Toward Resilient Architectures:

Why Green Often Isn’t.

When measured in assessments, many sustainable buildings are
proven less sustainable than proponents have claimed.

By Michael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros

Something surprising has happened with many so-called “sustainable”

buildings. When actually measured in post-occupancy assessments, they’ve proven far
less sustainable than their proponents have claimed. In some cases they’ve actually
performed worse than much older buildings, with no such claims. A 2009 New York
Times article, “Some buildings not living up to green label,” documented the extensive
problems with many sustainability icons. Among other reasons for this failing, the
Times pointed to the widespread use of expansive curtain-wall glass assemblies and
large, “deep-plan” designs that put most usable space far from exterior walls, forcing
greater reliance on artificial light and ventilation systems.
Partly in response to the bad press, the City of New York instituted a new law
requiring disclosure of actual performance for many buildings. That led to reports of
even more poor-performing sustainability icons. Another Times article, “City’s Law
Tracking Energy Use Yields Some Surprises,” noted that the gleaming new 7 World
Trade Center, LEED Gold-certified, scored just 74 on the Energy Star rating — one
point below the minimum 75 for “high-efficiency buildings” under the national rating
system. That modest rating doesn’t even factor in the significant embodied energy in
the new materials of 7 World Trade Center. Things got even worse in 2010 with a
lawsuit [“$100 Million Class Action Filed Against LEED and USGBC”] against the US
Green Building Council, developers of the LEED certification system (Leadership in
Energy and Environmental Design). The plaintiffs in the lawsuit alleged that the
USGBC engaged in “deceptive trade practices, false advertising and anti-trust” by
promoting the LEED system, and argued that because the LEED system does not live
up to predicted and advertised energy savings, the USGBC actually defrauded
municipalities and private entities. The suit was ultimately dismissed, but in its wake the
website Treehugger and others predicted, based on the evidence uncovered, that
“there will be more of this kind of litigation.” What’s going on? How can the desire to
increase sustainability actually result in its opposite? One problem with many
sustainability approaches is that they don’t question the underlying building type.
Instead they only add new “greener” components, such as more efficient mechanical
systems and better wall insulation. But this “bolt-on” conception of sustainability, even
when partially successful, has the drawback of leaving underlying forms, and the
structural system that generates them, intact. The result is too often the familiar “law of
unintended consequences.” What’s gained in one area is lost elsewhere as the result
of other unanticipated interactions.

