DESIGNING WITH THE SUN
The first step in creating comfort and thermal delight in buildings is to understand
the relationship between the climate and our need for shelter. There is
an enormous variation in climates that buildings experience. These can be at
the scale of global climates, from the Arctic to the Sahara. They can be
regional climates in the centre of a continent or on the seashore. They can be
local climates on the sunny or the shady side of a hill or street. All will influence
the way in which a building should be designed in relation to the sun.
The sun can be a friend or an enemy in buildings. Poor climatic design of
buildings, all too often seen in ‘modern’ architecture, causes many buildings to
overheat, even in temperate or cold climates where such problems traditionally
never existed. The power of the sun should be understood and respected
by good designers of well-designed, passive solar buildings in which the free
energy of the sun is used to power the building but not allowed to interfere
with the comfort and economy of the building’s occupants.
The five things a designer needs to know for a good passive solar design are:
1 how strong the sun at the site is at different times of the year
2 where the sun will be at different times of the year in relation to the site
3 how much of the sun’s heat a building will need, or not need, at different
times of the year to enable the building occupants to be comfortable
4 how much storage capacity the building should have in relation to the
available solar gain at the site to meet those needs
5 what the additional requirements are for controlling the heat gain from
direct solar radiation, convection or conduction in a design and how they
can be met by envelope performance, building form and ventilation.
There are a number of factors that influence the incidence, or strength, of
solar radiation at the site including:
• the latitude of the site
• the altitude and azimuth of the site
• how much shade will be given by any obstacles that exist between the
building and the site
• the weather above the site.

AZIMUTH AND ALTITUDE OF THE SUN AT A SITE
The angle with which the sun strikes at a location is represented by the
terms altitude and azimuth. Altitude is the vertical angle in the sky (sometimes
referred to as height); azimuth is the horizontal direction from which it
comes (also referred to as bearing). Altitude angles range from 0° (horizontal)
to 90° (vertical: directly overhead). Azimuth is generally measured clockwise
from north so that due east is 90°, south 180° and west 270° (or 90°).
Because the Earth revolves around the sun once a year, we have four seasons.
The Earth’s axis remains in a constant alignment in its rotation so
twice a year the incoming solar radiation is perpendicular to the latitude of
the equator and only once a year is it perpendicular to the tropics of Cancer
and Capricorn,

The changing values of azimuth and altitude angles are predominantly a
reflection of the changes in the relative positions of Earth and sun. These are
governed by:
• the rotation of the Earth around the sun
• the rotation of the Earth about its axis.
One of the simplest tools we can use for the derivation of altitude and
azimuth angles is a graph using Cartesian coordinates
incorporates two types of line. Firstly, those representing the variation in altitude
and azimuth over the period of a day (given for the 21st or 22nd day of
each month). Secondly, those joining the points on the altitude–azimuth lines
for a specific hour. Thus the solar angles for 11 a.m. on 21 March may be read
off on the horizontal and vertical axes where these two lines meet (altitude
36°, azimuth 19°). Values for other days may be read by interpolating between
these lines.

It may appear that these are the only determinants of angular position,
however we are actually concerned with the direction of the sun’s radiation
rather than the Earth–sun position. Also, radiation does not travel in an
entirely straight line but is bent slightly by the Earth’s atmosphere.
The distance between the Earth and the sun is approximately 150 million
km, varying slightly through the year with the variation of the azimuth and
altitude angles with time.
All passive solar features involve the transmission of solar radiation through
a protective glazing layer(s) on the sun side of a building, into a building space
where it is absorbed and stored by thermal mass (for example thick masonry
walls and floors or water-filled containers). The typical processes involved are:
• collection – to collect solar energy, double-glazed windows are used on
the south-facing side of the house

• storage – after the sun’s energy has been collected, some heat is immediately
used in the living spaces and some is stored for later use. The storage,
called thermal mass, is usually built into the floors and/or interior walls.
Mass is characterised by its ability to absorb heat, store it and release it
slowly as the temperature inside the house falls. Concrete, stone, brick and
water can be used as mass
• distribution – heat stored in floors and walls is slowly released by radiation,
convection and conduction. In a hybrid system, fans, vents and
blowers may be used to distribute the heat.
There are several types of passive solar system that can be used in homes. The
most common are direct gain, indirect gain and isolated gain.
SYSTEM COMPONENTS
There are three key components to all passive solar systems for heating:
• collector
• mass
• heated space.
DIRECT GAIN SYSTEMS
Direct gain systems are most commonly used in passive solar architecture.
The roof, walls and floor are insulated to a high level. Solar radiation enters
through the windows and is absorbed by the heavy material of the building.
The whole building structure gradually collects and stores solar energy during
the day. Heavy building materials provide thermal storage. The collected
solar energy is gradually released at night when there is no solar gain.
Direct gain systems commonly utilise windows or skylights to allow solar
radiation to directly enter zones to be heated. If the building is constructed
of lightweight materials, mass may need to be added to the building interior
to increase its heat storage capacity. The proportion of a building’s heating
needs that can be met by solar energy increases as the area of sun-facing
glazing increases. Additional mass must therefore be used to reduce interior
temperature swings and delay the release of solar energy into occupied
spaces. While the mass that is directly illuminated by the incident energy,
sunshine, is the most effective for energy storage, long-wave radiation
exchanges and convective air currents in the solar heated rooms allow nonilluminated
mass to also provide effective energy storage.

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In order to understand the thinking behind green building principles it is necessary
to remember why we should be so concerned with such issues in the construction
industry. Perhaps producing more energy from renewable sources and protecting
wildlife and habitats is much more important? Indeed there are many who do not
give green building a high priority. It is surprising how many environmental
groups, for instance, appear to attach a low priority to their built environment.
Groups concerned with the natural environment, wildlife, habitats and so on,
sometimes inhabit or build dreadful buildings using toxic materials and high
embodied energy materials.
Many others see the issue purely in terms of energy efficiency or more
specifically fuel efficiency and are largely unconcerned about the environmental
impacts of the materials which they use to achieve reductions in gas, oil and
electricity bills. Government and European research and development
programmes such as Joule/Thermie, Save and Altener or the UK Clean
Technology programme seem largely designed to encourage high technology
development, leading to new and more products and systems which will expand
industry and create new markets.
When the four main principles set out above are taken into account, it becomes
clear that the building materials industry, the transport of materials and products,
their construction on site and then the pollution and energy wastage coming from
buildings collectively has a surprisingly wider impact on the environment than
most other human activities. The Vales have suggested that 66% of total UK
energy consumption is accounted for by buildings and building construction and
services.10 Thus the importance of buildings and the construction industry has to
be seen as one of the most, if not the most important user of energy and resources
in advanced society.
Major savings will not be achieved only by putting more insulation in homes
or using low energy light bulbs, a much more fundamental review of all building
materials production and construction methods, transportation etc. is required.
Thus if we are concerned about ozone depletion, wastage of limited natural
resources, such as oil, gas and minerals, the loss of forested areas, toxic chemical
manufacture and emissions, destruction of natural habitats and so on, tackling the
built environment is going to go a long way to addressing these issues.

