Chapter 8
Conclusion

When an offshore oil rig explodes, the seemingly sound pretext for a way of life is also called into question.¹

The greening of architecture is both a concept and practice of the ongoing process and continual refinement toward greater architectural and urban responses to the environment. This process has many dimensions that cover both space and time as well as different intensities from remedies of unsustainability, to maintaining sustainable balances, and finally to creating benevolent abundances. The patterns of change through the past five decades give an indication to the areas of unsustainability and correspondence between the evolving greening methods and the changes in contemporary architecture—both of which have been moving targets. The global disposition of green architectural and urban works is a prelude to the potential pervasiveness of this phenomenon. Signature architects still play an important role in this maturation process by providing exciting, innovative and inspiring models. Yet, it is the architecture of the everyday that is still in most need of attention. James Wines concludes in his book Green Architecture (2000) that “architecture still has one of the most important conservation and communication roles to play in any new ecologically responsible vision of the future.”² Design education, too, will play a critical role in the future greening of architecture.

The First Principles in architecture contain an unwavering set of concepts that inherently address sustainability. It might be better served to focus less upon mutable sustainable and technological determinism and the ways in which they influence building design, but rather focus more directly on the architecture process and reinforce its essential nature and purpose, which is to weave into manifest form the unity, generative, formative, corporeal and regenerative principles. It is unfortunate that the word “architecture” needs to be modified with the term “green” in order to render it with sustainably responsible meaning. It should naturally include green intentions and practices, however it is not surprising, with present economic pressures and generally low development standards, that mainstream architecture is generally unsustainable. In many ways, the greening process should start at home with more climate-responsive designs and the purchase of efficient products and equipment, energy-efficient lighting, and a recycling center in the kitchen for organic, paper, glass, plastic and aluminum waste. This includes expanding to the garden, the site, neighborhood and the urban environments as well. It is the dynamic interactions within a particular context that extend architectural singularity of focus to more systemic considerations.³ Infrastructure architecture, too, is an interesting green idea and frontier about both ecological and urban connections. The relational and in-between realms are a challenging landscape for sustainable planning to occur. Concepts of plurality, hybridity, resilience and biometrics are informing a new generation of green environments.

The greening of contemporary architecture has been illustrated over more than five decades from the early examples of Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto to the more recent works of Bill Dunster and James Corner. This slice of time establishes patterns of innovation and re-direction in building and city making through modern, postmodern and metamodern periods. The intent was to demystify the various approaches to sustainable design, to weave together better working and more inclusive definitions, and to create clear and model demonstrations that might contribute to an ongoing greening process.⁴ The greening of architecture is linked to external events whether they are natural disasters, vacillating economic conditions, new knowledge concerning the environment, changes in regulatory policies, political turnovers, creation of new technologies, or development of extraordinary designs. The greenest building in the world is still an elusive target. Is it Bullitt Center in Seattle, BedZED in London, Findhorn Eco-Community in Scotland, Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, BMW Welt in Munich, CH2 in Melbourne, COR in Miami, IUCN Building in Geneva or Bank of America in New York?

A comprehensive and effective way to articulate the diversifying effects of globalizing green architecture was to divide and contrast representative works into the various dualities: urban–rural, high-tech–low-tech, new–existing, small–large, and extreme–mainstream. This gives a broad spectrum of the differing approaches to sustainable design through quite varying contexts and extreme conditions. It seems clear that there is no consistent architectural language to these exemplifications; however, certain sustainable approaches are common among most of the projects. Residential projects, which were inherently skin-dominated, typically employed passive solar heating, natural ventilation, daylighting, higher insulating values, and energy efficient appliances. In warmer climates, they incorporated a number of different sunshading, solar control devices, evaporative cooling, and natural ventilation. Non-residential projects, which were load-dominated, typically incorporated daylighting, solar control devices, green roofs, atriums, photovoltaic electricity production, and high efficiency HVAC systems. Urban projects tended to focus on density of built form, mixes of use and cross programming, and encouraging pedestrian places and movement with connections to public transport. The demonstrations of sustainable practices were expressed through differing architectural forms that generally included vernacular revivals, high-tech, modernist, and biomorphic languages. Regional and cultural differences also informed many of the designs.

