addition, I would enter two, or three to get the result that was needed.
  - bluthru 13y ago
    >do to market conditions This was the problem, not the software.
    - brudgers 13y ago
      I was not implying that there was a problem with the software at all. Nor with the market. Or even with the permitting process. A competent designer gets the results they want within whatever constraints are created by the system. I made a design decision to use three occupants based on the design decision to use a 1.5 ton (18k BTU) HVAC system based on a cost benefit analysis based on the Owner's goals. A permit for construction being among the Owner's goals. LEED has basically been working the same way. The Owner specifies a Gold Rating. The designer designs the documentation for a Gold Rating. They design the building based on other criteria in addition to the Gold Rating. To be clear, it was not as if my goal was to subvert the system. I could have specified a 1 ton (12k BTU) unit. Inevitably, I would receive a call from my client because the AC subcontractor bid a 1.5 ton unit and that was what was on site and at least partially installed and had been red tagged by the inspector just because it was his job to red tag it. Then we would all spend a lot of time back and forth and the end result would be that the inspector would be a little pissed off because the 1.5 ton unit got approved by his boss based upon common sense over the fact that it didn't really matter and that energy calcs for a small addition are meaningless and the energy code was really designed for larger projects and all we were really doing was shuffling paper. And shuffling paper is largely what LEED is all about - at least up until now.
xradionut 13y ago
Energy efficient architecture is much easier on the residential level if properly applied. Unfortunately many of the better concepts run afoul of over zealous city regs and development restrictions. Plus residential developers have no monetary incentives for changing their crappy processes.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
contingencies 13y ago
Great article! Sending to all the (conventional) architects I know. Best quote, IMHO: Architectural critic Peter Buchanan, writing recently in the UK magazine, The Architectural Review, placed the blame for these failures squarely at the feet of the Modernist design model itself, and called for a “big rethink” about many of its unquestioned assumptions. Modernism is inherently unsustainable, he argued, because it evolved in the beginning of the era of abundant and cheap fossil fuels. This cheap energy powered the weekend commute to the early Modernist villas, and kept their large open spaces warm, in spite of large expanses of glass and thin wall sections. Petrochemicals created their complex sealants and fueled the production of their exotic extrusions. “Modern architecture is thus an energy-profligate, petrochemical architecture, only possible when fossil fuels are abundant and affordable”, he said. “Like the sprawling cities it spawned, it belongs to that waning era historians are already calling ‘the oil interval’.” This is so damn right!
coldcode 13y ago
Many things people say are better are often worse. Proving something as complex as one large building design is better than another is hard to calculate as long as unpredictable people are using it.
brudgers 13y ago
This article is analogous to a Why the Automobile hardly ever deserves the appellation 'Horse Replacement' witten in 1903. We are in the first 25 years of architectural interest in Green Building - it began among professional architects following the Rio Summit. It took more than a decade to get the first big projects, such as Foster's built. The buildings coming online today tend to reflect designs four or more years old - buildings have long incubation periods. That's not to say that LEED hasn't been mostly bullshit. But HN'ers of all people should understand why. They [USGBC] have been focused on creating and growing a user base. During the boom, they credentialed anyone who could pass the exam as Certified. You just needed to answer questions about processing paperwork, you didn't need to know squat about buildings. Then they sold agencies on the idea of specifying LEED certification. Now that they have buildings to measure, they can actually look at post occupancy analysis and make it a criterion. What bothers me about the article itself is that it juxtaposes historic landmarks - Lever House and Segrams - with the image of a bucolic residence which concludes the article. Seagram was designed with the intent that all its lights would blaze all night for aesthetic effect. Then again, it does help clarify that the real purpose of the article is not criticism of Green Building but an attack on modernism. Everyone in Seoul or Mexico or Rio or Helsinki will not be served by a house designed for the Bayous of Louisiana.
chiph 13y ago
I see a lot of "checklist green" projects. Green construction ultimately requires a highly holistic approach, considering far more than just the parts going into the building. There are a lot of modern (style) homes being built in Austin. They usually have expensive multi-pane glass windows for energy efficiency, which are required to get LEED, Energy-Star, and City of Austin certifications. But they lack any sort of exterior shade on them, so the sunlight just beams straight in. If they had sheltered the glass under an overhang or put an awning over it, they probably would have cut their A/C costs by a third or more. They meet the requirements to get the certificate and be sold as "green", but fail to achieve the real purpose -- reducing monthly energy costs.
- bluthru 13y ago
  >But they lack any sort of exterior shade on them What direction does the window face? Are you certain solar insolation is an issue?
  - chiph 13y ago
    You typically want the long dimension of the house to be facing east/west, so that fewer windows are facing directly into the sun. Passive solar (prevention or gain, depending on climate) is something that should be taken into consideration. For Austin's climate, it's fairly important. I saw 113F temperatures last year, and 103F so far this year, with the hottest part of the year still to come. http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/home/construction/solardesign/orientation.html http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/home/construction/solard...
    - bluthru 13y ago
      You actually want buildings oriented west/east, facing north/south. Why? Because you can control the sun with horizontal shading devices. In the summertime you can block insolation with shading devices while allowing insolation during the colder months for free heat gain. This also allows all-day indirect daylighting from the north. The sun is also low in the east and west, so it's difficult to control and often glares into inhabitants. Shading the east and west faces of buildings often requires vertical shading devices or operable shading devices if you don't want to block the view. Finally, remember that the face of the building that receives the most solar insolation is the roof. I know the article says east/west, but that doesn't apply if you have shading devices.