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We’ve been talking about green buildings in general. Now let’s get a little
more speciŠc about what we actually mean by the term“green building.”
Utilizing the LEED system of the US Green Building Council, introduced
in the previous chapter, a green building is one that is built considering the
following Šve factors. However, most green buildings do not incorporate
all of these measures, but rather the project team picks and chooses those
that are appropriate for a project’s budget and goals.
1. Promote Selection of Appropriate Sites and
Environmentally Sustainable Site Development
• Locate projects on sites away from wetlands, above the 100-year šood
level, away from prime agricultural land and away from endangered
or threatened species habitat.
• Locate projects on sites where there is already urban infrastructure to
serve them.
• Locate projects on brownŠeld sites that have been remediated of contamination;
these usually have infrastructure already in place.
• Provide opportunities and building infrastructure for people to commute
to work using public transit and bicycles.
• Minimize parking to discourage excessive auto use.
• Provide low-emission vehicles and car-sharing arrangements to reduce
gasoline use.
• Protect open space in site development and restore open space on already
impacted sites.
• Manage stormwater to reduce the rate and quantity of stormwater
runoª, and use best practices to clean stormwater before it leaves the
site.
• Manage landscaping and parking lots to reduce excessive areas of
open pavement that cause heating of the area around a building in
summer, leading tomore air-conditioning use.
• Control interior and exterior light from leaving the site, helping to
make skies darker at night.
2. Promote Efficient Use ofWater Resources
• Control irrigation water use for landscaping, using as little as possible.
Select native landscaping which demands little or no added water.
• Look for alternative ways to reduce sewage šows from the project,
possibly even treating the wastewater onsite.
• Use water-conserving Šxtures inside the building, to reduce overall
water demand.
3. Conserve Energy, Use Renewable Energy and
Protect Atmospheric Resources
• Reduce the energy use (and environmental impact) of buildings 20%
ormore below the level of a standard building.
• Use onsite renewable energy to supply a portion of the building’s electrical
and gas (thermal energy) needs, using solar photovoltaic (PV)
panels or solar water heating.
• Commission the building by verifying the functional performance of
all energy-using systems after they are installed but before the building
is occupied.
• Reduce the use of ozone-harming and global-warming chemicals in
building refrigeration and air-conditioning systems.
• Provide a means to troubleshoot the building’s energy use on a continuing
basis by installingmeasuring andmonitoring devices.
• Supply 35%ormore of the building’s electrical supply with purchased
green power fromoªsite installations, typically fromwind farms.
4. Conserve BuildingMaterials, Reduce ConstructionWaste
and Sensibly Use Natural Resources
• Install permanent locations for recycling bins to encourage the practice
in building operations.
• Reuse existing buildings, including interior and exterior materials, to
reduce the energy use and environmental impacts associated with
producing new buildingmaterials.
• Reduce construction waste disposal by 50% or more to cut costs and
reduce landŠll use.
• Use salvaged and reclaimed building materials such as decorative
brick and wood timbers that are still structurally sound.
• Use recycled-content building materials that are made from “downcycled”
materials such as recycled concrete, dry wall, šy ash fromcoalŠred
plants and newspapers.
• Use materials that are harvested and processed in the region, within
500 miles, to cut the transportation impacts associated with bringing
themfromfarther away.
• Use rapidly renewable materials that have a ten-year regeneration
time or less, such as bamboo, cork, linoleum, wheatboard or strawboard
cabinetry.
• Purchase 50% or more of the wood products in the building from
forests certiŠed for sustainable harvesting and good management
practices.
5. Protect and Enhance Indoor Environmental Quality
• Provide non-smoking buildings, or separate ventilation systems
where smoking is allowed (such as in high-rise housing).
• Monitor delivery of outside air ventilation so that it responds to demand
by using sensors for carbon dioxide levels to adjust air šow.
• Provide for 30% increased ventilation above code levels, or natural
ventilation of indoor work areas, to increase the amount of healthy air
in the building.
• Conduct construction activities so that there is clean air at the startup
of systems and no dust ormoisture inmaterials such as ductwork and
sheet rock. The idea is to get rid of “new-building smell” and its associated
toxicity.
• Use low-emittingmaterials in the building to reduce sources of future
contamination, including oª-gassing frompaints and coatings, adhesives
and sealants, carpets and backing and composite (or engineered)
wood or agriŠber products.
• Make sure that areas where chemicals are mixed or used (such as inhouse
printing plants or large copy rooms) are separately ventilated,
and install walk-oª mats or grilles at building entrances to capture
contaminants before they enter the building.
• Provide for individual thermal comfort of building occupants, with
respect to temperature and humidity.
• Provide for occupant control of building lighting and ventilation systems.
• Provide for adequate daylighting of interior work spaces, using both
vision glazing and overhead light sources such as skylights and roof
monitors (vertical glazing).
• Provide for views of the outdoors from at least 90% of all workspaces
so that people can connect with the environment.

