Page 191 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

EXISTING BUILDINGS 169

Stewart Brand, author of How Buildings Learn, provides us with as good a jump-
ing point as any from which to re-think our approach to existing buildings. Brand begins
with the premise that “no buildings adapt well,” that, in fact, “they’re designed not to
adapt,” in terms of how they are constructed, the budgets that are created to manage
them, how they are regulated and taxed, even how they are remodeled. Having said
that, Brand makes a number of cogent points, among them:

■ Office buildings, comprising the largest capital asset of developed nations and accom-
modating over half of their workforces, have to adapt quickly because of intense com-
petitive pressures. 3
■ Over a fifty-year period, changes within a building cost three times more than the orig-
inal building. 4
■ Changes tend to occur from the inside out, starting with stuff and space plans (five to
seven years), then moving to services (fifteen to twenty years), and then finally to the
external skin (twenty years) and structure (thirty years and upward). 5
■ Adaptation occurs most easily in cheap buildings that few care about, and occurs in a
refined way in long-lasting sustained-purpose buildings. 6
■ A building’s longevity is often determined by how well it can absorb new service tech-
nologies, such as innovative energy services. 7
■ A building’s capacity to adapt over the long term (its adaptivity) should be distin-
guished from a building’s graceless turnover from tenant to tenant. 8
■ Age plus adaptivity makes buildings and community humane, and hence more beloved. 9

Brand’s overall assessment of the relative adaptive capacity of buildings is, overall,
dead-on. Buildings in our country generally do not adapt well; when they do, they
adapt from the inside outward. Adaptations work most readily when there’s a capacity
to use new technologies, and they occur best at the two ends of the spectrum—with
cheap buildings no one loves and with expensive, institutional buildings, buildings that
were designed to be loved for an extended period of time. But what about the com-
mercial buildings in the vast middle of the spectrum, buildings that are neither cheap
and unloved nor expensive and cherished?
John Lyle, author of Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development, in making
the argument for our need to understand systems ecologically, relies tellingly enough
on the metaphor of a building:

Ecosystematic order, then, is analogous to the order found in buildings. First, there is
the structural order of posts, beams, walls, and roof. Second, there is the functional
order of material and energy flows represented by the pipes, valves, wires, switches,
circuit breakers, ducts, dampers, and other apparatus. Third, there is the locational
order of the floor plan. 10

Buildings show us how to think in a holistic way, over the long term. We need to
think about their structure: what they are made of, everything that goes into them. We
need to think about what makes them function: the energy that flows into them, how
water is supplied and utilized. And we need to think about a building’s location and