I appreciate all of the recent posts on sustainable design, and would like to add one thought.
We need to remember where LEED came from, what the world of green design was like before LEED was started by the USGBC in the late 1990's.
Along with many others, I was designing green buildings and renovating historic structures back in the late 1970's and 1980's, but we were all responding to a wide variety of issues and concerns. Of course, energy conservation was a big thing in response to the first "energy crisis" in pricing fuel. But air quality, water quality, preserving rare hardwoods, using more daylight - these were all mixed and valuable concerns for architecture. But I didn't have an energy modeling tool to help make decisions about orientation, heat gain and passive solar design.
The great achievement of the USGBC was to create one comprehensive checklist that incorporated many inputs from all of these concerned interests. Making it easier to measure green success was both a noble goal, and a way to popularize the entire effort, making it more mainstream and less intuitive and willful. It provides a way to check that our designs meet some of the goals of sustainability in some agreed-upon manner.
With this success came the realization that green design is awfully complex, hard to measure, and the varied interests continue to push and pull on the system.
There is the ongoing danger of greenwashing, lots of companies trying to sell us stuff that they say is green. But the role of the architect is to look carefully at every product and system, as we always have done, to make selections appropriate to the project and the client.
What is the worst case, how can a sustainable project become a "disaster" in any way worse than the plethora of bad buildings that surround us every day? Even if the energy reduction is not as good as planned - people are not machines and do not use the systems appropriately all of the time, nor maintain them well, and that applies whether it is well designed or not. What if the recycled flooring lasts only 10 years instead of 15 years as advertised, its use still may have avoided damage to natural resources and helped with indoor air.
Green building design and practice is still a work in progress, and so is the LEED system. That is one of its strengths - it can evolve and serve all of us in the design and building professions. At the absolute minimum, the LEED checklist helps organize the discussions with clients, team members, engineers and builders. And that is worth something.
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Sherman Aronson AIA
BLT Architects
Philadelphia PA
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