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In Your Office orWorkplace
There are many things you can do where you work to promote green
buildings and sustainable design.Here are a few brief suggestions you can
implement right away.
Reducing Your Carbon Footprint
In early 2007 Swiss Re, amajor global insurance company, announced that
it would be supporting investments and purchases made by employees
that contribute to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The new “COYou2
reduce and gain” program is part of Swiss Re’s commitments supporting
the Clinton Global Initiative. In 2003 Swiss Re declared that it wouldmake
its own operations carbon neutral by 2013. Now, as part of the Clinton
Global Initiative, Swiss Re has decided to support measures taken by its
employees that contribute to the reduction of CO2 emissions.
The “COYou2 reduce and gain” program supports employees’ investments
in measures that contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions,
particularly in relation to mobility, heating and electrical energy. Such
measures, which vary according to regional circumstances and preferences,
include low-emission hybrid cars, use of public transport and the
installation of solar panels or heat pumps. Fromnow until the end of 2011,
Swiss Re plans to rebate each employee one-half of the amounts invested
in these measures, up to a maximum per employee of 5,000 Swiss francs
(about $4,000) or the equivalent in local currency.
According to Ivo Menzinger, Head of Sustainability & Emerging Risk
Management,who is in charge of the “COYou2 reduce and gain” program,“Swiss Re is actively engaged in mitigating climate change and its consequences.
This program is an investment that will encourage our employees
to make a personal contribution and further raises awareness of the
issue.”1
Take action with your company or business. Some easy steps to take
include:
• If you operate a šeet of vehicles, convert them all to hybrids and cut
your normal gasoline consumption by 35%to 50%.
• Subsidize employees’ use of public transit, at least 50%ormore.
• Discourage single occupancy vehicle use by not paying for parking.
• Provide secured bicycle storage in your building with shower facilities
or nearby health club passes to encourage people to ride to work in
good weather. (This is also a great “wellness” initiative.)
• BuyGreen Tags or other “carbon oªsets” to cover 100%of your annual
travel mileage by car, bus, ferry and airplane. (There are a large number
of organizations that cater to this need.)
• Buy green power for the electricity consumption of your workplace;
wind-generated power is widely available froma large number of reputable
organizations;make sure it is “Green-e” certiŠed fromthe Center
for Resource Solutions.2
• Begin the journey to sustainability by examining all of your operations,
to see how to reduce their environmental footprint; this activity
can involve everyone in the organization; even simple steps like eliminating
wastebaskets under individual desks in favor of paper recycling
boxes sends a simplemessage, as does having the IT department set all
the printer default setting to “duplex” so people will stop printing on
one side of the paper for internal use.
• Undertake a LEED-EB assessment of your existing building operations;
LEED for Existing Buildings is a comprehensive evaluation and
benchmarking system that will help you “green” your operations and
engage the entire workforce in the eªort.
• Buy laptops and šat-panel monitors for everyone to cut energy use
from “plug loads,” often 20% or more of the total energy use of an
o‹ce.
• Re-lamp and install lighting controls, so you are using only the most
e‹cient Šxtures and lights don’t operate when people aren’t using a
roomor o‹ce.
• Join the US Green Building Council as a corporate or agencymember
and become part of the solution; once you join, everyone in the company
or agency can enjoy themembership beneŠts.• Study all of the other aspects of your business operations and work to
change each aspect, over time, to more sustainable options, then encourage
employees to take those same principles home.
In Your Home or Apartment
The most powerful agent of change is your own personal experience.
Think of what you can do to promote green buildings and green operations
where you live.Here are a few examples:
• Start keeping track of your gas, electricity and water use, along with
the number of gallons of gasoline purchased and airlinemiles šown.
• Try to cut down on energy and water use by 10% in the next year by
examining all of your habits and seeing where you can combine trips
or cut down on optional travel.
• Go even beyond 10% reduction: create a “year of living sustainably”
that commits you to dramatic changes in lifestyle tomeet sustainability
goals; if you have kids, enlist their help and creativity. It will
strongly supplement the education they’re typically getting in school.
• If you can’t stop traveling, because of your job or family needs, then
start by purchasing “carbon oªsets” or Green Tags for all of your
mileage, so that you’re oªsetting their impact with clean power or tree
plantings somewhere else.
• Buy a hybrid car or a more fuel-e‹cient vehicle; you can Šnd the top
ten green cars each year listed by the American Council for an Energy-
E‹cient Economy.3
• Look into state and federal incentives for installing solar electric and
thermal systems on your home; if you’re a renter, discuss the beneŠts
of doing this with your landlord ormanagement company.
• Call the local gas or electric utility company and ask for a home energy
audit to Šnd out what are the “low-cost/no-cost” things you can
do to cut down on energy consumption; in some areas, the local water
company will oªer technical assistance or free kits for cutting water
consumption.
• Install dual-šush toilets to cut water use fromtoilet šushing by half or
more; install other water-conservingmeasures such as drip irrigation.
• Form a neighborhood “sustainable living” group to engage the creativity
of others in Šnding additional ways to cut energy and water
use, reduce the use of poisons in landscapemaintenance and enhance
local recycling eªorts.
• Consider your purchasing patterns and their “upstream” impacts, including
waste in production, transportation costs (if made far fromwhere you live) and embedded energy of production, distribution,
use and disposal.
• For home remodeling, try to support local retail stores that specialize
in sustainable products, such as healthy paint and carpet and reclaimed
or salvaged buildingmaterials.
Your Town, City or State: The Power of Local Initiatives
Just as “all politics is local,” a statement famously attributed to former
speaker of the US House of Representatives Tip O’Neill, all successful sustainability
eªorts have their roots in local action.Withmore than 16 states
and 60 cities (as of early 2007) oªering local initiatives to promote green
buildings, there is ample precedent for you to engage your local school
board, city council, country board or commission and even state representatives
in this eªort.Drill down into each green building success story and
you will Šnd just a few local people, some in government, some in business
and some plain citizens, whose energy and foresight have made the diªerence.
Some of the initiatives already enacted, on which you can model
your eªorts, include:
• At the local level, secure a commitment from a school district, city or
county to build all future buildings and schools to at least the LEED
Silver level; some communities have committed to build LEED Gold
projects (the earliest on record was the City of Vancouver, British Columbia);
this may take some doing because you’re going to hear the
old familiar refrain “it costs too much,” and you’ll have to convince
people otherwise by using the examples in this book; among theNorth
American cities making this commitment are Seattle, Sacramento,
Portland (OR), Tucson, San Francisco, Calgary andMadison (WI).
• Some cities are taking the next step after greening their own operations,
requiring larger private-sector projects to meet LEED certiŠed
or Silver-level certiŠcations within the next few years. (Large cities
such as Boston andWashington, DC, have done this, and more cities
will be requiring such achievements or incorporating LEED requirements
and Architecture 2030 milestones into the building code in the
next few years.)
• If you have a municipal electric utility or public utility district, convince
it to oªer incentives for energy conservation and solar energy
systems; often the large cash šows of a utility permit it to oªer incentives
that will, over time, allow it to oªset expensive purchases of additional
generating capacity in the future; in Texas,Austin Energy, amunicipal
utility, has been promoting green homes since the early 1990sand has one of the most successful green home rating systems in the
country.
• Convince your mayor or city council to sign onto the USMayors’Climate
Protection Agreement, which commits cities to becoming carbon
neutral within the next decade, or sooner, in their own operations;
4 at the global level, former US President Clinton’s Climate
Change Initiative is engaging the 40 largest cities in the world to become
carbon neutral over the next 20 to 30 years.5 (Already, London
has signed on to this initiative.) In Denver,Mayor John Hickenlooper
has been aggressively promoting the Greenprint Denver plan for
sustainable development,6 and in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley has
vowed to make Chicago the “greenest city” in North America by promoting
green buildings, green roofs and street tree plantings.
• Convince your city council or country commission/board to oªer incentives
to private sector projects that commit to building green; successful
incentives include faster processing of building permits andincreased“density bonuses” for high-rise o‹ces, apartments and condominium
developments; if you know a state legislator, talk to them
about sponsoring state initiatives to promote green buildings and renewable
energy; successful initiatives have included personal and/or
corporate income tax credits (Oregon and New York, along with 23
other states); property tax abatements for LEED Silver or better certiŠcations
(Nevada); sales tax elimination on solar systems (Arizona,
Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maryland and 12 other
states); and rebates for purchase of solar systems (California,Arizona,
Colorado and 30 other states).7
• Have the governor or state legislature require the state utility commission
to have all investor-owned utilities collect a tax on utility bills and
oªer “public purpose” funds for investments in conservation, onsite
power and renewable energy; in 2007 the California Public Utilities
Commission adopted an incentive payment system in the form of a
consumer rebate, to encourage people to install photovoltaic systems
on their roofs; the goal is “amillion solar roofs”within ten years.

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Daylighting is an aspect of green building design that should be ubiquitous;
without adequate daylighting, people will not perform well and will
not be healthy. For building plans, this implies a design that is no more
than 66 feet wide, front to back, or about 33 feet to a window from any
workstation. This is a standard design requirement in many places in Europe,
where people’s health is placed before economic e‹ciency. Looked at
another way, a building should be oriented so that the long axis is eastwest;
this allows for maximum daylighting, from both south- and northfacing
windows.
Daylighting’s beneŠts are immediately apparent; people see better and
feel better whenever there is natural light for reading and working. Good
daylighting design can employ skylights, north-facing windows on the
roof, a central atrium, light shelves to bounce light into a space while shading
windows from the summer sun, and other techniques. Good daylighting is always indirect, without glare.Daylighting is usually combined with
electric lighting, so that there is a constant lighting level, typically 30 footcandles
at the desktop, or there is task lighting provided for each workstation.
According to a report from Carnegie Mellon University analyzing
daylighting research,“Eleven case studies have shown that innovative daylighting
systems can pay for themselves in less than one year due to energy
and productivity beneŠts…the ROI [return on investment] for daylighting
is over 185%.”38
A California study of the impact of daylighting examined 73 stores of
a chain retailer, of which 24 had daylighting. The results:
The value of the energy savings from daylighting is far overshadowed
by the value of the predicted increase in sales due to daylighting.
The proŠt from increased sales associated with daylight
is worth at least 19 times the energy savings.

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As we showed earlier, a main barrier to implementing green buildings has
been the perceived cost increases for green measures. It is true that many
of the earlier green projects in the 2000 to 2005 period were more costly.
This is largely because the transition to new methods of design and construction
involves a lot of social learning that is accompanied by construction
mistakes, poor designs, unproven new products and a myriad of reasons
leading to extra costs. By 2005 and especially in 2006, however,many
design and construction teams had done enough green projects to start
lowering costs tomore conventional levels.
In 2006 the developer of a large LEEDPlatinumproject in Portland—
a very complex, 412,000-square-foot, mixed-use medical facility — reported
a cost premium (net of local, state and federal incentives) of about
1%on a $145million project.30 Now, this developer had designed and built
30 prior LEED projects and used a very experienced architect and engineering
team, already well-versed in green building methods. But their
success does point to the fact that future green buildings can be built without
any initial cost premium, once design and construction teams garner
enough experience.

