Living in Toronto, Lloyd Alter has been an architect, developer and inventor. He now spends his time as a writer. In the course of his work developing small residential units and prefabs, Lloyd became convinced that we just use too much of everything- too much space, too much land, too much food, too much fuel, too much money, and that "the key to sustainability is to simply use less. And, the key to happily using less is to design things better."
(treehugger.com)After reading a few of his articles on
Treehugger and got a sense of his efficient philosophy, I wanted to ask him a few questions about his life as an architect and his experience with
LEED requirements and what he thinks about this program. From my
previous article-- and brief research about LEED I came to think the program was in need of help. An Architect, with concerns of efficiency and sustainability should have a better sense than myself about how LEED's is moving us along. So, lets begin...
As an Architect, how or why do you feel the LEEDs checklist may be failing?
I don’t. I have said before in my posts that I thought there were problems with LEED, I think the organization has gone through many efforts to solve the problems and is adapting to them, [and] that it recognizes them.
Two years ago I did write after hearing Bill McDonough saying that LEED is just a dumb check list that lets PVC get through. Then LEEDs set up a big committee to look at the use of PVC in buildings and came out with what I thought was a wishy washy conclusion saying that well PVC (windows) is really no worse than all the others in that aluminum has costs and every other window technique does so why are we picking on PVC. So, there slow moving, and they’re very careful. The check list system sometimes leads to point mongering where there’s the famous example of a $325 bicycle rack getting the same number of points as a green water-collection system.
I think that they’re doing very well and the other thing that has happened that has made me more supportive of them is A) they’re doing well but B) is their under attack by a whole pile of green-washing organizations being set up by people with vested interests who don’t like what LEED is doing; like the lumber industry doesn’t like the fact that LEED prefers people to use FSC certified lumber, so is set up an organization called Green Globes in the states which would be an ok standard but its whole function of being set up was to get around the LEED’s requirements for lumber. So Certain municipalities are saying “Green Globes is also acceptable to us” and basically that is a real problem when people start to work around other types of systems. There’s another one, house builders; ‘[LEED recognizes that big houses consume more resources than small ‘so let’s create a new system that doesn’t criticize you for being too big.’]
So LEED may not be perfect, but it is the best of the systems that are out there. It is completely independent of the industries that provide building materials, or the trades that build, and therefore, I think it’s almost above criticizing or those things that used to concern me too much with point mongering, were out growing this. People are seeing thru it, and the customer out there who wants to go into a LEED building, their consultants and real estate agents and architects are smart enough to see through this.
You have been an architect for many years, and seem to have maintained a green philosophy with your building. You have a Quote on Treehugger that says we just need to use less in general. Can you elaborate on this a little bit?
Well I’ve always been much more concerned about the efficiency of how we live than I was doing ‘green design’ and when I was in practice this was new and I really did not do a lot of it but when it comes to living with less… the fact of matter is if you look at our cars they’re all much bigger than they used to be, if you look at our houses they gone from an average of 900 sq ft to an average of 27-2700 sq ft in 30 years. That’s all because oil was so cheap, if you build a bigger house you didn’t have a problem heating it, also the builders didn’t have to build it very well because the gas was cheap and electricity was cheap.. So what has happened is we let everything we own balloon beyond what will soon be our ability to pay for the resources to heat and cool them. Or our ability to pay for the gas to drive to them because when gas was cheap we could all live in the distant suburbs, and if the government kept building 407’s and 400’s and adding lanes all the time then we could get to them.
But what we’ve got has essentially become unsustainable. So, what I say all the time is you don’t really have to change the way we do things… Toronto’s been around for a while and the old building have a lot of embedded body energy and we don’t need to knock them down to make green buildings – we just have to build at a density where people consume less space, less resources, less materials, less of everything to live the way they do.
When you go to Europe, you go to Amsterdam, Germany when they build new houses they’re very tight they’re very efficient and their buildings are all very close together because they realize that A) they build for a hundred years they don’t build for 20 like we do and B) they’ve got to pay to maintain it.
So I think that the future of sustainability is to basically use fewer resources and use them more efficiently.
Considering the prefabricated homes and their efficiency, do you feel that they will help solve some of our issues with global warming and become a trend on the rise in the upcoming years?
