Architect and urban planner Walker Wells talks about why building green is more than just following a checklist.
 | Walker Wells, Director, Green Urbanism Program, Global Green USA"A big part of sustainability is just being knowledgeable about where you are; about any given place and its underlying ecology." (Photo courtesy: Wells) |
Are green buildings still affordable only to the rich?
It's true that green is more expensive, but it adds value, and generally things of greater value have a higher price tag, because it reflects the long-term value that you're going to derive from that initial investment. You will spend more money to get a more efficient air conditioner or better windows. However, that initial investment can be too big of a hurdle for many people, which is why we have historically seen the majority of green buildings built by people who are affluent.
Why is green going mainstream now?
It has really changed in the last three or four years, where a number of these strategies have become pretty affordable and commonplace. There used to be a 25-percent premium to get an efficient, EnergyStar refrigerator. Now there's so little of a premium that some government agencies don't think there's a need for rebates.
Compact fluorescents are still more expensive than conventional lightbulbs, but not as much as they used to be. There used to be one manufacturer of low-VOC (volatile organic compound) paint; now there's four or five.
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How much value does going green add to a building?
I think it only adds value for people who perceive that value. When you look at it from a lifecycle perspective of a building, sure, the investment pays itself off in five or seven years, and gives you ten or fifteen years of benefits. But you have to be confident that you're going to be around to accrue those benefits.
I don't know how often most Americans move, but it's something like every five years on average. Something like photovoltaic panels may have a ten-year payback period - that could be hard for people to accept if they don't know if they'll be there in ten years. And that's just to get to zero.
Do rating systems, like the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification, help people decide how to best build green?
I think people have started to understand that LEED is a great tool, but like all tools, it has to be used wisely, by people who are skilled. A skilled craftsman can use a knife to make something of incredible beauty that works with the material they are using, and somebody else could make something that isn't very attractive at all, but you could still say they used the right tool.
There is some sophistication about the need to set priorities within that rating system; not needing to follow a checklist, or that recognizing that following a checklist may not lead to the desired outcome. There's a benefit of having that comparison, but every time we come up with one, it has its failings. Having a certification like LEED, EnergyStar, or organic means something, but obviously none of those are perfect.
As an architect and planner, how do you approach green building?
At Global Green, the greatest benefit that we bring to a project is design integration. We help people go back to simple questions of where and what a building is. What are the fundamental things that we need to be conscious of? People need daylight. They need it to be not too hot or too cold. And they need to be sheltered from the rain.
You can get a little deeper: people should have a sense of security and there should be a sense of community. All of this can basically lead you to setting the bones of the project - how it sits on the site, its site plan, its massing, its form, where the entrances are. It is thin so that daylight can penetrate through the unit for most of the day, and so that air can move through the building.
Then you can start thinking about the right heating and cooling systems to use in that climate. What's the right way to make hot water, given the number of the people in the building and its configuration? This is much different than going to a checklist that says "pick an air conditioner that's X," because you never ask yourself in that checklist, do I even need an air conditioner if I can have through ventilation and window overhangs; am I in a climate zone where the need for air conditioning maybe isn't critical?
So building green is more than just adding eco-friendly technology to a building?
I've come around to the idea that a big part of sustainability is just being knowledgeable about where you are; about any given place and its underlying dynamics and ecology. Then you start to get some sensitivity about what grows there, what doesn't grow there, and why, the soil, rain, and weather patterns, and then starting to come up with design strategies that work in concert with that ecology.
Maybe we don't need fifty water heaters in a building. Maybe they just need one boiler that pre-heats water in a solar thermal system on the roof, and we could distribute that hot water through the building and even use it for space heating. Then we have less mechanical equipment in the apartments, less need to vent, less pipes, less sources of combustion gases. It becomes a much more elegant solution.
editor: Valdis Wish
publishing date: October 5, 2008
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