What determines the cost of a green building?
• First and foremost, it depends on what the design teamand owner are
trying to achieve. If it’s a LEED Platinum building, they most likely
will use green roofs and photovoltaics, two expensive additions to a
project that may not be included in a LEED Silver or possibly even a
LEED Gold project.
• Second, it depends how early in the process the project decides to pursue
sustainable design and construction.As we show in the section on
integrated design, it’s best if that decision is made as early as possible,
even during the site selection process, so that a building can be properly
oriented, with a rectangular shape that allows for good daylighting
and e‹cient passive solar designmeasures.
• Third, it depends still on the experience of the design and construction
team with green buildings; the more experience, the less the cost
premium based on both fear of the unknown and lack of knowledge
about sourcing green products, for example. Less-experienced teams
often use green building consultants to help them out with their Šrst
project, to accelerate the learning curve.
Integrated design often leads to creative solutions that allow teams to
“tunnel through the cost barrier” and design a more energy-e‹cient
building at a lower initial cost.31 Typically, this is done by having the architecture
do some of the work of cutting energy use, as well as heating and
cooling a building with daylighting, shading devices, highly e‹cient windows,
orientation and heavy mass construction. Green buildings can also
cut other project costs by saving on infrastructure investments and connection
charges for storm drainage and sewage connections through total
water system management. Often, by thinking strategically in the Šrst 30
days of a project, you can inšuence 65% of total costs by assessing a
broader range of options,making choices among key cost drivers and having
a clear vision of results. This puts a premiumon thinking (vs. doing), a
concept thatmany Americansmay Šnd challenging.
One of the most widely cited studies of the costs of green buildings
was done by the international cost-consulting ŠrmDavis Langdon in 2004
and updated early in 2007. Using their own proprietary database of actual
building costs, and comparing 45 LEED projects with 93 other non-LEED
projects, Davis Langdon discovered that green building costs (for three
types of common projects—libraries, academic classrooms and laboratories)
were statistically no diªerent than conventional building costs when
normalized for year of completion (taking cost inšation out of the analysis)
and location (rešecting the variation of building costs by locality).
Their work showed that themajor cost driver is the building program, that
is, what the building is designed to achieve. A simple branch library in the
suburbs might be fairly cheap to construct, but a downtown main library
will likely bemuchmore costly, on a dollars-per-square-foot basis.You can
Šnd a large big-city downtown library by a name architect that costs $500
per square foot, as well as one that serves the same function and costs only
$230 per square foot.
The Šgure below shows the results of the most recent Davis Langdon
study for ambulatory care facilities (one of Šve categories with enough
data from which to draw Šrm conclusions).32 The 2007 update included
additional project types and more cost data, all standardized to Sacramento,
California,mid-2006 costs. The conclusions of the study were unchanged:
certiŠed green buildings don’t cost any more than conventional
buildings, on a per-square-foot basis. What matters most: the building’s
design objectives.


Jerry Yudelson, Green Building A to Z, New Society Publisher

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From radical ecology to consumer-oriented
market approaches?
Kirsten Gram-Hanssen and Jesper Ole Jensen
Gram-Hanssen and Jensen explore the development of green buildings in Denmark over
the last three decades, identifying differences in design philosophies and techniques.
They look at four approaches to green buildings: as energy-saving devices, as ecological
grassroots alternatives, as subsidised large-scale urban projects, and as consumer
products in a market approach. Using detailed case descriptions, the chapter asks to
what extent it is possible to define some buildings or some approaches as more ‘green’
than others. The authors suggest that in order to more fully understand sustainable
buildings we must account for the social structuring of both the identification of environmental
problems and their resulting embodiment in built form.
Introduction
Green buildings in Denmark vary widely with regard to all aspects of physical and social
solutions as well as ideological rationales. Sometimes this has led to controversies
among different actors in respect of the definitions and content of green buildings. We
present these different rationales and describe how each in its own way has contributed
to a general development of green buildings. We argue that a common definition of
green buildings is not necessarily needed and that many different approaches to such
buildings might be more useful than one.
Wew use the term ‘green buildings’ as a unifying and neutral notion of what different
actors in different contexts have described as ‘sustainable’, ‘resource-saving’, ‘ecological’,
‘self-supplying’, ‘natural’, ‘healthy’, etc. However, in some of our case descriptions,
when describing the rationales of actors we use some of their own words. The chapter
looks at four approaches differentiated by different understandings or concepts of
green buildings and by different actors:
• Green buildings as energy-saving devices: after the oil crisis in 1973, strong efforts
were made to develop building technologies to improve energy performance, as
well as regulations for implementing these technologies.
• Ecological alternatives emerging from the grassroots: as a radical critique of
modern society, a number of alternative and green rural settlements grew up in the
1980s and 1990s, emphasising community, self-sufficiency, alternative technologies,
lifestyle and spirituality.
• Subsidised large-scale urban projects: commitment to the 1987 Brundtland
Report created a public drive towards green buildings, aimed at testing, approving
and institutionalising alternative technologies, with ample public funding, primarily
in impressive building projects under the Urban Renewal Act.
• Green buildings in a market approach: in recent years we have seen a trend
towards considering green buildings as individual market-driven consumer products.
Here green labels and life cycle analysis (LCA) tools aim to give consumers a
central role in the development of such products, based on the market and on
ecological modernisation rather than on public subsidies.
The different approaches partly follow a historical path. However, it is important to
note that these approaches and their actors coexist at the same time. A key question is
how far technological development in green buildings has been a matter of interaction
between the physical and the social contexts. As a background to this way of analysing
and presenting the subject, the chapter starts with an introduction to social theories of
technological development, especially in relation to environmental and urban issues.
Very different aspects of green buildings have been emphasised in different historical
periods and by different actors. An actor-oriented approach may ask whether
different notions of green buildings are just a matter of different social constructions or if
it is possible to define them independently of the actors by measuring their degree of
sustainability. In the conclusions we try to answer this question, maintaining on one
hand that we need to measure ‘greenness’ or sustainability but on the other that every
way of measuring it is problematic and limited.
Theoretical approaches to technological development
Different theories help in understanding how technologies develop in relation to the
social environment: the theoretical field known as the social construction of technological
systems (SCOT theories); the theory of ecological modernisation; and new urban
technological studies.
SCOT theories

The zero-energy house of 1975 garnered major national and international attention.













SCOT is a research area that is based on the view that technology is socially
constructed, in opposition to technological determinism, which sees technology and
science each as autonomous and separate from society. This area can be divided into
three approaches (Bijker et al. 1987).
First is the social constructivist approach, which claims that technological artefacts
are open to sociological analysis, especially with respect to their design and technical
content. This approach looks at the social structures behind the growth and assimilation
of a technology. It introduces the concepts of ‘interpretative flexibility’, ‘closure’ and ‘relevant
social groups’, and Bijker’s study of Bakelite is one of the core examples (Bijker
1987).
The second approach treats technology as a ‘system’ metaphor and stresses the
importance of focusing on the links and relations between technology’s physical
artefacts and institutions and their environments. In his study of the electrical system
Hughes argues that technological systems are socio-technical, because besides their
technical elements they also comprise organisation, legislation, knowledge and
financing, woven together into a ‘seamless web’ (Hughes 1987). He distinguishes
between radical and conservative innovations in relation to the existing systems. The
success of the new radical technologies depends on, among other variables, how the
innovators tackle the ‘reverse salients’ – the weak parts of new systems – so that the
166 Alternative design new technology can compete with existing systems. The aim of the ‘system builders’ is
to shape a system by excluding other systems and components and, if successful, by
adding momentum to the system, giving increased stability over time.
The third approach takes the system metaphor a step further, developing ‘actornetwork’
theory, which breaks down the distinction between human and non-human
actors (Callon 1987; Latour 1987). According to this perspective, to create new technology
is to persuade, seduce and motivate actors to participate in a network around
the new technology. One of the studies using this approach looked at electric cars,
an area in which the successful engineer has to combine consumers, ministries and
the battery electrons, convincing them all of the roles they have to play (Callon
1987). A key controversial element in this approach is the consideration of nonhuman
actors, such as electrons, as belonging to the same network as consumers and
engineers.
These SCOT approaches focus on technological development in general, with no
specific emphasis on green or urban technology. We supplement the approach with
insights from theories that follow the same lines but with a more specifically green or
urban viewpoint.
Ecological modernisation
The notion of ecological modernisation brings together discussions of society, ecology
and technology, though it is difficult to say if it is actually a social theory, a political
programme or a broader discourse in the public debate. Hajer distinguishes between
different approaches – or ideal-typical interpretations – to ecological modernisation and
to the reactions against it (Hajer 1998). According to Hajer, a central element in ecological
modernisation is the rationalising of ecology so that it can be built into programmes,
politics and institutions. Another element is about ‘technicalisation’ of ecology, whereby
some of the big international firms, helped by non-governmental organisations (NGOs),
are changing moral and ethical concerns into technology and market issues. In opposition
to this trend, one critic of ecological modernisation questioned: ‘Why try to resolve
the ecological crisis by drawing on precisely those institutional principles that brought
about the mess in the first place?’
Ecological modernisation is often associated simply with more effective production
methods and win–win situations where companies can earn money on cleaner technologies.
According to Spaargaren, however, the central point in ecological modernisation
is not that greening of production can bring profit but that a process of monitoring and
guarding of all the major substances and energy flows follows modernisation, through
the introduction of instruments such as LCAs and environmental performance indicators
(Spaargaren 2000). In this approach, the objective of ecological modernisation is
to bridge the gap between the technical and social environmental sciences, by bringing
real material flows into the over-socialised social sciences and to bring social systems
and human behaviour into the under-socialised natural and technical sciences. Furthermore,
the task as outlined by Spaargaren is to introduce a more consumer-led perspective
into the theories to make an effective tool for analysing domestic consumption of,
say, water and energy. The question that Hajer and other more radical social ecologists
ask is whether ecology is primarily a question of material flow management or whether it
is a cultural task of redefining society. As the case studies demonstrate, questions like
this are prominent in the debate and in the technological development of urban ecology.

