'Sustainability Has Taken the Moral High Ground From Preservation'
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 10.20.07
This TreeHugger has previously expressed concern about demolition, suggesting that 'Every brick in building required the burning of fossil fuel in its manufacture, and every piece of lumber was cut and transported using energy. As long as the building stands, that energy is there, serving a useful purpose. Trash a building and you trash its embodied energy too."
Architect Henry Moss of Bruner/Cott, responsible for turning an old generating station at Harvard into a LEED platinum office building, told the Boston Preservation Alliance that “sustainability has taken the moral high ground from preservation,” and that some preservation advocates spend too much time griping about their waning influence and not enough figuring out how to make historic structures practical in an era of higher energy costs and lower carbon footprints.
From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Mr. Moss said the influential LEED standards for sustainability are “weak on historic structures,” in part because they don’t do a good job of accounting for what’s known as “embodied energy” — energy expended in the past to construct existing buildings. “In fact nobody knows anything about embodied energy,” said Mr. Moss, adding that it was amazing how little research had been done to figure out how much embodied energy is squandered when an existing building is demolished so a new one can be built in its place.
He also warned that as buildings’ sustainable systems become more complex, they will present additional challenges. “The competence of the professionals that are now working on these projects is really being stretched — it’s being stretched right along with the competence and knowledge of the project managers,” Mr. Moss said. “Where we used to do one or two new things in a project, we’re now doing 10 or 15. With that level of innovation, the risk in these projects is definitely increasing.”
For instance, he said Harvard University now has at least a half-dozen buildings with geothermal heating and cooling systems, and “each one of those has generated new lessons — I’m avoiding the term ‘head-banging problems.’ ::Chronicle of Higher Education
Constant learning and innovation is what is needed to solve many of the problems we have in this world. And architecture is no exception. The education of those in the construction sector, whether architects or project managers or others, does not end the day they step out of university. Quite the contrary, basic education ends when they leave universi and advanced and experimental education begins. University (hopefully) provides you the basic underpinning necessary so that when you leave school you can begin contributing and expanding on the base of knowledge and experience that exists. Constant improvement. And constant advances and improvements don't ever happen without hiccups of one form or other. The only way to avoid silly mistakes here and there is to wait for new designs and systems to have been field tested in numerous locations for a number of years to work out any kinks. If you do that, then by the time you implement a system that has no kinks, that system may already be antiquated. And in any case, no house or building design, no matter how traditional and how antiquated and well-understood the technology, will be perfect - all buildings end up having some design flaws. Designers need to try and think of absolutely everything that can go wrong and do the best to ensure that it doesn't, but we are humans and we can not foresee everything all the time. Buildings will have flaws. So architects should not let themselves become paralyzed by fear that a new system that they are not experienced with will have some difficulties. No progress is made through fear, only through confidence and optimism. Try to make sure that shit doesn't happen. But keep in mind that shit happens. Just be prepared to deal with it when it does, and learn from it.
Educational institutions seem to be taking the lead (no pun intended) on LEED platinum certified buildings. I don't believe Treehugger has covered the ongoing construction of a LEED platinum building at The Cooper Union. I've been told that it will be the first LEED platinum laboratory building in the country, though my memory is a bit fuzzy. More information can be found here http://www.cooper.edu/cubuilds/index.html.
The literature on the website says the building will be a minimum of LEED silver, but ever since classes started this semester, the faculty has been saying that it will be a platinum building.
While its easy to see how a generating station, which is open on the inside, and does not contain many historic or significant artifacts can be turned into an office building, the reality is many historical places cannot be reused without significant and lasting damage/destruction of the very things that characterize the place.
For instance, no reasonable person could argue that the Vizcaya estate in Miami could be reused without utterly destroying the up to 2000 year old paintings, vases, statues, and other elaborate pieces that dominate the estate, not to mention the very architecture style of the house. In that case, re-use is not an acceptable option. Painting preservationists as some sort of nattering nabobs who simply don't get it is wrong.