From thefifthestate:
Why do some green buildings not perform as well as some older buildings? Maybe it’s the architecture itself, argue Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros in this article that originally appeared in Metropolis Mag. Perhaps modernist architecture is inherently unsustainable with its cheap energy that 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, they say.
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 (below), 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.
“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.”
Keep this quote in mind as Telus Garden finishes construction. It wouldn’t appear that Vancouver is getting a “resilient” building.
Doh – Older buildings have single pane windows. TD Tower in Vancouver still does….
I’m not sure it is useful to pin this on a particular style. Modern, late modern, post-modern, deconstructivist, blobbist – they can all have the same problems. Big sheets of glass certainly can cause big solar gain in the summer, but modernism isn’t alone on having these. A better way of understanding this is that buildings built in the era of cheap energy didn’t have much incentive to be energy efficient. And as energy is still pretty cheap, or at least appears that way, there still isn’t much incentive.
What I’ve noticed is that newer buildings just have more things. Air conditioning is becoming more and more common in residential buildings in Vancouver even though it really isn’t necessary. We now have condo buildings in Vancouver with windows that don’t open very far, only a stupid enclosed balcony, and air conditioning to try to make it livable. I’ve been in one of these on a sunny day in March, and the air conditioning wasn’t working well, and it was 15 degrees outside and 25 inside with all the windows open as far as they would go. Incredibly wasteful of energy, and not that livable to boot.
And the way we use buildings is very important in how energy efficient they are. In the office where I work we are always getting new things that plug in and use energy. We now have a keurig coffee maker, in addition to the regular coffee maker, that permanently keeps a stash of hot water for the next cup. This is on all the time, weekends, over night, etc. We also have a water cooler that seems to have some sort of ozonator and water heater that runs 24/7. I actually turned that water heater off because it just seemed insane to have another thing keeping water hot all the time. And the lack of control over the air conditioning is maddening. Just last week on a cloudy day, some people had space heaters going because the air conditioning was so cold. It was set for a hot sunny day, but when things cooled off, no one could turn it down. We have the building operations people in here all the time, but it never is that comfortable because because office air conditioning is designed to be set at a particular level without accommodating for different times of day, different outfits, and just days when you feel extra hot or cold.
Measuring actual performance of buildings seems like the way to go in deriving some sort of LEED replacement. The linked article mentioned a system in NYC that tried to do that, but the result was an index that didn’t make much sense. It isn’t possible that the Seagram building used 20x the energy of the Empire State Building per floor area. Just reporting the kWh per area would be much more useful. Something like this would weed out things like Wall One which was meant to be energy efficient, but was actually so energy inefficient and poorly designed that it needed a refit. (I understand that Peter Busby wasn’t actually that pleased with the building and said that it had gone from green to light green in the design phase.)