63 points by dsego 13y ago

This is a good example of how the market can outperform centralized governing councils under certain conditions. the LEED-certifying body can't possibly hope to know all the 2nd- and 3rd-degree repercussions of different design decisions. But if we just increased the energy tax by 20% (arbitrary number), people would tend to find the global maxima of energy efficiency without having to conform to rigid standards. The same thing can be seen with cars. I think that raising CAFE standards for gas mileage is great and all, but at least where I'm from the trend toward buying more efficient cars is less about their lower upfront cost as a result of CAFE-induced supply reduction and more about the rising price of gas. A $1.50/gallon federal "negative externalities" tax on gasoline would do wonders for the nation's energy consumption levels.

mjn 13y ago
LEED and CAFE are a bit different: CAFE is a set of government-mandated standards aimed at reducing pollution (whether effectively or not), while LEED is a set of standards that originate with a private-sector trade group, aimed at promoting the brand of "green" architecture (and it's done that quite effectively). I don't see it as distinct from the market: LEED is an example of the market at work. It's just that it's optimizing for what the market optimizes for by default (profits), not optimizing for the actual environment. That process, where the market treats environmentalist sensibilities as just another niche market to cater to, is sometimes referred to as "green marketing", or more derogatorily as "greenwashing".
- kcorbitt 13y ago
  Sure, I'm not saying that LEED doesn't work because it's government-run (it's not) nor even going so far as saying that government involvement in the market is necessarily evil. I'm trying to make the distinction between an incentives-based market and a central planning council, not between the government and the private sector. The government can plan things centrally or organize distributed exchanges, as can private companies and trade organizations.
vy8vWJlco 13y ago
I get your point, but promoting a tax to get the most out of the market is doublespeak. A carrot ("This is better because... and you can use it!") is more "free-market" than a stick ("Don't do that.") - even if I would prefer not to be tempted (or threatened) by either.
- saraid216 13y ago
  It's not an incentive or a threat; it's a change in the rules of the game. When they patch Starcraft to increase the damage that a spore crawler does to biological units, that's not an incentive or a threat; it's a change in the rules of the game.
  - vy8vWJlco 13y ago
    I can't think of any rules that aren't enforced by threat. (The equivalent of patching Starcraft in the real world makes you rich or lands you in jail for tax evasion. The government's patch is only accepted because of the threat of force behind it.)
    - anonymoushn 13y ago
      Even if we all believe taxation is theft, we can still talk about which taxes and which expenditures are better than others. Given the choice between the state coercing you using the threat of violence and the state coercing you using the threat of violence in such a way that some public good is achieved, it seems natural to prefer the latter.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
    - saraid216 13y ago
      > The government's patch is only accepted because of the threat of force behind it. Uh, some of us accept the government's patch because we agree with it, or because we want to play the same game that everyone else is and the government happens to be a conveniently centralized entity for deciding which patches go in and which do not. Like Blizzard. We also accept that hacking your own patch in either means you can't play on the ladder with everyone else or that it's an action worth of receiving a ban in response. It's called "establishing a free market".
cam_l 13y ago
The issue particular to buildings is, as opposed to manufactured goods etc, buildings tend to stick around for quite a while and cost a lot of money for the build and a lot of money to operate. More than that, large capital outlays are required to reduce the operating costs by marginal amounts over the life of the building. Whenever you have a substantial delay between the outlay and the payback, market forces tend to be ineffective. Also, if we are talking energy costs, something like half the energy costs in buildings are in embodied energy - in the steel and concrete and materials used to build it. A broad scale energy tax would encourage reduction of upfront energy usage at the expense of long term operation. Any at the same time, may trigger the demolition of existing stock. Add to that most - something like 60-70% - building stock in the US is between 20-70 years old. If we take the example of making more efficient cars which started in the 80's, where the average age is less than ten years, we might expect to see the market delivering some real gains in building efficiency in 100 years or so.. Like it not, sometimes inefficient rigid standards are all we have. The standards are there to account for deficiencies in client requirements (or knowledge). There may be much better mechanisms to do this - one which better targets both the technical and motivational factors in energy reduction. But at the end of the day in an uninformed and long delay market, a blunt market mechanism is not it.

