Nature teaches us the importance of beauty for survival. Color in the plumage of birds, the smell of flowers are but two examples of natural selection to promote procreation (of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, consider the horny toad – not called horny for nothing). Nature doesn’t call this green design, it’s just good practice!
If a house or housing complex is not pleasing to the purchaser, it won’t sell. Consider Pruitt-Igoe, once touted as St. Louis’ panacea to housing for the poor. Even with subsidized rents, the building never reached 90% occupancy and was demolished after only twenty years. If it isn’t beautiful, it won’t sell, and even if it’s free, no one will pick it up from the roadside of housing detritus.
A lot of resources go into a building and the longer that building endures, the lower the environmental impact.
Architects must solve for a series of criteria: how does the building take best advantage of views, harness the sun and wind, solve the space requirements|adjacencies, optimize water and energy use, be resource efficient, nurture the local ecosystem, enhance inhabitants’ quality of life, and — delight? The architect’s goal in designing a green building is to find a solution that is an elegantly integrated whole. Beauty is not a trade-off for green design — beauty is essential to a building’s survival and therefore its environmental impact.
The advent of heating and cooling systems coupled with improvements in the building envelope and cheap energy have led to the homogenization of homebuilding. Compare the floor plan of a developer home in Vermont to one in Arizona. Apart from a little white cladding here and stucco there, the blueprints are the same. I grew up in a 1770’s home in Vermont that was four rooms over four (more volume to surface area). The traditional home in Virginia (where I now reside, apparently I can only live in states that start with “V”) is two over two (more surface area to volume). The former built to heat, the latter to breathe. Vermont has 6006 heating degree days (measurement that reflects the demand for energy needed to heat a building), Virginia has half that number, 3304. Vermont has 747 cooling degree days while VA has 1422 (twice as many). Without air conditioning, modern heating, homes from the 18th century were adapted to conserve or reject heat — a strategy seen in nature and one which, when applied to the building industry, has low first costs. This is a strategy the Developer-Builder can easily adopt. It’s called Regionalism.
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