Urban technological studies
Ecological modernisation discusses ecology in relation to social and technical questions,
but urban and housing issues have not yet become significant in this area.
Recent studies have rectified this lack. Guy and Shove have used the SCOT
approach, among others, to understand the development of different paradigms for
energy efficiency in buildings (Guy and Shove 2000). Graham and Marvin combine
SCOT theories with spatial political economy to describe recent developments in
urban technologies and state that cities are the greatest ‘socio-technical hybrids’ of
them all (Graham and Marvin 2001). One of the inputs for a spatial or geographical
political economy is Castells’ theory of how urban structures (as well as everything
else) are changed in the new, integrated, globalised society of networks (Castells
1996, 1997, 1998). Castells describes how new information technologies are some
of the prime supporters of global networks of everything from criminals to NGOs and
big international companies. As some of the old structure of the capitalist society fades
away, for example the nation state, new structures built on the power of identity emerge.
Before 11 September 2001, Castells had already described the strength of global
networks of religious fundamentalists and had also described the influence of the global
green movement.
Four paradigms of green building in the Danish context
Using these theories of technological development in an urban and ecological context,
we describe four different paradigms that can be found in the Danish development of
green buildings.
Green buildings as energy-saving devices
The first period of sustainable building in Denmark began in 1956, when the Suez crisis
threatened the country’s oil supply. Denmark was heavily dependent on imported oil for
heating in buildings as well as for all its other energy-consuming activities, so the crisis
gave strong support to researchers’ ideas for increasing the energy efficiency of buildings.
However, the first attempts to gain the attention and support of authorities in regulating
energy efficiency in buildings and to begin research studies in energy efficiency
failed, as the Suez crisis faded and oil prices fell to their lowest point ever. Thus the
development of the first low-energy houses was largely the result of a few visionary and
ambitious people. One such was Professor Korsgaard at the Danish Technical University.
The professor and his colleagues at the Thermal Insulation Laboratory were ready
and able by 1975 to build the zero-energy house, the first solar heated house in
Northern Europe (Fig. 10.1). This gained major national and international attention,
making the zero-energy house one of the most renowned examples of low-energy
houses of its time.
The zero-energy house’s aim was to show that it was possible to build a house at a
reasonable cost with already existing technology and that it could be heated and
provided with hot water simply through the use of solar heat, efficient insulation and
recycling of heat from ventilated air. Theoretically the only external energy supply would
be electricity for normal domestic consumption and for pumps and ventilation. The 120-
square-metre house was supplied with a 42-square-metre solar collector, and hot water for seasonal heat was stored in a 30-cubic-metre insulated water tank, the first of its
kind in Denmark. The house was built with insulation (mineral wool) as the prototype
constructive element, reducing the cold bridges. Other elements included switches to
turn off the convector fan when the windows were opened and a ventilation system with
heat exchangers, a feature widely used today in low-energy buildings. A two-year monitoring
period showed that the house had very low heat consumption, although not quite
zero – one main reason for this was that the heat loss from an underground storage tank
was much higher than expected.
An important factor in the attention given to the zero-energy house was that in the
1960s and 1970s Denmark experienced strong economic growth and the construction
of more than a million new detached houses – an extremely high number, given the
population then of approximately five million. These houses were all built with ample
space, and little consideration was given to energy consumption, and therefore half of
all imported oil was used to heat buildings, making oil a heavy burden on the national
budget. Given this, it is no wonder that the first low-energy buildings were also
designed as detached houses.
The zero-energy house was the first of a series of several other types of low-energy
building in the following years, the most remarkable of which were the Hjortekjærhusene
(six low-energy buildings built in 1978–9) and Skivehusene projects (1977, 1979 and
1984) (see Box 1). These buildings demonstrated potential for energy savings of up to
70 per cent, but with large variations among them. The amount of energy consumed for
heat, although considerably lower than in traditional houses, was often higher than
calculated. Surveys showed that the main source of this was the heat distribution
system and furthermore that the question of heat storage was crucial (Byberg 1984).

This indicated a lack of development of other technical components and the necessity
for a parallel development of the local infrastructure. Moreover, at the end of the 1970s
it was clear that diffusion into the market of the concept of low-energy building was
slow. The whole building market had declined, and low-energy buildings cost more than
traditional buildings, largely due to the fact that anything developed from a prototype will
be relatively expensive (Byberg 1984). On the other hand, findings from these pioneer
low-energy buildings have to a large extent been incorporated into Danish building
regulations and consequently have had a major impact on the construction of new buildings
(Saxhof et al. 1988).
The oil crisis of the 1970s also led to a fundamental restructuring of Danish
energy policy. The Ministry for Energy was formed in 1975, and in 1976 the
Programme for Energy Research was launched, leading over the next 25 years to
massive research and development projects concerning energy efficiency in buildings
and renewable energy (Energistyrelsen 2000). These projects were strongly
influenced by the people who were behind the first low-energy buildings. The development
of low-energy buildings in Denmark can therefore be described not just in
terms of technical development, but also in terms of its basis in an ‘infrastructure’
consisting of political and financial support, institutional security (the Thermal Insulation
Laboratory was established in 1959) and access to influential legislators.
Energy research in Denmark can be characterised as a ‘closed community’ (Guy and
Shove 2000), with close relationships between researchers, ministries and industry
enabling, such influence.
The researchers’ efforts are to some degree parallel to Thomas Hughes’s notion of
‘system builders’ (Hughes 1987). A moot point is whether their low-energy buildings
are to be seen, in Hughes’s terminology, as radical or conservative technology. On
one hand, the ideal was to establish a system that is based on low-energy buildings
and a renewable energy supply, which would mean a radical break with the existing
energy infrastructure. Furthermore, potential ‘reverse salients’ (such as problems with
heat storage) reduced the economic competitiveness of the low-energy buildings. For
those making low-energy buildings it was also a problem to get integrated effort from
the rest of the actors in the building industry. On the other hand, low-energy building
has, in Hughes’s terms, to a large extent been institutionalised, as basic concepts
have now been incorporated in building regulations, and must accordingly be considered
a conservative technology. This viewpoint also reflects a certain flexibility in the existing system (in spite of the momentum, according to Hughes), allowing change
and adaptation to new demands, rather than requiring the substitution of a whole new
system.
Although the low-energy building approach peaked, in terms of public attention, in
the 1970s, the funding, research and influence on building regulations have remained
until today, and there has also been a major diffusion of technologies to other types of
sustainable buildings. Recently, however, funding for energy research has, for the first
time since the energy crises in 1973, been drastically reduced, which implies a radical
change for low-energy building and research. But from 1985 ‘sustainability’ widely
replaced ‘energy saving’ as the key term in green buildings. This was due to the
Brundtland Report, which made possible a much broader interpretation of the themes
and technologies relating to green buildings.
Grassroots alternatives
A very different approach to green buildings is found in grassroots and citizen-initiated
projects (Box 2). The catchwords for the technology of this approach are closed cycles
and self-sufficiency, with inspiration coming from similar actors all over the world. Water
and waste should be recycled, energy locally produced from renewable resources and,
very importantly, the technologies should be organised in neighbourhoods to
strengthen and revitalise local social life. The ecological vision is followed by a social
vision of a more holistic everyday life – a life that is not split between work, family and
home. In this sense the urban ecological movement follows in the footsteps of the
collectivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and is a reaction against the lifestyle of
detached suburban houses. Furthermore, for some at the grassroots there is a spiritual
dimension to the relationship between humans and nature; for others there is an ethical
concern for future generations. Common to both groups is that human–nature relationships
need to be reconsidered.
Green buildings in Denmark 171
Box 2: Examples of grassroots or citizen-initiated projects
Projects in existing neighbourhoods
Baggesensgade 5 (Copenhagen) 1983
Hyldespjældet (Albertslund) c.1988
Vestergror (Copenhagen) 1988
BO-90 (Copenhagen) 1992
Øko-byen (Copenhagen) 1984
New-build eco-villages
Bofællesskabet Sol og vind (Beder)1980
Dyssekilde (Torup) 1990
Andelssamfundet (Hjortshøj) 1992
Munksøgård (Roskilde) 2000
Friland (Djursland) 2002

