Architecture Here and There

It's felicitous that you would post on the Original Green yesterday, as Wednesday afternoon I gave a talk to our office introducing them to some of the concepts in Steve's elegant and sensible re-formulation of sustainability.

The part of his thesis that has connected with me most deeply is the idea of sustainable building needing to be lovable. Driving home last night after my talk to the office, I was thinking about the relative effectiveness of various green measures and initiatives, and I realized that perhaps the single most important "green" thing we can do as architects is to make buildings that are loved by people. The energy saved by a beloved building being sustained long into the future vastly overwhelms any benefits from the solar panels on the roof, low 'e' glass, or super-efficient mechanical systems.

Thanks for posting this! The Original Green is an eyeopening read.

"Build buildings that use porches, colonnades, operable windows, ceiling height, etc., to leverage the sun, the shade, the flow of air, the regional climate in ways that evolved over centuries."

What about that has anything to do with style? Any good Post-modernist would know that the difference between morphology and style is a difference with a distinction.

Your insights into architecture would be far more convincing if you weren't so preoccupied with self-consciously defending your perceived territory as defender of all things classic against all things modern. At least then instead of mis-characterizing Gehery as "wierd" you would be able to see him for what he is, one of the foremost practitioner's of Urbanism working today.

Modern architecture has a long and authentic history of embodying sustainability, even when it wasn't easy to get built or fashionable. As an architecture student at Columbia in the 70's issues related to sustainability were not at the forefront, urbanism was. Yet in Los Angeles at SCIARC there was a faculty that understood the intimate connection between Design With Nature and Urbanism.

Your lame attempt to align Modernism with Wall Street is just silly.

Adding to Paul's comments, many modern buildings incorporate all the things you mentioned (colonnades, porches, high ceilings) plus water features to help humidify the air, cupolas and clearstory windows to shed heat, flat roofs planted with vegetation to help insulate the building and contribute to the environment, and buildings oriented to the prevailing breezes with walls of glass that can open up the space to the outside and bring those breezes in.

One does not need to recreate what looks like a house plucked from the streets of Charleston or Savannah to embrace "green". It is simply window dressing on what are sound ideas and practices. There are plenty of traditional looking energy sucking unsustainable buildings out there.

Of course there are. It's not really about anything as superficial as style, it's about traditions.

To summarize Mouzon's thesis very simply:

Before the "thermostat age", the places and buildings people built had no choice but to be green, otherwise people would suffer. There was a collected wisdom about sustainability embedded in the design of these traditional places and buildings.

These building traditions perpetuated because people loved the architecture, and there was wide consensus about it. People found reasons in the building design to want them to be the way they were. The embedded wisdom of sustainability was transferred through the tradition in a manner similar to a genetic code.

There is nothing at all that says that modern buildings couldn't do the same thing. But two big factors have stood in the way:

1. One of the central tenets of Modernism is a kind of "cult of uniqueness". In order to be considered important, a work must be unique. That means that each architect is encouraged to re-formulate an individual approach to sustainability. Under that scenario, living traditions aren't possible, and embedded wisdom isn't passed down the way it used to be.

2. Sustainable buildings must be lovable. If they aren't loved by people, they will be torn down and the embodied energy in them is lost. Many modern architects, whether it's through an effort to produce unique individual statements, embody references to the art world, or to produce enigmatic, "challenging" designs, have created building that appeal first to other architects and artists, and make no effort to converge on a more universal idea of beauty. These buildings often are unlovable by the average person, and are often not valued past the current generation. In this context they are literally anti-traditional.

I really recommend that you guys read Mouzon's book, and carefully consider his argument. Or visit his website: http://www.theoriginalgreen.org

OOOPS-

Wrong web address.

Here's the correct link:
http://www.originalgreen.org

OOOPS-

Wrong web address.

Here's the correct link:
http://www.originalgreen.org

Architecture theory seems to move forward as a dialectic. Gothic Revival v/s Classic Revival, Modern v/s Revival, post-modern v/s modern, urbanism v/s urban planning, landscape urbanism v/s urbanism. Architects seem to be unable to consider more than 2 things at once. Reality is often more complex. The real tragedy is that by taking the position that post modernism is stylistically constrained to pre-modern styles critics like you have alienated a generation of architects from embracing urbanism all together. Urbanism is disappearing as a subject of consideration from most architectural studios and is being displaced by sustainability. "Urban fabric" is quickly becoming a concept unfamiliar to the coming generation. Students believe that in order to practice urbanism they have to use the old styles because critics like you have told them so. Looking to the future and not to the past they turn off to your message and ignore urbanism and all that it represents. It's tragic and history is repeating itself because synthesis is a concept that writers like this you cannot wrap their criticism around.

Why try to set one book against another instead of seeking to understand and ally the wisdom in each? It's not a competition.

Erik - An excellent summary, and a superlative rebuttal to the above comments. Mouzon's book is very good. Perhaps even better, and certainly more comprehensive in its focus on the structure of the modernist argument, is Steven Semes's "The Future of the Past," published last year.

@Paul: not only does Mr. Brussat attempt to align "modern" architecture with the excesses of Wall Street, he characterizes their failings in the recent past as "spurn[ing] the traditional restraints of the free market." In fact the the free market's "traditional restraints" were placed there by government, and when those restraints were lifted only did the true greedy, chaotic exuberance of the free market exert itself in its own destruction.

Furthermore, if Mr. Brussat feels that the science of global climate change is suspect, why use "sustainability" as a cornerstone of his case for facadist traditionalism?

Andrew - The roots of the failure of the market were two things having to do with abandonment of traditional restraint. One was the handing out of mortgages with loosened credit requirements - encouraged partly because the government desired to increase home ownership and partly because the mortgage companies wanted to have the benefit of lending to almost anybody (and then selling the mortgages on the secondary market). The second was, in the investment community, the relaxation of reserve requirements. Such requirements long predated government banking regulations.

Beauty not sustainability is the cornerstone of my critique of modernism and my support for traditional design. In any event, as I said in the column, sustainability makes sense regardless of one's views on global warming.

Kevin,I have found that remineralization is etesnsial to restore the minerals back into my garden soil that the plants have used up. It makes a very big difference. I use a mineral powder (called Azomite), compost and some basic organic materials at the start of each spring, just before planting. This year I omitted a bed to see what the results would be. The plants were smaller, sick and produced for less then the treated beds. My seeds all germinated as well. There is a difference.