Page 192 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

170 CHAPTER 6

the fact that how it functions is highly dependent on local conditions like temperature
variability, moisture, and available resources.
Lyle extends his metaphor, identifying a dozen design strategies that form the basis
of regenerative thinking (letting nature do the work, linking all the parts of a system
into an aggregated whole, matching technology to need, managing storage as a key to
sustainability). Many of these strategies are relevant to how buildings are designed or
re-designed, and thinking about the re-design of existing buildings, particularly that
vast category of buildings “in the middle,” is training for life in a new paradigm of less
consumption (of resources, energy, and water) and less waste.
It’s been said that the greenest building is one that’s already built. In part that’s
because older buildings contain what’s called “embodied energy”—the energy used to
harvest, manufacture, and transport the materials they are made of and the energy used
to build them in the first place. When a building is torn down, that embodied energy
is wasted (and still more energy is used in the demolition process, which also creates
waste and debris). This is the second, more pragmatic reason we cannot simply ignore
those “buildings in the middle”: a large portion of our building stock over the next
thirty years—the places we work and live—will be renovated buildings, not new ones.
A projection that illustrates the opportunities afforded by approaching existing
buildings differently can seen in Figure 6.1. We currently have a stock of 300 billion
square feet of building in the United States. By 2035, we will have demolished about
50 billion square feet of buildings—between 15 and 20 percent. Of the remaining 250
billion square feet, 150 billion will be renovated. And 150 billion square feet of new
construction will be added to overall inventory.
My colleagues and I at Melaver, Inc. hope new building stock that will come on the
market will be developed to green standards, and we are very concerned about how
existing buildings will be renovated. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency esti-
mates nearly half of America’s greenhouse gas emissions comes from the construction
and operation of buildings. Preserving the embodied energy of still-useful buildings
and improving their energy consumption and environmental impact present both a sig-
nificant challenge and an enormous opportunity.

Making the Most of an

Existing Building

Three of Melaver, Inc.’s LEED-certified projects are renovations of existing buildings,
and all three have multiple tenants. (Most LEED office buildings are occupied by a
single tenant, typically the building’s owner.) Two of them—the Telfair Building (LEED
for Commercial Interiors, where the company’s main office is located) and the Whita-
ker Building (LEED for New Construction Silver, 2004, the first LEED certified build-
ing in Savannah and home to the company’s brokerage division, Melaver | Mouchet)
—are mixed-use (retail and office) commercial properties in the historic district of