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Learning from green buildings that teach
Kathryn Janda and Alexandra von Meier
Janda and von Meier investigate two ‘green’ academic buildings: the Environmental
Technology Center at Sonoma State University and the Adam Joseph Lewis Center at
Oberlin College. Both are designed for use as teaching tools and both demonstrate
sustainable architecture. Both employ a variety of passive and active systems to achieve
their goals. Both have ‘epic’ stories to tell about the evaluation of their performance. As
self-proclaimed exemplars of sustainable architecture these buildings were set apart
from standard construction practice by a heightened degree of ‘inspection, assessment
and expectation’. But did the measures adopted by engineers and critics reflect the
intentions of the builders or did they quantify something different? What was it that the
buildings were designed to teach? The authors argue that the quantitative data
collected ‘may raise more questions about building performance than they resolve’.
Noting that ‘numbers rarely change our notions of what we already believe to be true’,
Janda and von Meier thus bring into question the use of quantitative data taken at a
particular moment in time as the sole criterion for the ‘goodness’ of buildings.
Introduction
Buildings present a significant challenge for the natural environment. Roodman and
Lenssen (1995: 5) claim, for instance, that buildings account for 16 per cent of the
world’s water use, 20 per cent of its wood harvest and 40 per cent of its material and
energy flows. Although new buildings can be constructed in a more sustainable fashion,
quite often they are not. What can we learn from those constructed to be sustainable?
Technical lessons are often sought from such exemplars. Did the argon-filled, doublepaned
windows in this building save energy? Did using paint low in volatile organic
compounds in that building reduce off-gassing? While such questions are important
stepping stones to ‘better’ designs, each green building example contains a set of
social lessons as well. David Orr (1993) has coined the phrase ‘architecture as pedagogy’
to describe the concept that we learn from buildings, not just in them. Similarly,
W. J. Rohwedder (2003) extends this idea to describe ‘pedagogy of place’.
To explore the lessons learned from specific architectures in particular places, we
investigate two ‘green’ academic buildings: the Environmental Technology Center
(ETC) at Sonoma State University, California, and the Adam Joseph Lewis Center
(AJLC) at Oberlin College, Ohio. Both are designed to be used as teaching tools and
both demonstrate sustainable architecture. Both employ passive and active systems to
achieve these goals. Both also have ‘epic’ stories to tell about the social structures and
institutional values that resulted in the adoption of some architectural strategies and the
rejection of others. Finally, each author has first-hand knowledge of and daily experience with one of these buildings. Our own participation with these structures and our observation
of other uses and users helps to frame our understanding of the differences and
similarities between them. Through our comparative analysis, we hope to raise new
questions concerning the social and institutional context in which sustainable buildings
are constructed, used and evaluated.
These buildings were designed to be far better than average, but by what measure
are they better? Are there ways in which they are worse? Despite much public critical
acclaim, people involved with both buildings are frequently called on to prove that the
pedagogical, architectural and environmental theories behind them are working in practice.
Among many dimensions, we focus on the presence, absence and use of ‘data’,
looking at several factors with respect to data gathering, use and evaluation. First, we
examine how the presence or absence of quantitative data enhances or obscures
stories of building performance. Second, we describe how institutional requirements
shape the desire for and impact of ‘hard numbers’. Finally, we discuss who learns what
from ‘buildings that teach’: students, faculty and the academic institutions themselves.
Background
Although both the ETC and the AJLC have ample amounts of glass on the south side
and use thermal mass for passive heating and cooling, these buildings do not shout
‘sustainability’ to passers-by. Neither structure relies visually on elements that the
general public would likely identify as ‘green’: a biomorphic shape, obvious photovoltaic
arrays or windmills, or a garden on the roof.1 Instead, both building designs share a modern aesthetic and a geometric vocabulary typical of today’s commercial and institutional
structures (Figs 3.1 and 3.2).
The Environmental Technology Center at Sonoma State University (SSU) is a 2,200
square foot (204 square metre) building with one large seminar room that functions as
an auditorium, classroom and laboratory. It is situated on a site internal to the SSU
campus, which is located about an hour north of San Francisco. Funded in part by
grants from the National Science Foundation and the California Energy Commission
and completed in 2001, the ETC was conceived as a ‘building that teaches’
(Rohwedder 1998), offering an immediate hands-on experience of high-efficiency technology
and green building to general audiences as well as an abundance of real-time
data for building science buffs.
Use of the ETC comprises university classes – including technical courses on
energy, environmental studies courses and selected courses from other departments –
and classes and events involving outside agencies and the general public. These
include, for example, meetings by the local chapter of the Green Building Council,
training workshops for energy auditors, work meetings for Sonoma County’s Climate
Protection Campaign and public events such as the Green Building Expo, with lectures
and vendor exhibits. The ETC has also become a favourite classroom for two other
departments: the Psychology of Yoga class appreciates the warm floor in addition to
the light and spacious feel, and the a cappella Chamber Singers enjoy the acoustics.

The ETC was the subject of Congressional testimony before the House Energy
Subcommittee by its director (von Meier 2001), at the invitation of Congresswoman
Lynn Woolsey (Democrat), who had supported the ETC since its inception. Representative
Woolsey subsequently arranged for an Energy Subcommittee field hearing to
take place at the ETC, chaired by Congresswoman Judy Biggert (Republican, Illinois).
Nationally recognised energy experts testified at the field hearing (US House of Representatives
2002), with the space of the ETC serving as a concrete example of the
concepts of energy efficiency and renewable resource use they advocated.
Like the ETC, the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies serves many
purposes. The AJLC is a two-storey, 13,600 square foot (1,260 square metre) building
with three classrooms, a library, an auditorium, six offices, a conference room and a
kitchen. It also houses a ‘Living Machine’ that treats and internally recycles wastewater
from within the building, which is sited on the edge of the Oberlin College campus, near
Richardsonian Romanesque academic buildings and down the street from Victorian-era
homes. Like the ETC, it was designed as a building that teaches. In the words of David
Orr, the chair of Oberlin’s Environmental Studies Program, the project team wanted a
building that would ‘help redefine the relationship between humankind and the environment
– one that would expand our sense of ecological possibilities’ (Reis 2000).
The AJLC has enjoyed considerable critical acclaim. It has received architectural
awards from the American Institute of Architects, construction awards from national and
state contractors’ organisations and an Ohio governor’s award for energy efficiency and
has been named one of the thirty ‘Milestone Buildings for the Twentieth Century’ by the
US Department of Energy. An early model of the building is included in an architectural
textbook on the interactive effects of buildings and the environment (Fitch and
Bobenhausen 1999: 336), a diagram appears in a popular environmental science
textbook (Miller 2001b: 537), and it has been the subject of numerous articles in the
press. Part of its notoriety has to do with its star architectural team, William McDonough
and Partners, which is famous for several sustainable buildings as well as a book on the
topic of sustainability (McDonough and Braungart 2002). Part also has to do with the
dedication and eloquence of its on-campus champion, David Orr, who is a prolific writer
and a dynamic speaker and has published several articles about the AJLC’s design
process (Orr 2002, 2003a, 2003b). Orr also plans to use the AJLC as the basis of a
book on the subject of design and organisational learning.
Equally the AJLC has been the subject of much controversy. At the centre of this
debate is a contested statement that one of the goals of the AJLC was to be a ‘net
energy exporter’. An Oberlin faculty member outside the Environmental Studies
Program has argued that the building consumes far more energy than the photovoltaic
(PV) array delivers (Scofield 2002a, 2002b, 2002c). Proponents of the building do not
deny that it currently uses more energy than it generates; early documentation indicates
that the goal of net energy exportation was a long-term one, intended to be reached only
as PV efficiencies improved beyond the 15 per cent that is common today.
We believe that the stories surrounding these two buildings – including the range of
perspectives on how ‘efficient’ or ‘consumptive’ they are, as well as how their performance
is accounted for and by whom – have much to say about how expectations for
sustainable architecture are shaped. Although framed in technical terms (such as air
changes per hour or Btu per square foot) these goals have social implications as well as
technical bases.

