Mom, apple pie and green architecture. An unlikely trio, to be sure, but not in the minds of the idealistic crusaders for environmentally sound design. They were in this most pragmatic of cities last week, suggesting to a conclave of 5,000 architects from more than 85 countries that it would be practically un-American-or un-British, un-Japanese or un-whatever-not to join their save-the-planet cause.
Put the guilt trip on hold for a minute: Who wouldn’t be in favor of a world without waste? A world without toxic materials? Who wouldn’t want workplaces that offer a healthy, stress-free environment for workers? Or buildings that consume less energy than conventional structures? Or new developments that reduce sprawl, traffic congestion and air pollution?
These were among the principles that emerged from the World Congress of Architects, a joint convention of the American Institute of Architects and the International Union of Architects held at McCormick Place and the Auditorium Theatre. The tough questions few seemed to be debating at the four-day gathering were: How much will this environmental wish list cost to implement? And who’s got the political clout to turn the wish list into reality?
“Architecture at the Crossroads: Designing for a Sustainable Future” was billed as the largest gathering of architects in history. Given its high-minded environmental agenda, the Congress was laced with irony. It began with a parade that stopped traffic in downtown Chicago, causing idling cars to spew pollutants into the air. Its first three days were at McCormick Place, a great black gash on the green swath of Chicago’s lakefront that is unreachable by mass transit.
Nevertheless, the convention ended with the issuance of a “Chicago Declaration of Interdependence,” conceived by organizers as a logical extension of last year’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. A sustainable society, said the declaration, “restores, preserves and enhances nature and culture for the benefit of all life, present and future.” Architects, it added, will “place environmental and social sustainability at the core of our practices and professional responsibilities.”
Put aside the question of whether the declaration constitutes the equivalent of a Hippocratic oath for the design profession (it probably won’t be binding on those who signed it, organizers said). The more significant question seems to be: Will the principles of the declaration work their way into the economic and cultural mainstream or will they become the foundation for a relatively insignificant niche market, the architectural equivalent of organic food?
The importance of the declaration’s principles is difficult to dispute. Half the world’s energy is spent constructing, tearing down, heating and lighting buildings, according to officials of the International Union of Architects. It only stands to reason that by rethinking how they design buildings-specifying materials that require less energy to produce than conventional materials, for example-architects can lessen the impact of such scourges as the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming.
Two developments last week indicated that green architecture was moving into the mainstream. President Clinton announced the creation of a new council that will be devoted to developing sustainable development policies that can be implemented by U.S. businesses and governments. And Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation’s largest retailer, opened a 120,000-square-foot environmental demonstration store in Lawrence, Kan.
The store, which is likely to end up costing 10 to 20 percent more to build than a conventional Wal-Mart, includes wooden beams fabricated from selectively harvested, rather than clear-cut, timber. It has a solar-powered sign in front, a parking lot of recycled asphalt and skylights outfitted with electronic daylight sensors that regulate fluorescent lights in response to the amount of daylight coming inside. In the long run, savings from such measures are expected to offset part of the higher initial construction costs, Wal-Mart officials say.
Perhaps emboldened by these developments, leaders of the convention told architects that, despite a worldwide economic slowdown, it is their responsibility to be the shock troops in a global war against pollution and waste. The designers were further informed that they had the power to win this war, just as architects who ventured forth from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 changed the face of the American city with Beaux-Arts train stations, libraries and art museums.
Yet for any number of reasons, these assertions-offered by Susan Maxman of Philadelphia, president of the American Institute of Architects, and leaders of the International Union of Architects-were hard to give much credence, no matter how noble the impulse behind them.
First, 1993 is not 1893. The Chicago world’s fair of 1893 was a real, live spectacle of an event, not a revolutionary idea in search of a constituency. The fair’s White City-a carefully orchestrated fantasyland of neo-classical buildings planned by Daniel Burnham-drew millions of people to Chicago, thus establishing a political constituency for the City Beautiful movement of grandly scaled structures and civic monuments. In contrast, the World Congress was a closed-to-the-public affair; the closest its stylishly dressed attendees got to real people were the thousands of tie-dyed Grateful Dead fans passing through McCormick Place to Dead concerts at Soldier Field.
Second, even in healthy economic times, architects are political wimps compared to the powerful professions of doctors and lawyers. Now, in the very moment when they are at their weakest economically, architects were being asked to save the world.
How would you like to be the struggling architect telling some chief executive officer that your bid came in 20 percent high, but that it will save money over time because of higher productivity and reduced energy costs? There may be some rare, enlightened CEO who will go for such long-term logic. Most will not.
Third, the theme of the convention was the right message conveyed to the wrong audience-old wine in a new, green bottle. For years, architects have been inveighing against suburban sprawl, arrogantly telling people to stop driving and start walking so there would be less congestion and less pollution. And what have Americans done? However foolishly, they’ve kept spreading their suburbs farther and farther from downtowns in search of the impossible dream of peace and quiet. To be sure, recycling is making a dent in our throwaway society, but let’s see if President Clinton can increase the gas tax before getting too optimistic about an America that is about to turn red, white, blue and green.
The closest thing to genuine debate offered by this oh-so-polite convention occurred Sunday during a five-person panel discussion, when Chicago’s Helmut Jahn-cast as the guy in the black hat even though he wore a spiffy white suit-mixed it up with New York architect William McDonough, a leading green guerrilla who sported a blue bow tie.
Jahn put down green architecture as a passing fad, but McDonough countered that it was part of a fundamental shift in cultural values. Jahn said the overriding issue of good design is intelligent planning, which makes climate and the environment part of a broader range of economic and social concerns. McDonough compared today’s steel-and-glass boxes to smoke-belching steamships-energy-wasting relics of an industrial age that romanticized the machine and created “machines for living,” not his ideal of a “living machine.”
Jahn said that advocates of green design were trying to make the architect into “the saint who saves the world,” but McDonough responded that architects shouldn’t just accept conventional materials, such as clear-cut timbers; they must seek out new, energy-saving or environmentally sound ones, as at the Wal-Mart store.
Who’s right? It matters little. Both Jahn and McDonough would probably agree that if it has any chance to be broadly accepted, green design must not become an end in itself, but part of a larger framework that incorporates the essential elements of space, light, structure, human scale and responsiveness to surroundings, whether natural or man-made. That way it’s not architecture that’s green for green’s sake, but green for our sake.
