 The
term "green building" has recently entered the popular lexicon, though
not in any well-defined way. Like beauty, its significance is in the eye of the
beholder. For some, the term requires articulating in detail the philosophy and
goals of "sustainable" or "regenerative" design, and there
is already a vigorous and healthy public discourse on what those terms might connote.
For others, green building means healthy, non-toxic building interiors that don't
poison their occupants, or a vigorous switch away from fossil-fuel dependence
to energy-efficiency and renewable energy sources, or even the radical notion
that the shape, materials, and electromagnetic fields of buildings have effects,
rarely quantifiable, on the physical, emotional and spiritual well-being of occupants-
effects that deserve more than a little scrutiny. There are also those who measure
the effects of buildings on their immediate environs as a benchmark of greenness--heat
island effects in cities (where most humans now live), urban runoff effects on
waterways, and the effects of the construction industry, in its immense scale
and variety, on the planet-wide ecosystem that is unmetaphorically our life support
system.All of the above deserves serious attention, but it is not material for Green Building Press—though, to one degree or another, all such discussions form the intellectual corpus that underlies and overarches our work. There is theory and there is practice; we are about practice. We are where the rubber meets the road. We seek to specifically identify where our regular ways of building are, in fact, harmful or just don't work, and then specifically describe viable improvements. Others have written passionately, extensively, and articulately on the need to save at least a few patches of wild forest from the axe; we write of alternatives-there are many!-to using wood in buildings. Others may write the obscure but necessary academic papers on, say, variations on chloride-ion permeability of early-age concrete mixes containing varying amounts of fly ash; we write about improving concrete for the builder who has to pour 1600 cubic yards of foundation in the next three weeks or face ruinous financial penalties. That builder may not even know what chloride-ion permeability is; what matters is getting a lot of mud into the forms without breaking the pumps, losing strength, or creating excessive void pockets. It is, to the best of our ability, to that person that we address our work, as well as to the engineers and architects straightjacketed by the "standard of care" and overwhelmingly compelled by legal, cultural, and psychological forces to keep doing what everyone else is doing. We—the builders,
architects, and engineers who write for Green Building Press—see ways to
improve the way we build, and we seek to bring those to your attention in the
simplest and easiest-to-use ways we can. Just as we cannot live without causing
harm, from the worms and insects we step on to the cows and cabbages we eat, we
cannot build without causing harm. But we can look for ways to cause the least
harm in our work, and even to build in a manner that regenerates life and landscapes;
this is what we mean by "improve." We see this simply as good business.
If nothing else, we seek to respect our descendants and the world they will inherit.
Recognize and learn from our mistakes, then correct and move forward; that is
the art and science of building well. | ||||||||||||