Energy-wasting glass box from the 1960s compared to a new LEED-certified

curtain-wall building. Spot the difference? The trouble is, (paraphrasing Albert Einstein)
we cannot solve problems with the same basic typologies that created them.
For example, adding more efficient active energy systems tends to reduce the
amount of energy used, and therefore lowers its overall cost. But, in turn, that lower
cost tends to make tenants less careful with their energy use — a phenomenon known
as “Jevons’ Paradox.” Increasing efficiency lowers cost, and increases demand — in
turn increasing the rate of consumption, and wiping out the initial savings. The lesson is
that we can’t deal with energy consumption in isolation. We have to look at the concept
of energy more broadly, including embodied energy and other factors. There are often
other unintended consequences. A notable case is London’s sustainability-hyped
“Gherkin” (Foster & Partners, 2003), where the building’s open-floor ventilation system
was compromised when security-conscious tenants created glass separations.
Operable windows whose required specifications had been lowered because of the
natural ventilation feature actually began to fall from the building, and had to be
permanently closed. The ambitious goal of a more sophisticated natural ventilation
system paradoxically resulted in even worse ventilation.
No building is an island: Another major problem with green building programs
happens when they treat buildings in isolation from their urban contexts. In one
infamous example [“Driving to Green Buildings”], the Chesapeake Bay Foundation
moved its headquarters to the world’s first certified LEED-Platinum building — but the
move took them from an older building in the city of Annapolis, Maryland to a new
building in the suburbs, requiring new embodied energy and resources. The added
employee travel alone — what’s known as “transportation energy intensity” — more
than erased the energy gains of the new building. The theory of resilience discussed in
our article, “Toward Resilient Architectures 1: Biology Lessons,” points to the nature of
the problem. Systems may appear to be well engineered within their original defined
parameters — but they will inevitably interact with many other systems, often in an
unpredictable and non-linear way. We look towards a more “robust” design
methodology, combining redundant (“network”) and diverse approaches, working
across many scales, and ensuring fine-grained adaptivity of design elements. Though
these criteria may sound abstract, they’re exactly the sorts of characteristics achieved
with so-called “passive” design approaches. Passive buildings allow the users to adjust
and adapt to climactic conditions — say, by opening or closing windows or blinds, and
getting natural light and air. These designs can be far more accurate in adjusting to
circumstances at a much finer grain of structure. They feature diverse systems that do
more than one thing — like the walls that hold up the building and also accumulate
heat through thermal mass. They have networks of spaces that can be reconfigured
easily, even converted to entirely new uses, with relatively inexpensive modifications
(unlike the “open-plan” typology, which has never delivered on expectations). They are
all-around, multi-purpose buildings that aren’t narrowly designed to one fashionable
look or specialized user. And perhaps most crucially, they don’t stand apart from
context and urban fabric, but work together with other scales of the city, to achieve
benefits at both larger and smaller scales.
Older buildings perform better… Sometimes: Many older buildings took
exactly this “passive” approach, simply because they had to. In an era when energy
was expensive (or simply not available) and transportation was difficult, buildings were
naturally more clustered together in urban centers. Their shape and orientation
exploited natural daylight, and typically featured smaller, well-positioned windows and
load-bearing walls with higher thermal mass. The simple, robust shapes of these
buildings allowed almost endless configurations. In fact many of the most in-demand
urban buildings today are actually adaptive reuse projects of much older buildings. The
results of this passive approach are reflected in good energy performance. While New
York’s 7 World Trade Center actually scored below the city’s minimum rating of 75 out
of 100, older buildings in the city that had been retrofitted with the same efficient
heating, cooling, and lighting technologies fared much better: the Empire State Building
scored a rating of 80, the Chrysler Building scored 84. But just being old is clearly not a
criterion of success. The 1963 MetLife/PanAm building (Walter Gropius & Pietro
Belluschi), now a half-century old, scored a dismal 39. Another mid-century icon, the
Lever House (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1952), scored 20. The worst performer of all
was Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe’s iconic Seagram building, built in 1958. Its score was
an astonishingly low 3. What’s the problem with these buildings? As the earlier New
York Times article noted, they have extensive curtain-wall assemblies, large window
areas, large-scale “deep-plan” forms, and other limitations. On a fundamental level, as
we can now begin to see from resilience theory, they lack many crucial resilient
advantages of older building types. There may be something inherent in the building
type itself that is non-resilient. The form language itself could be an innate problem —
something that, according to systems thinking, no mere bolt-on “green” additions can
fix.
“Oil-interval” architecture: Architectural critic Peter Buchanan, writing
recently in the UK magazine, The Architectural Review, placed the blame for these
failures squarely at the feet of the Modernist design model itself, and called for a “big
rethink” about many of its unquestioned assumptions [“The Big Rethink: Farewell To
Modernism — And Modernity Too”]. Modernism is inherently unsustainable, he argued,
because it evolved in the beginning of the era of abundant and cheap fossil fuels. This
cheap energy powered the weekend commute to the early Modernist villas, and kept
their large open spaces warm, in spite of large expanses of glass and thin wall
sections. Petrochemicals created their complex sealants and fueled the production of
their exotic extrusions. “Modern architecture is thus an energy-profligate, petrochemical
architecture, only possible when fossil fuels are abundant and affordable”, he said.
“Like the sprawling cities it spawned, it belongs to that waning era historians are
already calling ‘the oil interval’.”
 Cities built using a form language whose dominant feature is to maximize the
consumption of fossil fuels. Though a successful economic development strategy
during the “oil-interval” era, it has left us with a looming catastrophe.
Buchanan is not alone in calling for a “big rethink” about the assumptions of
Modernist design. It is fashionable among many architects today to attack Modernism,
and argue instead for various kinds of avant-garde and “Post-Modernist” styles.
Buchanan lumps these styles together under a category he calls “Deconstructionist
Post-Modernism.” But he insists that the Deconstructionists have not actually
transcended the Modernist paradigm they attack: they still operate almost entirely
within the industrial assumptions and engineering methodologies of the “oil interval.”
Once again, resilience theory provides insight into the serious flaws carried by this
family of related form languages — and indeed, flaws in their very conception of
design. (Those will need to be examined in great detail.) Ironically, this “modern” model
is now almost a century old, belonging to an era of “engineered resilience” — that is,
resilience within only one designed system, but unable to cope with the unintended
consequences of interactions with other systems (like urban transportation, say, or true
ecological systems). Because the Modernist form language and its successors are tied
to the old linear engineering paradigm, they cannot in practice combine redundant
(“network”) and diverse approaches, nor work across many scales, nor ensure a fine-
grained adaptivity for design elements — though they can certainly create the symbolic
appearance of doing so. Contrary to such dubious claims (in what sometimes takes on
aspects of a massive marketing effort), they cannot actually achieve what C. H. Holling
called “ecological resilience.” This seems to suggest an important explanation of the
alarmingly poor performance of these buildings and places, when actually evaluated in
post-occupancy research. Seen in this light, the various avant-garde attempts to
transcend Modernism appear more as exotic new wrappings for the same underlying
(and non-resilient) structural types and industrial methods. But as Albert Einstein
famously pointed out: “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and
move toward higher levels.” Just as it is not possible to achieve resilience by merely
adding new devices like solar collectors to these old industrial-Modernist building types,
it is not possible to get meaningful benefits with dazzling new designer permutations
and tokenistic ecological thinking within the same essentially industrial design process.
We do need a “big rethink” about the most basic methods and systems of design for
the future.
A wave of neo-modernism: Yet if anything, in recent years there has been a
remarkable resurgence of an even more unapologetic form of Modernism. In light of the
evidence, this is a decidedly reactionary trend: we seem to be witnessing a “back to
roots” movement — one that, like other such movements, is based more on doctrinal
belief than on evidence. This fashionable Neo-Modernism ranges from outright “retro”
boxy white buildings, interiors, and furnishings, to swoopy futuristic-looking buildings
and landscapes. Stylistically, the shapes are eye-catching and often edgy, and some
people (especially many architects) clearly like them.