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Competing models by industry, government and NGOs

Steven A. Moore and Nathan Engstrom
In 1992 the city of Austin, Texas, was the first in the country to create a residential
green building programme and by the end of the century about 26 similar ones
emerged in 16 different states. Moore and Engstrom argue two related points. The
first is that ‘green building’ reflects the latent fusion of two powerful late-nineteenthcentury
ideas, preservation of the natural environment and protection of the public
health. These two concepts were so ideologically opposed at the turn of the twentieth
century that it took a full century of changing conditions to reconcile the opposing
assumptions that motivated their respective supporters. Second, the authors hold
that, once reconciled under the broad umbrella of ‘sustainable development’, green
building programmes foreshadow North American building codes of the twenty-first
century. Some US green building ‘programmes’ are departments within municipal
governments, others are the products of homebuilder associations, and at least two
are non-profit non-governmental organisations. Taken collectively, these
‘programmes’ reflect a changing cultural horizon with regard to public health and the
built environment. Taken individually, however, they reflect contradictory social values
that vie to redefine how a private house embodies a public ‘good’. The authors’ project
is not to predict how these conflicting social values will become resolved, but to better
understand the social construction of green building programmes as antecedents of
twenty-first-century cultural values that will ultimately become realised as standardised
building codes.
Green building as good building
Building codes in the United States derive principally from English precedents. Their
adoption can be understood as acceptance by mid-nineteenth-century Americans of
those utilitarian values which made it possible to restrict some individual freedoms, like
shoddy building practices, in favour of general health, safety and welfare. The political
will to pass such legislation was, no doubt, strongly influenced by a series of devastating
fires that damaged or destroyed eleven nineteenth-century American cities and
the chronic outbreaks of typhus, yellow fever and smallpox that plagued many other
cities (AIA 1990: 9). These crises were inevitably followed by legislation and the
founding of institutions intent on eliminating those building practices that would most
obviously contribute to repeat fires and epidemics. Historians generally refer to this
phenomenon as the era of ‘sanitary reform’ or the ‘public health movement’.
If we accept this dialectical relation of crisis and reform it is tempting to interpret the
appearance of ‘green building programmes’ in the US, not as a new phenomenon, but
as a continuation of two nineteenth-century social movements: the public health movement
and the environmental movement. The environmental crises experienced by contemporary city dwellers are, after all, not different in kind from those experienced by
nineteenth-century urban dwellers. Poor air quality, fouled water and general environmental
degradation are the unintended consequences of industrial development that
are shared by both periods. It does not really matter if the sources of pollution have
shifted from smokestacks to tailpipes – the threat is the same. What is different in our
current situation is that the dramatic fires and epidemics of the nineteenth century have
been replaced by more subtle and pervasive effects that derive from long-term industrial
development. Energy scarcity, water scarcity, climate change and chemical sensitivity
are environmental conditions that even the economically comfortable can no longer
avoid by moving further out of town. It is now solidly middle-class citizens, not only the
industrial proletariat, who experience the crisis of environmental degradation and seek
environmental security from government, industry or third-party experts. The risks associated
with environmental degradation have, then, been somewhat democratised. And
with the democratisation of risk has come economic and political controversy (Beck
1992: 191–9).
The production of environmental programmes and building codes is, of course, not
entirely a matter of science. Rather, it is a highly social and contentious process in which
some interests are suppressed and others are reinforced. The presence of competing
interests is reflected in the confusing array of codes and green building standards that
have emerged in response to contemporary environmental conditions. Commercial
construction certification schemes like LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design), BEES (Building for Economic and Environmental Sustainability) and BREEAM
(Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) are just a few
examples. Such conflicting standards tend to frame problems and propose solutions in
ways that define opposing ‘goods’. All manufacturing standards are, in this view,
socially constructed agreements that favour a particular set of actors because they
contain the interests of the standard-makers (Latour 1987: 201).1
Beginning with the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), many have argued that the
history of modernisation has been synonymous with standardisation (Weber 1958:
181–2; Feenberg 1995: 4). Weber understood that the institutions of modern
commerce are better able to optimise exchange value by imposing a single structure on
diverse populations and spaces. This logic suggests that those outside an emergent
technological network run the risk of being excluded from certain exchanges. If your
locomotive is of the wrong gauge, your motor of the wrong voltage or your software of
the wrong operating system, you are excluded. The mechanisms of commerce, then,
favour dominance by a single technological standard. It does not really matter what that
standard is – DOS versus MAC, for example – so long as it is commensurable with the
endless array of local conditions. If we apply the logic of modernisation to the homebuilding
industry, it suggests that the emergence of multiple green building
programmes and model environmental codes are competing attempts to standardise
the many variables of ‘good’ building to include ‘green’ building practices.
On this basis, we hypothesise that standards designed by industry, government, and
non-governmental organisation (NGO) environmentalists will differ. This hypothesis is
based on the assumptions that these organisational types generally represent opposing
political interests and that with authorship of a building code comes the power to regulate
the social and technical constitution of the artefact. We also assume that, in practice,
standardised codes represent, to one degree or another, the negotiated interests
of industry, government and environmentalists. Building codes can, then, be understood as the temporary resolution of social conflicts that are, in turn, materialised
as buildings. The establishment of codes, by any means, pushes the building industry
down a particular technological path. Green building codes will, for example, push us
away from paints that rely on volatile organic compounds to those that do not and from
harvesting old-growth timber towards substitute technologies such as engineered
wood products. In these and other similar cases some technological networks will
benefit and others will necessarily suffer.
Green building programmes intend to challenge existing building codes and seek to
redefine the agreements that shaped them on the grounds of the general welfare.
According to this utilitarian logic, private dwellings contribute to or detract from several
kinds of public resources or public goods. With regard to the construction of private
houses, two types of damage to public resources can be assessed by environmental
accountants. The first are those negative environmental impacts that derive from gathering
building materials and energy from distant locales. Water pollution caused by
timber ‘clear-cutting’ or strip mining is an example of this type, where costs are borne by
downstream citizens reliant on access to clean water. The second is the public cost to
maintain the health and welfare of those citizens who build badly, either out of ignorance
or malice. An example of this type is personal injury and property damage derived from
building on a flood plain, where costs are borne by taxpayers. In the eyes of utilitarians,
the loss of either type of public good trumps private property rights because such
ruinous acts increase the public cost to maintain the ‘civic economy’. If we agree, then,
that the general welfare is promoted by green building we have also agreed in principle
that green building is a necessary if insufficient condition for good building.
The balance of this chapter is in four sections. The first section establishes the early
linkage between building codes and the public health movement and the delayed linkage
of building codes to the environmental movement. The second section examines how
changing technological standards both reflect and attempt to resolve cultural conflict. To
make these arguments concrete, we will, in the third section, empirically examine three
cases that demonstrate how government, industry and environmentalists infuse technological
standards with opposing values. Finally, our conclusion will argue that through a
process of crisis, reform, codification and standardisation today’s green building
programmes foreshadow the social construction of twenty-first-century building codes.
Building codes, public health, environmental preservation
In this section we argue that the long-term development of building codes related to
human health is rooted in nineteenth-century utilitarian thought and becomes fused with
the environmental preservation movement at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The codification of building standards, as all architecture students learn early in their
careers, begins with Article 229 of the Code of King Hammurabi (Mesopotamia 1780
BCE) (Sanderson 1969: 5). The Greeks and Romans certainly contributed to the establishment
of construction standards, but it wasn’t until 1189 in England that a building
act representing municipal legislative power was developed. Five hundred years later, in
1676, a document resembling a modern building code was created through an Act of
Parliament to regulate the rebuilding of London after the devastating fire of 1666 (AIA
1990: 8). These pre-modern codes were, in emphasis, fire-prevention ordinances. The
emergence of the industrial revolution and rapid urbanisation in the nineteenth century,
however, created new conditions that catalysed the codification of building standards.
The idea that there is a collective or ‘public’ health, and that it is linked to environmental
conditions, emerged in mid-nineteenth-century England as ‘the sanitary idea’.
Most historians attribute the first or most prominent articulation of this idea to Edwin
Chadwick, son of James. The elder Chadwick was a devotee of the revolutionary Tom
Paine and had sufficient status among radical thinkers of his day to gain his son a position
as the personal secretary to Jeremy Bentham, a progenitor of utilitarianism. It was
Bentham who argued for the ‘greatest happiness principle’, that ‘the end of life, ethically
speaking is “the greatest good for the greatest number”’ (Reese 1980: 53). Although
the younger Chadwick was profoundly influenced by the utilitarians in philosophical
matters, he is remembered, not as a thinker, but as a civil servant and man of action. At
the behest of Parliament, he published in 1842 his Report on the Sanitary Condition of
the Labouring Population of Great Britain, which proved to be as historically influential
as it was then controversial. Chadwick’s report was considered radical because, first, it
relied on rigorously gathered empirical data rather than deductive logic, and second, it
employed such methods to reject the commonly held idea that disease was the fatalistic
imposition of God’s will. With equal temerity, Chadwick challenged the received
wisdom that held poverty to be the main cause of ill health. Chadwick argued the
reverse, that ‘the attack of fever precedes the destitution, not the destitution the
disease’ (Chadwick 1965: 210). For Chadwick and his fellow ‘sanitarians’, disease was
not an outward sign of moral depravity, but the misfortune of those subjected to
degraded environments. In the eyes of historian William Luckin, Chadwick was a ‘protoenvironmentalist’
because he identified an environmental cause of disease before there
was any scientific understanding of pathogenic organisms (Melosi 2000: 46). It was not
until some 20 years after the publication of Chadwick’s report that ‘germ theory’, based
on the work of Pasteur and others, would begin to supplant the then dominant ‘miasma’
theory of disease.
Chadwick’s medical logic might have remained simply prescient were it not for the
political implications of the sanitary idea. Beginning with the utilitarian formula of ‘the
greatest good for the greatest number’, he reasoned that true ‘civic economy’ required
‘preventative measures in raising the standard of health and the chances of life’
(Chadwick 1965: 246). It was a short mental step from advocating the economic value
of public health to advocating the creation of a general building code backed up by a
strong central government capable of enforcing such standards (Chadwick 1965:
339–47). The utilitarians were, then, precursors of the modern welfare state.
In recent years utilitarianism has been much criticised for its easy disregard for the
civil rights of minorities. Bentham, Chadwick and their followers constructed an attitude
towards social order that we now regard as highly authoritarian and technocratic. They
were not predisposed to trust in the ability of common citizens to make sensible choices
concerning much of anything. Rather, their idea of ‘civic economy’ relied on an educated
elite to manage efficiently the interests of society, which they conceived to be essentially
economic in nature.
Such an efficiently managed or sanitised society was the nightmare of Michel
Foucault (1975). In Foucault’s view, the institutions of public health constructed by
nineteenth-century utilitarians were little more than the illegitimate mechanisms of the
modern bureaucratic state through which social deviancy might be eradicated. The
ethical dilemma posed by the doctrines of public health, then, is characterised by a
confrontation between two seemingly rational desires. First is the desire of those who,
like Chadwick, wish to minimise the waste of resources associated with environmental

