With a few exceptions, claims made about green buildings — at least so far — are built on fuzzy math and borrowing against the future. JDavidsonNYC reports
Phoenix House, in the U.K., gets closer than some. Art: CSK Architects Behold the building of the future: mossy stones lying strewn around a hill outside the English city of Windsor, carved, shaped, and incised in the fashions of centuries past. These chunks of 18th-century wall and Victorian cornice have lain in the woods for nearly 100 years, remnants of a British country home dismembered, like so many others, so there’d be nothing left to pay taxes on.
Until recently, the effort to mitigate the damage has focused almost exclusively on operational efficiency, which comes into play as soon as the building is complete. We have an array of effective new techniques for keeping the temperature comfortable, the lights on, and the water running, all on a shrinking carbon budget. Now, though, engineers, contractors, developers, and architects like Howland are starting to recognize that they’ve tackled the easiest challenge first.
The green Establishment is dominated by certification programs like BREEAM and LEED, which bestow points for efficient operations but downplay embodied carbon. Foster + Partners’ Bloomberg Building in London, for example, won the 2018 Stirling Prize partly for its environmental ambitions.
Thinking about the end of a building’s life even as it’s being conceived yields decisions of immense architectural significance. “You don’t use laminates or hybrid materials. Everything is bolted and screwed so it’s easily dismountable,” Howland says. “You avoid plasters and skins and paints.
Genuinely low-carbon buildings do exist, they just tend to be in places that have scarce access to industrial building materials and easy access to labor. “You can get close to zero if you’re really radical, like building out of straw bales, but it’s extremely difficult,” says Smith Mordak, director of sustainability and physics at the global engineering film Buro Happold. “What we can do now is create practices that will get us to zero eventually.” Those practices can be codified.
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