Curiously, after one century of unfettered design experiments, the Modernist

form language evolves back to the traditional glass box.
Not everyone seems to care for this new/old aesthetic, however. Some see the
new structures as sterile, ugly, and disruptive to their neighborhoods and cities.
Defenders of the designs often attack these critics for being presumably
unsophisticated, nostalgic, or unwilling to accept the inevitable progress of a dynamic
culture. This “battle of stylistic preferences” rages on, with the Neo-Modernists claiming
the avant-garde high ground, where they tend to dominate the media, critics, and
schools. Of course, fashions come and go, and architecture is no different: in a sense
this is just another phase in the more or less continuous waxing and waning of
architectural Modernism for almost a century now, along with raging debates about its
aesthetic merits. Those debates have never really died down. Critics like Buchanan are
not new: in the 1960s and 1970s equally vociferous critics like Christopher Alexander,
Peter Blake, Jane Jacobs, David Watkin, and Tom Wolfe made withering critiques, but
little has changed. What has now changed, however, is that we are asking newly
urgent questions about the resilience of this kind of structure, at a time when we need
to rigorously assess and improve that resilience. As this discussion suggests, it is not
only the particular and practical issues of expansive glazed curtain walls, bulky and
transparent buildings, and exotic assemblies overly reliant on petrochemical products
that are the root of the problem. It is perhaps the very idea of buildings as fashionable
icons celebrating their own newness, a quintessentially Modernist idea, which is
fundamentally at odds with the notion of sustainability. As they age, these buildings are
destined to be less new and therefore less useful, not more so. The pristine Modernist
(and now Post-Modernist and Deconstructivist) industrial surfaces are destined to mar,
weather, and otherwise degrade. The eye-catching novelties of one era will become
the abandoned eyesores of the next, an inevitability lost on a self-absorbed elite fixated
on today’s fashions. Meanwhile the humble, humane criteria of resilient design are
being pushed aside, in the rush to embrace the most attention-getting new
technological approaches — which then produce a disastrous wave of unintended
failures. This is clearly no way to prepare for a “sustainable” future in any sense.
Modernism is more than just a style. In this light, why have the form
language and design methodologies of Modernism proven so stubbornly persistent?
The answer is that Modernism is not merely a style that one may care for or not. It is
part and parcel of a remarkably comprehensive — even totalizing — project of
aesthetics, tectonics, urbanism, technology, culture, and ultimately, civilization. That
project has had a profound effect upon the development of modern settlements, for
better or worse, and (especially visible in the light of resilience theory) made a huge
contribution to the current state in which we find our cities, and our civilization. The
origins of architectural Modernism are closely affiliated with the progressive goals of
the early Twentieth Century, and the humanitarian ideals — even the utopian zeal — of
well-meaning visionaries of that day. Those individuals saw a promising capacity, in the
dawning industrial technology of the age, to deliver a new era of prosperity and quality
of life for humanity. At their most credulous, its leaders were clearly enraptured by the
seemingly infinite possibilities for a technological utopia. From that they developed an
elaborate — and in surprising ways, still poorly-evaluated — theory about the
necessary new tectonics and form languages of the civilization of the future. Their
followers today still argue that it is, unquestionably, Modernism that is best positioned
to don the mantle of sustainability. Many things did improve under this technological
regime, of course, and today we can cure diseases, reduce backbreaking toil, eat
exotic foods, travel fast in comfortable motoring and flying craft, and do many other
things that would astonish our ancestors. But along with that new regime has come a
calamitous ecological depletion and destruction of resources, and an erosion of the
foundation on which all economics and indeed all life depends. So today, in an age of
converging crises, it is well worth our asking hard questions about the assumptions of
that industrial regime — and the complicity of architectural Modernism as a kind of
alluring “product packaging” within it. The story goes back to a remarkably small group
of writers, theorists, and practitioners in the early 20th Century, and notably the
Austrian architect Adolf Loos. We will need to look more closely at this history — and
what its ongoing legacy means for us, and our very daunting design challenges today.

Michael Mehaffy is an urbanist and critical thinker in complexity and the built
environment. He is a practicing planner and builder, and is known for his many projects
as well as his writings. He has been a close associate of the architect and software
pioneer Christopher Alexander. He is a Research Associate with the Center for
Environmental Structure, Alexander’s research center founded in 1967, and Executive
Director of the Sustasis Foundation, a Portland, OR-based NGO dedicated to
developing and applying neighborhood-scale tools for resilient and sustainable
development.
Nikos A. Salingaros is a mathematician and polymath known for his work
on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has
been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher
Alexander. Salingaros published substantive research on Algebras, Mathematical
Physics, Electromagnetic Fields, and Thermonuclear Fusion before turning his
attention to Architecture and Urbanism. He still is Professor of Mathematics at
the University of Texas at San Antonio and is also on the Architecture faculties of
universities in Italy, Mexico, and The Netherlands.