Image: Olson Kundig
By Kira Gould
The AIA Committee on the Environment’s COTE Top Ten awards program celebrates the integration of design excellence and sustainability. Among the 2018 recipients was Olson Kundig’s Sawmill House, an off-the-grid performer chock-full of innovations (11kW array with battery storage, thermal mass, sun shading, ground source heat pump and radiant floor, LED lighting and passive cooling strategies and the use of salvaged materials from the site). By these measures, the project seems an obvious contender for exemplary sustainable design excellence, the purpose of COTE Top Ten. On the other hand, does a 4,000-square-foot house for six people really represent the pinnacle of sustainable design? Some observers (architects, educators, and others) question whether a building for so few people on an isolated site in an ecologically sensitive area can be considered a model of smart land use.
wisdom is that COTE Top Ten recipients are often small rural projects. But Lessons from the Leading Edge, the 2016 report assessing the history of the awards program, showed that the majority of projects have been in urban settings. And as COTE founder Bob Berkebile, FAIA, noted in the report’s foreword, “Today, advanced sustainable design practices are being applied to projects regardless of building type, scale, budget, or climate.” In 22 years, houses have won only 12 times, accounting for only 5 percent of recipients overall.
The COTE Top Ten honors 10 projects each year, which has the effect of “making room” for a range of building types (which changes from year to year). The recipients then become case studies in the collection (now numbering more than 200) that includes projects of many types, in various climates, locations, and innovations.
Despite their minimal representation among projects, nearly every time a house wins, it stirs discomfort. Questions raised (about even very high-performance homes) include: Can a single-family house on a rural, ecologically sensitive area be considered a model of design to the degree that it receives a COTE Top Ten award? Can a single-family house ever qualify as sustainable land use? And where in the COTE Top Ten measures (detailed in last year’s call for submissions) is this addressed?
If you are going to hold up any building type as a model, what are the baseline thresholds? For single-family, for many, the too-large house built in a rural and/or previously undeveloped site can never make the cut. For others, they can overlook one or even both of those aspects if the other measures/metrics are so superior as to constitute industry innovations.
Given the ubiquity and importance of this building type in the United States and beyond, it’s important both not to exclude this building type from the AIA COTE Top Ten but also to it when projects demonstrate innovation. But that’s not likely to manifest as “perfection” by any standard. And there will likely always be disagreement (both within the jury and among the public after the recipients are announced) about what constitutes a model and how strong a model a project must be on some measures (and which ones?) to counterbalance a weaker stance on others. This is the nature of awards programs and juries, whose members interpret the awards frameworks to the best of their collective ability.
To explore the topic of houses as examples of sustainable design excellence, I talked to Julie Snow, FAIA, of Snow Kreilich Architects (this year’s Firm of the Year), who was a juror on this year’s AIA COTE Top Ten Awards, and Anne Schopf, FAIA, of Mahlum Architects, who is a member of the AIA COTE Advisory Group. These kinds of discussions are, in fact, part of the very purpose of this awards program. “The profession needs to be talking about what it means to design a residence on an undeveloped piece of property,” Snow said. “That is a discussion that should be occurring more often. Where are the ethics drawn? Are we, as a profession, walking away from designing for undeveloped land?”
Image: Kevin Scott/Olson Kundig
Even so, Schopf pointed out, it is incumbent upon the profession to “critically consider our consumption of land as . It relates to connectivity and transportation and carbon footprint.” She notes that land use is not explicitly addressed in the measures. Land use does show up in the Community and Ecology measures and is referenced in other measures. I asked Lance Hosey, FAIA, about this; he’s the architect/author who, while serving as a member of the AIA COTE Advisory Group, led the research and writing of the Lessons from the Leading Edge report and was part of the revamping of the measures for 2017 along with Z Smith, FAIA, and others. “The new measures are meant to focus on of decisions, not on categories of decision-making,” he says.
While we cannot delve into the particulars of the jury’s consideration of the recipients, we are free to share that the technical jury had strong marks for the Sawmill House. Snow says that the jury carefully considered the design quality, the sustainability measures, the degree of integration between both, and the building type--as it did for every project. “The house has a high level of demonstrated innovation and technical advancement in sustainability, in energy use,” Snow said. “It worked well for the site, designed for the climate. And it is a beautiful house. Design excellence and sustainability are critical, and this met that criteria.”
“Traditionally in architecture,” Snow pointed out, “we have used the single-family house as a tool for experimentation. There is a responsibility to advance design in that context.” Indeed, added Schopf, “Many small practices get their start in single-family work. Then they carry those lessons forward into larger work. And when you push innovation, it eventually changes the baseline for projects. That is a way to propel practice.” That the COTE Top Ten program does this across a range of project types and scales is one of its greatest strengths.
“Look at how many houses are built in the US,” Snow said. “We cannot walk away from this building type.” Indeed, last year, there were some 800,000 single-family house building permits issued (according to the U.S. Census Bureau). “Leadership in this building type is important,” Schopf said. She points to US Census Bureau data as proof the “the scale of the type is changing. In 1975, the average house was 1,600 square feet and now it’s up to 2,700 square feet. In that same time, household size has decreased. This has resulted in an explosive increase in the square footage occupied, on average, in each household. In 1975, it was 550 square feet per person; today it is more than 1000.” The residential sector in the US continues to be the highest consumer of energy; today more Americans reside in single-family homes than any other housing type.
Image: Kevin Scott/Olson Kundig
Snow points out that there are advances to be made in all type of projects, and all types and scales of single-family residences. And these advances have applications for other building types, too. “A house like this is not just a model for single-family residences, either; it can be a model for other similar-scale projects such as camps and environmental centers. A ‘retreat residence’ is, on a certain level, a model that joins us to the land. It can work beautifully as a larger piece of how we relate to our environment. Our urbanizing culture still needs that connection to nature.”
“To take any one project or project type as the poster child of ‘green’ misses the point,” Hosey said. “Worse, to suggest that certain project types and scales are inherently ‘unsustainable’ discourages people from making smarter decisions about those projects, which is the opposite of what COTE Top Ten is meant to do.”
It is certainly true that any design awards program, even the AIA COTE Top Ten (still the only program that celebrates the integration of design excellence and performance on measures of sustainability), should seek to reward innovation, invention, and design. As Hosey puts it, “If we’re going to consider only those projects whose location and program are inherently lighter on the earth, then what we’re judging is the client and the community, not the architect’s decisions.”
In this case, the AIA COTE Top Ten is celebrating a project whose designers’ approach to resources was rigorous. The result is a beautiful project performing beautifully in a remote, ecologically sensitive site. That is something to celebrate and discuss.
Kira Gould, Allied AIA, is principal of Kira Gould CONNECT, a communications consultancy to the AEC industry with a focus on sustainable design excellence, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.