GREEN BUILDING: RECONSTRUCTING COMMUNITY, REUNITING PEOPLE AND NATURE

By Mark Sommer and - - Reprint | | Print |

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BERKELEY, Apr 1 2004 (IPS) - In advanced industrial nations we spend 90 percent of our lives in the Great Indoors with little connection to the Great Outdoors. Modern construction techniques have successfully shielded us from Mother Nature, and one another, and too often at the expense of our well-being, writes Mark Sommer, a journalist and host of the award-winning syndicated radio programme \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’. In this article, Sommer writes that in response to the growing divergence between our architecture and our well-being, a new generation of architects and designers is emerging with a different vision and strategy, setting new standards for construction based on principles that reunite humans with one another and nature. What has gone wrong with the buildings we inhabit is a reflection of the deficiencies of modernity itself — its isolation from nature, brutal disregard for community, and uncritical embrace of a narrow economic calculus. The post-modern sustainable building movement places the conservation of resources and reconnection between people and nature ahead of privileged isolation and private profit. But to be widely adopted, it must also satisfy the bottom line, albeit one that gives greater weight to social and environmental benefits.

In advanced industrial nations we spend ninety percent of our lives in the Great Indoors with little connection to the Great Outdoors. Modern construction techniques have successfully shielded us from Mother Nature — and one another — too often at the expense of our well-being.

This was not always the case. We have only to look at the medieval cities of Europe or the indigenous architecture of native peoples worldwide to see how in other times and places people built with a much more welcoming attitude towards other people — and other species.

Why, then, do so many of the structures we’ve built in recent decades often feel isolating and inhuman? Why do they sometimes even make us sick? ”Sick buildings”, constructed of materials laced with toxic substances and sealing us off from nature and one another, are symptoms of a strange syndrome in which we let short-term profit and cut-rate construction trump long-term livability and durability. Much of our modern man-made environment seems determined to deny any relationship to nature while ignoring the modern reality of limited resources. The hard truth is that we simply can’t afford to keep building this way.

In response to the growing divergence between our architecture and our well-being, a new generation of architects and designers is emerging with a different vision and strategy. Calling their craft ”green” or ”sustainable building”, they are setting new standards for construction based on principles that reunite humans with one another and nature.

Green building combines the ingenuity and efficiency of high-tech design with natural building materials formulated from straw, stone, concrete, and clay and new uses for food staples like corn and soy, as well as techniques that tap into sun and wind energy and urban designs like auto-free districts, slow-traffic streets and spacious plazas that draw us into a revitalised common life.

To encourage widespread adoption of its core principles, the sustainable building movement has established a green building rating system it calls Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), which delineates state-of-the-art strategies for sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality.

The greatest single obstacle to the adoption of more environmentally-friendly building design is not the technical challenges but the up-front construction costs, since too few such buildings and materials are being manufactured to achieve the requisite economies of scale that would make them broadly affordable. Nonetheless, some green developers have already found that the initial effort to work with nature rather than against it actually reduces costs and adds to the commercial appeal of their projects.

While most green builders work on a modest scale, some have been inspired to redesign entire cities and regions according to the principles of ”the New Urbanism”. Peter Calthorpe, a visionary San Francisco-based urban architect, has led collaborative public design processes for Chicago, Los Angeles, and the entire state of Utah. Arguing that we can’t afford and don’t need to rebuild from the ground up, he advocates ”in-filling” vacant inner-city spaces, mixed-use and mixed-income design to encourage social interaction between classes and races, and slowing local traffic to revive street life and create ”walkable neighbourhoods”. Curitiba, Brazil, redesigned over the past few decades by Mayor Jaime Lerner and a team of urban architects, has demonstrated how intelligent public transportation systems can catalyse a broader revitalisation.

The challenges faced by urban architects in the developing world are far greater than in the industrial world. Poverty, unemployment, mass migration to already overcrowded cities, and woefully inadequate public services combine in super-cities like Sao Paolo, Cairo, Manila and Lagos to create vast shantytowns with no regular water, electricity, sewage disposal, employment, schooling, or healthcare. With millions homeless and tens of millions with no more than cardboard and tin to call home, urban designers turn less to high-tech designs than to traditional and readily available materials like adobe and straw that have served well for thousands of years.

What has gone wrong with the buildings we inhabit is a reflection of the deficiencies of modernity itself — its isolation from nature, brutal disregard for community, and uncritical embrace of a narrow economic calculus.

The post-modern sustainable building movement places the conservation of resources and reconnection between people and nature ahead of privileged isolation and private profit. But to be widely adopted, it must also satisfy the bottom line, albeit one that gives greater weight to social and environmental benefits. Urban architects face a daunting but essential task in taking green design beyond the boutique building trade in decades to come. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)