Letter Cloud by Erin Shie Palmer Wing Luke Museum west lightwell Olson Kundig Architect Seattle, Washington dbwingluke.com |
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 |
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 |
...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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
Traditional log cabin building log-cabin-adventures.com |
Barn raising shawnhunter.com |
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)
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