Getting to Real Change

by Mike Nicklas

For three decades, I’ve been trying to get this sustainable design stuff right.

My firm, Innovative Design, has designed over 800 buildings incorporating solar energy technology. Through a series of speculative solar home design initiatives, we produced solar designs that were built over 4,000 times throughout the Southeast. Our early designs concentrated on passive, solar water and space heating and energy-efficiency, but by the 1980s, Innovative Design began to address more and more sustainable strategies in its building designs.

Though our focus has moved from residential to school buildings, our current school designs tend to incorporate extensive daylighting, solar water heating, photovoltaics, rainwater harvesting, constructed wetlands, recycling systems, xeriscape planting strategies, low-emitting finishes and furnishings, a strong focus on indoor air quality, and many other green strategies.

In a first for us, we’re now designing a school that will incorporate a Living Machine – a biological wastewater treatment system developed by Taos, New Mexico-based Living Machines Inc. that mimics nature’s own water-cleaning system. In this Greensboro, North Carolina school, a rainwater catchment system will be used for toilet flushing. The waste will go from there to the Living Machine and once treated, to the ball fields for irrigation. From the fields, it flows into the aquifer.

We have designed 12 new sustainable schools, each better than the last. And we’ve completed renovations or additions on another 40 schools that have incorporated green strategies.

But during these 30 years, I’ve also seen a pattern of on-again, off-again enthusiasm for sustainable design. Such fads have little long-term effect. Worse, they may distract designers from efforts to develop the cost-effective techniques that will transform architecture as we know it.

Targeting Points, or Benefits?
During the last three years, I’ve worked with more than 30 other architectural firms in their own efforts to address an increasing owner-driven emphasis on “green” design. You need only look at the effects of the US Green Building Council’s LEED Green Building Rating System to detect designers’ growing interest in sustainable design. What’s driving the interest?

Years ago, the American Institute of Architects conducted a nationwide initiative to educate architects about how they could make their building designs more energy-efficient. At the time, the “Energy and Architecture” training program was viewed as extremely successful, with over a quarter of the nation’s architectural firms participating.

Then, as today, the architects were responding to customer demand. Several years after the Energy and Architecture effort concluded, however, the initiative was found to have had little impact on architectural design. Within a short period of time, the architects no longer implemented the energy-saving strategies they had learned.

I was part of the review committee that determined the reason for this lack of long-term effect was primarily that the nuts and bolts of energy-efficiency were taught, but the moral reasons to do so were not. The technical knowledge existed, but the architects simply didn’t care enough, from an environmental standpoint, to make energy-efficiency part of every one of their designs.

Today we find ourselves in a similar situation, again driven more by customer demand than designer values. I frequently work with other A&E firms, mostly conducting daylighting analysis, DOE II simulations, designs for rainwater catchment systems, constructed wetlands, PV and solar water-heating systems, and LEED compliance.

With a wonderful few exceptions, my experience in working with these firms is that architects are more concerned about getting LEED points than about the real environmental impact of their designs. Too many times, they have asked me if some specification is enough to earn the point – “I don’t need to do any more, right?” Too many times the concern is in earning the points most cheaply, rather than doing what will have the most environmental benefit for the least cost. This narrow perspective greatly hurts their ability to economically maximize environmental benefits.

Breaking the Pattern
The LEED initiative clearly has many benefits. Until the values of designers change, however, lasting effects will be hard to come by. Just as in the 1970s and early ’80s, we have a wonderful opportunity. Customers are demanding greener and greener buildings. But if the sustainability of our planet does not become a value embraced by the majority of designers, we will find ourselves once again caught in the same pattern.

People have often asked me how my firm could possibly get solar in 4,800 buildings when, in their minds, for 25 years solar has cost too much. The answer is simple. It was my priority.

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Mike Nicklas, FAIA, is principal of architectural firm Innovative Design, Raleigh, NC., and past chair of the American Solar Energy Society (ASES). He was the recipient of ASES’ highest honor, the 1996 Charles Greeley Abbot Award. Contact him: nicklas@innovativedesign.net

FROM Solar Today, a SustainableBusiness.com Content Partner