It's About Sustainability

http://blog.preservationleadershipforum.org/2014/10/30/old-places-sustainability/#.VFLB1_TF9Yx

Letter Cloud by Erin Shie Palmer
Wing Luke Museum west lightwell
Olson Kundig Architect
Seattle, Washington
dbwingluke.com

Hello Everyone:

It is a happy Monday for yours truly.  Checking the page view count, blogger saw that we are at 19,190 looks.  Awe-some.  Pretty amazing considering blogger had to deal with technical issues and a cold recently.  Keep calm and blog on.  Today we are going to revisit another one of our favorite people, Tom Mayes of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

 In the latest installment of his wonderful series "Why  Do Old Places Matter?" the subject is sustainability.  Adaptive reuse of a building is one of the most environmentally minded activities a person or community can under take, more so than simply buying or building a "green" building.  As the oft-quoted Carl Elefante, of Quinn-Evan Architects, goes "the greenest building is...one that is already bulit" (Elefante, Forum Journal, 4, 2007)  Fortunately, adaptive reuse is becoming more common and the benefits more recognized.  In his post, Mr. Mayes summarizes the key points from the work by the National Trust's Preservation Green Lab, the Urban Land Institute, the Green building Council, Smart Growth America, et al...(Forum Journal Bridging Land Conservation and Historic Preservation, Fall 2010)  Mr. Mayes hopes that his summary will give people a glimpse at the reasons why saving and reusing old places is the "green" solution.  Further, Mr. Mayes writes, "...I also want to suggest that old places should themselves be viewed as part of the ecology we hope to sustain."

Los Angeles Historic Core
Los Angeles, California
amoeba.com

Tom Mayes begins with a quick brief list of reasons why the reusing old buildings and revitalizing communities is the environmentally sound thing to do:

1) Avoided impact.  Reusing old buildings avoids the environmental impacts of the extraction, processing and transportation of new material and the the construction process.  The Preservation Green report, The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse, concludes,

Building Reuse almost always yields fewer environmental impacts than new construction when comparing buildings of similar size and functionality and...it takes 10 to 80 years for a new building that is 30 percent more efficient than the average-performing existing building to overcome, through efficient operations, the negative climate change impacts related to the construction process. (The Greenest Building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse, 2011 vi)

Downtown Lewiston, Idaho
resultsrealty.net

2) Land Conservation.  Continuing to use existing buildings and communities avoids or minimizes the use of forests, farms, wildlife habitat, and open space for new construction.  Smart Growth America, the national coalition for "...people who want to live and work in great neighborhoods..." (http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org) stated,

...reusing already-developed land...preserves open spaces that are home to wildlife.  Habitat loss is the main threat to 80% of the threatened and endangered species in the United States, but building within existing community, rather than outside of town on a wild greenfield, helps preserve wildlife habitat, protect air and water quality and foster the strong economic growth that's only possible in dense development. (Smart growth protects natural habitat, accessed by May Oct. 25, 2014)

Aspinall Federal Building and Courthouse
Grand Junction, Colorado
gimole.com

3) Embodied Energy.  Old buildings and communities embody the energy and carbon that was devoted to produce them-wood and coal are used to fire the bricks, smelt the tin used to forge the nails and the saw, and the timber is transported to the job site.  Some critics would argue that the idea of "embodied energy" does not lead to any positive impact today or in the future, it is true that it would be a extremely wasteful to discard these materials and their historical energy in a landfill, adding to the environmental impact of demolition. (The Greenest Building, 20)

4) Operating Energy.  Many old buildings, because of the way they are designed already use less operating energy than new buildings.  Quoting from the Preservation Green Lab,

Building owners, developers, policy makers, and green building experts often assume that it is preferable to build a new, energy-efficient building to retrofit an older building to the same level of efficiency yet,...data from the U.S. Department of Energy Information Administration (EIA) demonstrates that commercial buildings constructed before 1920 use less energy per square foot, than buildings from any other decade of construction. (The Greenest Building, 18)

Lightwell staircase
Wing Luke Museum
Olson Kundig Architect
olsonkundigarchitects.com

5) Passive Design.  Older buildings were often designed to take advantage of naturally occurring energy.  The lightwell in the Wing Luke Museum for the Asian American Experience in Seattle, Washington or the transom windows at Home Rule in Washington D.C. as great examples of older building designed to take advantage of naturally occurring energy.  A lot of designers are revisiting the inherent passive sustainable designs used in older buildings.  Mr. Mayes recalls, "I'm reminded of a 1970s study of the farmhouses of the New River Valley in North Carolina.  These farmhouses developed organically in response to the climate to take advantage of the landscape for warmth in the winter, coolness in the summer, and the gravity flow of water to the springhouses."

