Caption: The new Clean Air Gardening building, pre-renovation.
Today’s NY Times has an interesting article about how the Europeans are kicking our butts in the US when it comes to environmentally friendly and efficient architecture and building design.
After more than a decade of tightening guidelines, Europe has made green architecture an everyday reality. In Germany and the Netherlands especially, a new generation of architects has expanded the definition of sustainable design beyond solar panels and sod roofs. As Matthias Sauerbruch put it to me: “The eco-friendly projects you saw in the 1970s, with solar panels and recycled materials: they were so self-conscious. We call this Birkenstock architecture. Now we don’t need to do this anymore. The basic technology is all pretty accepted.”
In the United States, architects cannot make the same claim with equal confidence. Despite the media attention showered on “green” issues, the federal government has yet to establish universal efficiency standards for buildings. Yet, according to some estimates, buildings consume nearly as much energy as industry and transportation combined. And the average building in the U.S. uses roughly a third more energy than its German counterpart.
As you might have seen in our previous posts, or at the Practical Environmentalist site, Clean Air Gardening is in the process of renovating an existing building right now to make it LEED certified or Energy Star certified or both.
But I want to point out that we aren’t doing this just because of some altruistic wish to help the environment. Yes, we care about the environment, but we also care about our bottom line. And those two things don’t have to contradict each other.
Green buildings make sense from a financial perspective, and from a productivity perspective. You can spend some money up front for energy efficiency improvements that will pay you back year after year after year in lower energy costs. Many of the things that we are doing have a short payback period of just a few years. When you implement features like natural lighting and better air quality, you end up with a place where it’s easier to get work done, and where it’s pleasant to spend time.
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