Absolutely yes. First of all they use about 30% less energy to build than the conventional home. Particularly out in the country when you see all the F150 pickup truck carrying the trades every day for 6 months up there and if someone forgets a box of nails its an hour to the nearest hardware store. Whereas if you build in the factory, you’ve got all of the tools there, most of the workers live nearby – in this case you don’t take the workers to the site where the house is gunna be you take the house to the site where the house is gunna be so that you get great efficiency. The other thing is the quality control of building inside, having inspectors, having whole processes of checking the work just lead to a better, tighter more efficient building you can have an architect design a wall to say R27, but when you measure it there’s actually gunna be leaks, there gunna be air infiltration, theres gunna be gaps where the insulation didn’t go straight to the edge and there’s gunna be significantly less—when you do it in a factory you get what you design.
When you start a new project, are there any personal standards or values you impose upon them?
Well I do not practice architecture anymore I find that I prefer writing than designing buildings so I am spending all of my time on things like Treehugger now.
But when I did practice I absolutely.. I lost work at times because of what I thought. I remember being asked a couple of times to renovate big houses, and I would go and I would and I would say them ‘why this is good, this is history... you need a new furnis and a new kitchen, but I don’t want to knock down that wall this rooms got great proportions. And I lost work because I liked what was there more than what I thought I could add to it.
We have to think about old buildings that way. If everybody just says ‘oh this is just old – lets knock it down and change it… or this house is slightly not energy efficient so spend a million bucks to build a new one that is marginally more energy efficient’ and not considering all the energy and resources that will be going into building the new house.
I think very much we have to think about what we have so carefully before you go and do a new project.
It seems hard to find designers if not consumers or buyers who are willing to think about things in this way. Do you have anything you’d recommend for a designer sticking up for their beliefs or in dealing with clients who may have desires for something that may be out of reach – or simply not responsible.
Well one thing that we have to do, and the problem in Ontario and Canada goes right back to the schools and our education and where we place our values. In Scandinavia and in Europe they are very concerned with design right from day 1. They don’t build a school in France unless it’s the result of a design competition to get the most interesting school that they can because they think its so important to educate a child in an environment that is challenging and interesting and well designed. Here they put in to the absolute lowest builder and they build it to the lowest possible standards that they think they can get away with and there’s no culture that’s strongly based on design.
In this country unfortunately the thing everybody values everything on is the price and in architecture they value the price per sq.ft. above all. So builders got rich by just pumping air into houses because drywall and plastic carpet was cheap. So people would come in and say ‘oh well that house is only $190 a sq.ft., or $180..’
When you start looking at the small units, like if you look at the sustained mini home, one of the nicest designers around for a really small living space it costs over $400 a square foot because it has the same kitchen the same bathroom the same furnises, all the hard stuff that is made from great sustainable materials and what it doesn't have is is a lot of free air.
So we somehow have to break through this idea that the price per sq.ft. or the cheapest cost is the most important thing. I mean rich people don’t buy cheap cars they know that a BMW is built to s different quality than a Ford and their willing to pay for that quality...and yet design, their not. In their houses and with their furniture very few of them are. And I think this goes right back to education.
When you were practicing with Royal Homes and considering LEED’s and the Canadian Green Building Council, have you ever been confronted with conflicts.. For example something you thought was right but there was a missing check on the list – or wanting to receive a similar award have you ever missed the requirements for that award but ended up with something that may have been even better?
Well I believe Vinyl windows are evil, I don’t think anyone should be putting Vinyl windows in their house or that anybody should be building with vinyl. And again, the CGBC and with the LEED, they are following more slowly than I like and they still let you do it. And of course I think the problem is that the plastic industry is huge, and vinyl windows are very cheap.
So, sometimes… there are architects that to them doing the right thing means going beyond LEED. But that’s what the issue is, it’s not an issue with objecting to something within LEED. LEED lets you do whatever you want, it doesn’t have a catalog of materials you pick through and you have to prove that the choices you have made are the more sustainable choices. If you’re an architect that’s really concerned about this then its your responsibility to go beyond LEED. That’s why for instance a lot of people love Cradle to Cradle. That’s because the whole system goes beyond and actually looks at every single material that they approve: where does it come from, what happens during its useful life and what happens when its life is over. And they unlike LEED is actually certified products, but now LEED and they are talking to each other so you can put C2C products in a LEED building and get LEED points for it.
And that’s great.
Labels: architecture, Energy, interview