John Ehrenfeld posits that true sustainability “lives in a world distinct from the present: one with a new vocabulary and cultural habits.”⁴ The challenge is to find the pathway that connects these two places. This is why he observed that most of our efforts now were aimed at reducing unsustainability.⁵ Hopefully, in future the building and re-building of the habitable environment will be closer to pure renewable sustainability with attendant abundances. In some ways this addresses the degree of severity of our perceived unsustainable environments and the magnitude of the standards we set for creating a more sustainable future. The greening process both now and in the future is formed by the inextricable relationship among our societal and personal needs for energy and resources, the availability of existing and renewable resources, and the nature of the built environment in terms of configuration, density, mixes of use, methods of connectivity, and the quality of the sustainable measures. The goal is to achieve a healthy balance and climax ecological relationship with the environment as a whole.

The human environment comprises the transect from the most urban with intense cultural activity and density of built form to the most rural with dispersed habitation, direct connections to nature and larger areas of agricultural production. Implementing sustainable planning and design measures for these varying territories takes great skill especially in the face of current development practices, land ownership, and the spatial structure of the existing built environment. A challenge for forth coming decades is the creation of smooth and seamless connections, cascading modes of transport and recombinant urban forms between these extremes employing complementary visions and incremental processes of change. Heroic green architecture still plays an inspiring role, but more importantly, mainstream everyday architecture and urbanism will remain the domain and foil for the greatest areas of need and impact. This underscores the importance of sustainable measures within interstitial and infrastructural space and continued efforts to create more pedestrian, livable and mix use places of dwelling.

The physical characteristics of green urbanism follow Michel Foucault’s systems of organization as they function as both place and network architectures. They share complicit roles in creating a sustainable future focused on the urban design scale. The energies of placemaking focus inwardly on being, rest, stasis, agglomeration, concentration, saturation, safety, dwelling, stewardship, pedestrian scale and experience. This means being there and being in place having supportive architecture and urban forms that contribute to nodes of sustainable living patterns. Connective tissue on the other hand is characterized by flow; it is moving, fluid, linear, interstitial, infrastructural and dynamic focusing on interchange, accessibility and systemic connectedness. It is the go-between where resources, nature, goods, energy, and people move and respond to differing kinds of speed-scale environments and between-place processes and modes of transport. Previously fragmented, this sprawling territory offers great opportunities for a new kind of reformed green architecture and eco-urbanism. The interface between urban dwelling place and infrastructure network suggest an ecological power-geometry and progressive sense of place. Constellating urbanism is a notion that unites urban agglomerations into a more comprehensive whole as illustrated with Serenbe Community’s interconnected hamlets. Place becomes coherent and identifiable.

Each decade added to the continuing DNA of the greening of architecture in distinctive ways. They were radical and visionary in the 1960s, phototropic and solar oriented in the 1970s, historic and formalist vernacular in the 1980s, eco-technological in the 1990s, and eco-pluralistic in the decade after the millennium. The Terreform image in Figure 8.1a illustrates the integration of many accumulative strategies, including vertical urban farming, mass transit, urban agriculture, agro-high-rises, green walls, water harvesting and intense pedestrian activity. Far from a single object of sustainability, it is an environment of interrelated activities. More importantly, it shows the total environmental design affording multiple greening processes. The BedZED photovoltaic array and wind cowls, in Figure 8.1b, suggest a different green aesthetic and architectural language with celebration of the tectonic elements of the design. Critically important is the regeneration of informal settlements, where a billion people presently live, with focus on the architecture of the in-between and infrastructure as shown in Medellin, Colombia as pictured in Figure 8.1c.⁶ This extraordinary work included the Metro Cable, which was a gondola lift system providing complementary transportation services. Myriads of images and thousands of built works are now being produced, largely enabled by the growth in environmental awareness, the need to reduce greenhouse gasses, and the desire for more healthy places to live and work. The challenge is to continue these advances into more integrated applications on all scales and with all new development. The First Principles of architecture remain a timeless guide, which are continually interpreted and positively contributing to an alignment with the mutable processes of the greening of architecture.⁷ Not to be taken alone, they form a consummatory integration of processes.