bluthru 13y ago

The LEED rating system isn't all-encompassing, but it is a good way for clients to buy into "sustainability". It's "less bad" and not truly "good", as William McDonough would say. As building information modeling becomes more sophisticated, computer models could potentially reliably calculate a building's entire embodied energy over its expected lifetime. It would be amazing if a project's BIM model was submitted to a rating agency an was given an all-encompassing environmental impact rating.

brudgers 13y ago
A simulation is not a building. Before I was licensed, I did a fair number of small residential additions in Florida. For a building permit, a Manual-J calculation in accordance with the Florida Energy Code was required. At that time, do to market conditions, 1.5 ton (18k BTU) heat-pumps were about 1/3 less than 1 ton (12k BTU) units. However, oversizing the unit to the cheaper size would cause the calculation to fail and permit to be denied. These were small projects and the difference in up front costs could be relatively substantial and the likelihood of long term payback minimal because the zoning assumptions upon which the calculations were based did not exist in the real world. So, instead of the default of one occupant for the addition, I would enter two, or three to get the result that was needed.
- bluthru 13y ago
  >do to market conditions This was the problem, not the software.
  - brudgers 13y ago
    I was not implying that there was a problem with the software at all. Nor with the market. Or even with the permitting process. A competent designer gets the results they want within whatever constraints are created by the system. I made a design decision to use three occupants based on the design decision to use a 1.5 ton (18k BTU) HVAC system based on a cost benefit analysis based on the Owner's goals. A permit for construction being among the Owner's goals. LEED has basically been working the same way. The Owner specifies a Gold Rating. The designer designs the documentation for a Gold Rating. They design the building based on other criteria in addition to the Gold Rating. To be clear, it was not as if my goal was to subvert the system. I could have specified a 1 ton (12k BTU) unit. Inevitably, I would receive a call from my client because the AC subcontractor bid a 1.5 ton unit and that was what was on site and at least partially installed and had been red tagged by the inspector just because it was his job to red tag it. Then we would all spend a lot of time back and forth and the end result would be that the inspector would be a little pissed off because the 1.5 ton unit got approved by his boss based upon common sense over the fact that it didn't really matter and that energy calcs for a small addition are meaningless and the energy code was really designed for larger projects and all we were really doing was shuffling paper. And shuffling paper is largely what LEED is all about - at least up until now.