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Changing Government Policy
An important consultation document was issued by the UK Government in 1998.1 Part of a wider
consultation exercise on sustainability, it discussed some principles of sustainable construction and current
practices in the industry. Following the consultation process, which brought in a relatively small number of
responses, a Government strategy based on this consultation process will soon be published, though it is
likely to fall well short of the standards advocated in this volume. While the government approach is hardly
radical, recognition of the subject is a huge step forward and is to be greatly welcomed.
Other steps have also been taken, in particular the establishment of a scheme to provide one day’s free
design advice to anyone planing to build a green building over 500 square metres. The Design Advice for
Greener Buildings scheme is funded by the DETR and administered by BRECSU.2 This scheme
demonstrates recognition of the importance of an holistic approach to consider all aspects of green building
rather than simply focusing on energy efficiency which was previously the only area where financial help was
available.
The construction industry has been under a great deal of scrutiny following the publication of the
“Latham” report and more recently the “Egan” report.3 Both these reports recognise the inefficiency of the
construction sector and the need to be more competitive and better managed. It is only in this economic
sense that sustainability is usually referred to and the debate about the nature of building construction in the
future largely ignores questions of environmental impact. Indeed the word sustainability only appears once,
in the Egan report (paragraph 58) with a call for greater priority to be given in the design and planning stage
to “flexibility of use, operating and maintenance costs and sustainability.”
While the UK lags behind, in some European countries, much higher standards and working practices
have been adopted. These include the careful separation of waste on site into separate skips so that it is then
recycled, the greater use of recycled materials in place of newly quarried aggregates and the elimination of
many toxic and non environmentally friendly materials to improve building worker safety and improve
indoor air quality. Most of these measures are covered by European directives and then enforced in
particular countries by building or local regulations

Demand for green materials?
At present most of these sustainability measures are barely on the agenda of the building regulation
formulation process in the UK and there are strong industry lobbies to maintain the status quo for as long as
possible. Many environmentally friendly products are now available in Europe, but few of them are sold in
bulk in the UK. This is surprising in that many producers and distributors of building materials and products
are multi national companies. Akzo Nobel, the Swedish company (of Nobel peace prize fame) for instance
own many of the paint companies in the UK and are in the process of marketing these products under the
name Akzo Nobel but it isn’t clear whether we can look forward to the introduction of Sweden’s higher
environmental standards into the UK paint industry5
One argument that is used by building companies, designers and suppliers in the UK is that clients are
not interested in eco products and so market forces continue to dictate that we continue to use materials that
are not so environmentally friendly as they could be. There is some evidence of this in that when
“Construction Resources” was set up in Southwark in London, the UK’s first eco builders merchants,6 many
of their suppliers in Germany and Holland were unwilling to invest in the centre because their market
research had told them there was little interest in the UK. In Germany, where there is even a federation of
eco builders merchants, green materials have a significant share of the market.7
However this is something of a chicken and egg situation. Clients are frequently not told about green
materials and even when they are interested, most materials cannot be sourced in normal ways, so if
builders cannot obtain them from their normal suppliers they won’t use them. If designers promoted green
materials and builders merchants stocked them, there would undoubtedly be greater use.

The public sector could give a lead in this respect so that local authorities, hospitals trusts and central
government could adopt green specification standards and because of the bulk of materials which they
order, the market would have to change to meet this demand. The Greening Government Section of the
DETR has produced an excellent report which gives guidance on how to achieve greener buildings.8 Apart
from covering most topics, under 38 headings, including indoor air quality, it has an excellent and
comprehensive set of appendices giving sources of information and useful contacts. Needless to say, the
Green Building handbook gets mentioned throughout. This document, which contains a Green Code for
Architects (based on BREEAM),9 would be very useful to anyone trying to persuade a sceptical public
sector client that green building is not a strange and hippie activity but quite normal and sanctioned by
Government.

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