Looking Ahead: The Next 10 Years of Green Building
(Page 3 of 10)
May/June 2009
By Eric Corey Freed
I'd like to see the current crisis of the environment and economics be a call for people to step outside of their homes and look at the environment in which they live in. I'd like people to see their home as being 50 percent of the solution, with the surrounding landscape and gardens as the other half of the solution. Then you'll discover a more dynamic relationship between inside and outside. Then we'll be tapping into the potential of the site and the landscape to solve part of the problem.
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If we do really well, we'll begin to look at housing heuristically again. We'll design the house and the city together. We'll look at it as "home-site-city" or "home-site-rural landscape"—all designed together at the same time. We've been creating these self-regulating boxes, which essentially isolate us from our environment and our communities. We really need to dispel that paradigm and move totally in the other direction.
GIL FRIEND: Things people have been talking about for decades: Housing should be appropriate to place and tailored to ambient flows of energy, water and air. We need to shift from minimizing damage to how we grow regenerative capacity, resilience and beauty. How do we enrich the experience of people living in the housing? Houses should come alive: living houses and living cities.
DAVID ORR: The changes mentioned are changes that should happen and are long overdue. After World War II, it became harder for minority populations in inner city areas to afford housing. Money flowed outside to green field areas, and the result was that, plus cheap energy, made suburban sprawl a reality.
I hope with this new administration we'll see more use of light rail and inner city train connections. The city of Portland recently rediscovered trolleys, and their use has been very successful up there. I hope to see trains become a part of daily life in the next decade or two.
MICHELLE KAUFMANN: Some good that can come out of this housing crisis is that what we, as sustainable designers, have been wanting to happen, actually will happen, out of necessity. People are feeling the financial end of the reality that we do not have endless resources (money, energy, water). And that is now going to translate to people wanting green homes out of financial necessity.
SARAH SUSANKA: I tend to be very optimistic, and I believe that when we put our minds to something, it happens. What should happen is what will happen. We just need the right mindset. That's how change happens.
PLINY FISK: Housing needs to become adaptive to the region and place, and resilient to diversity of culture and particular family needs. From an industry standpoint it needs to be Designed for Manufacturing (DfM), and industry protocol that forces you to think from the start about how you are going to make something—what the tools are, the manufacturing technique. In the past, this has been very intuitive (i.e. a chisel does this, and a bandsaw that), but because we're faced with such a large housing crisis all over the world, we really have to develop a low-cost, high-performance method of meeting demand. Hopefully, in a truly eco-industrial environment, we will build homes that are understood as much by the users as the designers/engineers. We can no longer afford to one off, popcorn-style a bunch of cool ideas that go nowhere.
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