Does green building demand complexity?

Just read the Oct. 2009 Buildings article about New York City's One Byrant Park, a recently-completed skyscraper that has become the first office tower in the world to achieve LEED Platinum. Green features which are growing common in smaller buildings but are mostly unheard of on this scale (2M sq ft) include:

• it's mostly constructed of recycled and recyclabe materials
• insulating glass allows max daylight while reducing heat transfer
• a low-emission cogeneration plant complements power
• a grey water recycling system designed to save millions of gallons per year
• planted roofs, etc.

It's pointed out in the article that "Besides being the most environmentally advanced skyscraper in the world, it's also one of the most comlex." While some of the reasons for that complexity include things like being located at one of the world's busiest intersections and enveloping a 1,055-seat Broadway theater with an historical facade, much of the complexity comes from the systems necessary for its planned high performance.

I think that as we move forward with sustainable building, we'll be treading each side of the complexity issue; smaller new and renovated buildings will be very simple as inefficient systems are done away with in favor of using the building's immediate environment for conditioning, circulation, etc., but big buildings will tend toward increasing complexity, as they try to meet very different goals on a much larger scale, and various harvesting techniques will become more feasible when done in larger amounts.

Opportunity rests in both increasing simplicity and complexity; the trick is understanding where. That understanding, though, is only going to grow more complex.

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Yoga above the clouds, originally uploaded by carl kalabaw.

bike racks vs. skip stops

The federal government’s landlord, the General Services Administration (GSA), was surprised in 2007 upon completion of the super-green San Francisco Federal Building when it was told by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) that the building didn’t qualify for a LEED rating. It had specifically been built to raise the sustainable bar, and GSA took it as a snub that LEED hadn’t been conferred. Architect Thom Mayne of LA’s Morphosis, didn’t seem as concerned; maybe-well-earned confidence buoyed him as he pointed out the problems with LEED that prevented it from recognizing the building’s achievements.

Most agreed that a LEED rating, which awards points based on a spectrum of measures integrated into the construction and intended operation of a building (but not so much the actual operation), wasn’t up to the task because the federal building was too advanced, incorporating features not yet addressed by LEED. Evidently the USGBC eventually agreed, as it just granted a silver rating to the building. Still, even though GSA and USGBC are praising the achievement, a silver rating seems to fall short for a building that so clearly exemplifies much of what the USGBC promotes. And Mayne? I haven't found any comment; he's busy following up on the performance of his SanFran building (I hope he reads this Epoch Times article) and designing newly astonishing ones in some of the world's other important cities.

A side view of the new Federal Building in San Francisco.

(Ivan Velinov/The Epoch Times)

Persistence

Sometimes things that have been forgotten or purposely shelved emerge, whether from the slime or some shining glory, into our current events that are tied inextricably to other things about which we only have tangential awareness, and it’s like a firecracker going off when the connections are made. For most of my life I’ve been aware of the names Manson, Tate, and Polanski, and I’ve known that various levels of sadness surrounded those names, but until this morning had no idea the first two were tied in any way to the third.

But then I was reading the comments in a favorite blog this morning and they tied together awful events that unfolded just before I could have been aware of them, which had ensured that I would only ever hear about them as snippets bubbled up through popular culture, ferried but never explained by those who actually remembered them as events rather than micro-history. It turns out that Manson and his followers killed Sharon Tate (which I knew), an actress married to Roman Polanski, a director* (which I didn’t know). She was eight and a half months pregnant (which I thankfully hadn’t known). Eight years later, the widower drugged and raped a 13-year-old (If really pushed I might remember that Polanski was a rapist, but probably not. I’m sure I heard that association at one time or another, probably diffused through the euphimisms used to soft-peddle his crime, but I doubt I really stored it away in memory. ) and skipped town.

All these sad and awful and tawdry facts settled onto the floor like dust, the connections quickly swept into corners by our lives. Sometimes it’s good to forget about things, but forgetting doesn’t truly insulate us because at any moment they can float back into reality, dragging their forgotten connections behind them like spider silk. It’s like karma, which I do and don’t believe in, making itself obvious in our lives, reminding us with clear facts that everything we ever do has a result, and will persist, in one way or another, and we normally have the choice whether that persistence is positive or negative.


* Yes, I intended to say a director as if he’s just one of many, as if he was a truck driver, because in spite of his talents at movie making, he is just one of many. It’s just a job, and neither his talent nor his name give him any special insight into anything other than movie-making, and they certainly shouldn’t offer him any special consideration (which they’ve seemed to for 30 years), and that is important to remember when he is judged as a fugitive, pedophile, and rapist in the coming weeks.