Housing and Community Development

Ken: I wrote in the blog that the AIA is "tacitly supporting the adoption locally of rating systems", not that there is an official program. There is no 'program' of which I am aware. There should be one. Because of its membership, if for no other reason, the AIA should be discouraging such adoption actively, let alone encouraging the state certification of Raters. As Mark Wills writes, the AIA is apparently "trying to emphasize the need NOT to adopt such regimes", but is, with all due respect, frequently not succeeding.

A word of explanation, perhaps more than you may want to read, but I feel obliged to explain my reasoning about Raters:

First, I plead the fifth. Two localities near me have adopted rating systems as a prerequisite for obtaining a building permit or a certificate of occupancy. The Town of Brookhaven on Long Island has 'adopted' Energy Star and the Town of Southampton has adopted LEED. All buildings proposed in these towns must first be evaluated using these respective rating systems by Raters certified only by these private systems. No proposed buildings may be given a building permit before the fact (or a certificate of occupancy after) by a building inspector - who is certified by the state - if they have not first achieved a satisfactory rating score, let alone been built to one, as determined and attested to by a Rater of one of these systems.

Of course, this is particularly confusing to Energy Star Raters, who are accustomed to working with builders during construction instead of before, in that they are being asked to rate a proposed project from the Drawings alone. And this is confusing to the localities as well: LEED, for instance, gives points for organizing meetings attended by consultants! Why would the locality care?

In some cases, Raters are registered architects like yourself. But this is a conflict of interest. Architects should not be determining whether or not their own work achieves a satisfactory rating. They may want to learn the substance of these systems, and that is a good thing. But they should engage a third party - as they would any other consultant - to make this independent evaluation for them, thereby avoiding the conflict and having the added benefit of another viewpoint.  

So who are these Raters? The answer is anyone. Anyone who can obtain a LEED or Energy Star or other agency rating. To be a Rater, you don't have to be state-certified or go to an architecture school or get a degree or pass an examination from the state or have any other professional certification. Yet to be a Rater is to have more authority in the process than a building inspector!

We all like and believe in green design, though we may differ on the actual substance of it. I, for one, like geothermal heating and cooling systems. They take a lot of fossil fuel out of our activity. Why can't the AIA and the localities encourage the use of such content instead? Isn't that what we want, rather than rating systems?

We may have gone to school to become architects, got degrees, apprenticed in practice, studied for and passed a professional exam, but when it comes to AIA membership, we became members because we wanted to and we had at last become  registered, a requirement for full-fledged membership in the AIA. Shouldn't the AIA be supporting activities which accrue to the benefit of that membership and thus expand its base, rather than the opposite? Isn't that shooting itself in the proverbial foot?