8.1 Contrast in Green Architectural Languages a) Amsterdam Avenue New York City b) BedZED PV and Wind Cowls c) Informal Settlement in Medellin, Colombia

• The Unity Principle integrates part and whole, nodes and networks, and coherent enclaves with efficient connective tissues and infrastructure across transects of multiple scales of consideration. It guides growth into harmonious integrative designs of complementary divisions and conflicting opposites. It interconnects and synthesizes varying scales of development with a fusion and balance of individuality and community.

• The Generative Principle connects context, culture and land to evolving expressions of place multiplicity and proliferation in geographic space over time. It promotes morphological and incremental urban growth and contextual diversity. It generates sustainable technologies in response to multiple needs, situations and the availability of differing natural resources. It celebrates diversity and place-oriented exemplifications.

• The Formative Principle guides sustainable architecture and planning practice into appropriate climatic, contextual, ecological, and tectonic spatial orders, urban forms and green technologies. This includes the formal integrative design processes that seek to translate needs into functions into appropriated forms. It encompasses the tectonic and high organizational qualities of sustainability.

• The Corporeal Principle grounds sustainable intentions into pragmatic physical realities, concrete strategies, practical technologies, achievable project delivery systems, affordability, and eventual occupation and effective use. It is substantive, quantitative, tangible, differentiated and material expression of green measures, architectural and urban designs. It is the process of realistic manifestation.

• The Regenerative Principle responds to both dynamic ecological and human cycles that reuse, recycle, and recreate. It regenerates unproductive land, brownfields and abandon or obsolete buildings that create new beginnings. It promotes processes that restore, renew and revitalize in an ecology of responsive environmental design. Rather than an object of sustainability, it promotes an ongoing process of evolutionary change.

Architecture, in response to evolving human activity and concerns about the environment, becomes more effectively green with improving technology, model examples, and globalizing effects. If “architecture” is the weaving into manifestation the First Principles, then the greening of architecture has been a process that combines these informing principles with sustainable practices. Taken all together this multilayered approach enables designers to make catalytic leaps toward ever-increasing levels of morphogenic sustainability and balance with the environment. The exploration of the greening of architecture has been a process of defining, unfolding, explaining, illustrating and analyzing measures that transform architecture and urban design practice into more sustainable forms. This process is one that affects these works in both space and time.

The Brundtland Commission Report of 1987 has particular application to this conclusion on sustainable architecture and urban design.⁸ For sustainability to truly be effective both now and in the future; it must incorporate new visions and narratives of engagement. The greening of architecture will be informed by incremental changes, dynamic interactions with immediate surrounding environments, social equity and response to the diversity of needs, affordable applications, connectivity at all scales of human activity, and proliferation throughout the varying contexts on a planetary scale. And finally, there hopefully will no longer be the need for this greening process in the future; as architecture will naturally embody and fully actualize effective green principles.

ENDNOTES

1 Katherine Stoll and Scott Lloyd, Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks. Berlin: Jovis Berlag Publisher, 2010: 11.

2 James Wines, Green Architecture. Köln: Taschen Press, 2000: 233.

3 “Pathways” is a dynamic temporal value-based approach to sustainability that proposes alternative participant frames of determinant action. Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling, Dynamic Sustainability: Technology, Environment, Social Justice. London, UK: Earthscan Publications, 2010: 155–7.

4 Ken Yeang and Authur Spector, Green Design: From Theory to Practice. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2011.

5 John R. Ehrenfeld, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming Our Consumer Culture. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2008: 215.

6 In an article by David Mohoney (2011), the public architecture in South America is promoting viable, scalable and transformable neighborhood projects. Improvements at Medellin, Columbia include permanent housing, utilities and sewers, and a pedestrian walkway, all accomplished without displacing the former population. Source: http://www.cooperhewitt.org/conversations?page=4, accessed April 2012.

7 T.H. Irwin, Aristotle’s First Principles. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988.

8 The Brundtland Commission Report titled, Our Common Future (1987) delineated three pillars of sustainable development, which were economic growth, environmental protection and social equality. Since that time, it is clear that efforts to accomplish the Commission’s mandate have grown through the greening of architecture.