Recent decades in our profession have been defined by the dichotomy of eye grabbing design and sustainability chess games. The results can be stylistically unforgettable or achieve high marks in a sustainability program or some fusion of both but what is clear is the mark is being missed by miles. The road we have been on runs right in to a stone cliff of inconvenient data that describes the carbon footprint of our built environment expanding not shrinking, that confirms that unsustainable sprawl has restarted in countless places, and that reports that countless projects are not performing as expected and in many cases are over budget, use more energy and water than planned, and require major repairs and recertification efforts on an almost continual basis. What is still missing from almost every project are architects and clients who expect every building to be very low energy use, resilient, and straightforward to operate. As investors wonder day after day where they can find better returns in the markets, the ubiquitous endless profit drain-offs from costly buildings and their operations receives nowhere near the attention it deserves.
What is missing here is heroic design that resolves programmatic and aspirational challenges while simultaneously creating very low energy use, resilient, and operationally trouble free solutions. What stands as par is business as usual where sustainability is not even a consideration during design but rather assigned to clever support staff, engineers, specifiers, contractors, and commissioning agents to attempt remedies and nurse checklists. How does this army of people fix an all glass building? How do new buildings with the very same overall U-values of 0.50 that we delivered 40 years ago for exterior walls of glass and frame move us any closer to a carbon neutral future? Of course they do not. With nearly 300 feet of known ocean rise assured by the best sources like the USGS once all ice is melted, one would think complete panic would start to set in. Still we simply compete with a dozen other firms every time a new city of glass is proposed under a new venture. We let the concept people who have filled the full spectrum of media with an all glass future tell us how to design our buildings and cities. Do we need all glass cities? Of course we don’t. They are not-resilient, provide little privacy and noise control, are troublesome to keep clean or furnish around, provide no protection from the severe weather coming our way, and present a thermal and comfort problem that forces us to heat and cool far more then we should even consider.
A recent overview of modern HVAC design for new whole-floor office suites in new buildings illustrated that virtually all the heating and cooling loads were at the perimeter of the building where the glass walls were. That means we are literally heating the cold outdoors and cooling the hot outdoors. As if that were not enough we are compensating for the direct heat gain on furniture, floors, and people from the blazing sun while attempting to compensate for thousands of air leaks in most building enclosures. Every architect and owner should be required to tour a Passive House and see for themselves how very small a heating and cooling system should be when we are not blindly heating and cooling the great outdoors. Letting the style masters in the media set a completely fictitious future for all of us to follow when the stakes for our children and their children are this insanely high is a complete mistake and further it denies our profession the self-direction we must regain if this civilization stands any chance of righting this already listing ark.