6) Transportation and Density.  Older communities are often on existing transportation corridors, have greater density, and are close to workplaces so that fuel consumption from cars is minimized.  This is one of the great benefits of adaptively reusing existing communities because of the betterments for land conservation and is a principle of smart growth. (Glaeser, Triumph of the City,  et al)

Buffalo skyline
Buffalo, New York
en.wikipedia.org

All of the above stated reasons: farmland conservation, habitat preservation, open-space preservation, reduced energy consumption, mitigation of negative environmental impact, and so forth all combine to create a strong rationale for continued use, reuse, strengthening existing buildings and communities.  The perks of adaptive use is now recognized by the Green Building Council when it awards credits towards LEED certification.  However, there are deeper, more philosophical and ecological reasons for maintaining and reusing older buildings.

First, older communities develop organically over time with their own distinctive culture.  They are irreplaceable within our fluctuating environment.  By deciding not to maintain and strengthen these communities, said communities are doomed to extinction.  To underscore this point, Tom Mayes quotes writer and architect Kimberley Mok, "Building 'green' isn't just about using the latest and greatest technologies-it can also be about preserving time-honored, local building traditions that respect regional cultures and have been proven to be climatically appropriate over the centuries." (Huppert, Dec. 2013)

Rural West Virginia
wvsom.edu

Dovetailing off of Ms. Mok, Mr. Mayes writes, "Second, the building materials and craftsmanship also deserve respect, not only because of the environmental cost of extracting, transporting, making, and installing them, but also because of the fact that some of the materials and craftsmanship will exist again." Rural cabins, such as the one pictured on the left, were made by hand, using material that may never be available again.  Mr. Mayes uses the example of his vacation cabin in West Virginia to illustrate this point.  He writes, "Yet people who offered to buy the cabin before use planned to scrap it, seeing it as a teardown.  It seems to me that throwing old floorboards and siding away is not only disrespectful to the material and to the humans who labored to saw, plane, groove and install them, but inherently inconsistent with the very idea of sustainability."

Traditional log cabin building
log-cabin-adventures.com

Imagining a a more environmentally sustainable world, Mr. Mayes hopes, "...for a world where are more appreciative of the communities, buildings and things that already exist, and that we continue to use them, so that we're not constantly tearing buildings down and throwing things away."  We live in a consumer oriented world, "green" consumerism as well,  adds to the environmental problems, including climate change.  Yours truly must confess to being much of a consumer (it takes blogger weeks to decide what color lipstick to buy), blogger is not materialistic.  As a self-identified "accidental preservationist," blogger values places and objects with a history and is always seeking new ways to repurpose them.  Mr. Mayes cites political theorist Jane Bennet's book Vibrant Matter, observing the way places and objects resonate with individuals and call for a re-consideration of the relationship with things and materials as a strategy for altering our political ecology. The website http://www.cultivatingalternatives.com boils down Ms. Bennett's ideas to, "Bennett thinks that if we paid attention to the aliveness of matter, we wouldn't be so careless with out stuff." (Ibid, accessed Nov. 18, 2014)  Our own carelessness, conscious or unconscious, contributes to our throwaway mentality so environmentally damaging.

Barn raising
shawnhunter.com

Jane Bennett's theory about the aliveness of stuff resonates with Tom Mayes.  He ponders if "...our current view of sustainability may be too narrowly measured by a limited assessment of carbon footprint, and may not adequately take into account other factors, including the factors of time."  Quoting Scott Doyon, Principle of Placemakers, "If you tear down a storied and graceful historic building-hand-built and rooted in tradition, in which generations of people have crisscrossed into and through each others lives-and replace it with a high performance, modular gizmo-green equivalent, how much embedded energy is lost if you also count the loss of soul?" (Doyon, "Let's Get Metaphysical: Considering the value of soul in redevelopment, accessed by Mayes Oct. 23, 2014)  Object and places having a soul.  That is, indeed something to consider.  It has been often noted that places are living organism, thus it is possible to entertain the notion of a place or object having a soul.

Yours truly is quite pleased with the current trend toward adaptive reuse, recycling old materials, and an appreciation for old places.  Mr. Mayes reflects on this turn of building events with a quote in Jean Carroon's book Sustainable Preservation: Greening Existing Buildings, "The reuse and salvage in the project infuses it with a sense of connection, history and narrative.  Every detail comes alive with a story of origins, disposal, and rebirth." (Leger, Carroon, 252, 2010)  In short, sustainability is not just about the coolest and the latest ecologically minded gadget, it is also about the building as a whole.

Tom Mayes suspects that part of the low recognition of just how green existing buildings and communities is partly due to what Carl Elefante stated that "we are 'drunk on the new and now' and
therefore can't even see the obvious benefits of the old." (Elefante, 37)  It seems that at every turn, we are bombarded with advertisements for the latest "green" thing or scolded into recycling our bottles. While the building industry has a primary interest in developing new communities, the question becomes instead of promoting green products and communities, why not promote using places that already exist?  We will end with this quote from senior director of the Preservation Green Lab Jim Lindberg, "There is intelligence as well as energy embodied in our older buildings and neighborhoods.  These places have so much to teach us about adaptation, sustainability, and resilience." (Email to Mayes Oct. 28, 2014)