xradionut 13y ago

Energy efficient architecture is much easier on the residential level if properly applied. Unfortunately many of the better concepts run afoul of over zealous city regs and development restrictions. Plus residential developers have no monetary incentives for changing their crappy processes.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

contingencies 13y ago

Great article! Sending to all the (conventional) architects I know. Best quote, IMHO: Architectural critic Peter Buchanan, writing recently in the UK magazine, The Architectural Review, placed the blame for these failures squarely at the feet of the Modernist design model itself, and called for a “big rethink” about many of its unquestioned assumptions. Modernism is inherently unsustainable, he argued, because it evolved in the beginning of the era of abundant and cheap fossil fuels. This cheap energy powered the weekend commute to the early Modernist villas, and kept their large open spaces warm, in spite of large expanses of glass and thin wall sections. Petrochemicals created their complex sealants and fueled the production of their exotic extrusions. “Modern architecture is thus an energy-profligate, petrochemical architecture, only possible when fossil fuels are abundant and affordable”, he said. “Like the sprawling cities it spawned, it belongs to that waning era historians are already calling ‘the oil interval’.” This is so damn right!

coldcode 13y ago

Many things people say are better are often worse. Proving something as complex as one large building design is better than another is hard to calculate as long as unpredictable people are using it.

brudgers 13y ago

This article is analogous to a Why the Automobile hardly ever deserves the appellation 'Horse Replacement' witten in 1903. We are in the first 25 years of architectural interest in Green Building - it began among professional architects following the Rio Summit. It took more than a decade to get the first big projects, such as Foster's built. The buildings coming online today tend to reflect designs four or more years old - buildings have long incubation periods. That's not to say that LEED hasn't been mostly bullshit. But HN'ers of all people should understand why. They [USGBC] have been focused on creating and growing a user base. During the boom, they credentialed anyone who could pass the exam as Certified. You just needed to answer questions about processing paperwork, you didn't need to know squat about buildings. Then they sold agencies on the idea of specifying LEED certification. Now that they have buildings to measure, they can actually look at post occupancy analysis and make it a criterion. What bothers me about the article itself is that it juxtaposes historic landmarks - Lever House and Segrams - with the image of a bucolic residence which concludes the article. Seagram was designed with the intent that all its lights would blaze all night for aesthetic effect. Then again, it does help clarify that the real purpose of the article is not criticism of Green Building but an attack on modernism. Everyone in Seoul or Mexico or Rio or Helsinki will not be served by a house designed for the Bayous of Louisiana.

chiph 13y ago

I see a lot of "checklist green" projects. Green construction ultimately requires a highly holistic approach, considering far more than just the parts going into the building. There are a lot of modern (style) homes being built in Austin. They usually have expensive multi-pane glass windows for energy efficiency, which are required to get LEED, Energy-Star, and City of Austin certifications. But they lack any sort of exterior shade on them, so the sunlight just beams straight in. If they had sheltered the glass under an overhang or put an awning over it, they probably would have cut their A/C costs by a third or more. They meet the requirements to get the certificate and be sold as "green", but fail to achieve the real purpose -- reducing monthly energy costs.

bluthru 13y ago
>But they lack any sort of exterior shade on them What direction does the window face? Are you certain solar insolation is an issue?
- chiph 13y ago
  You typically want the long dimension of the house to be facing east/west, so that fewer windows are facing directly into the sun. Passive solar (prevention or gain, depending on climate) is something that should be taken into consideration. For Austin's climate, it's fairly important. I saw 113F temperatures last year, and 103F so far this year, with the hottest part of the year still to come. http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/home/construction/solardesign/orientation.html http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/home/construction/solard...
  - bluthru 13y ago
    You actually want buildings oriented west/east, facing north/south. Why? Because you can control the sun with horizontal shading devices. In the summertime you can block insolation with shading devices while allowing insolation during the colder months for free heat gain. This also allows all-day indirect daylighting from the north. The sun is also low in the east and west, so it's difficult to control and often glares into inhabitants. Shading the east and west faces of buildings often requires vertical shading devices or operable shading devices if you don't want to block the view. Finally, remember that the face of the building that receives the most solar insolation is the roof. I know the article says east/west, but that doesn't apply if you have shading devices.