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escribed as solar, passive, ecological, sustainable, regenerative, or just plain green—environmentally aligned approaches to architecture are guided by both scientific principles and a worshipful romance with nature. Consequently, green buildings are part method, part philosophy, and part ethic.
The 2000-2001 traveling exhibit Ten Shades of Green, curated by Peter Buchanan and designed by Tsurumaki Lewis, depicted the Ten Commandments of environmental design. It included the customary variety of notable buildings by prominent architects, but those details are not the present point of this discussion. The exhibition title by itself, taken out of the context of the exemplary work it promotes, provokes a divergent idea. It suggests that there are, in fact, relative shades of greenness, different levels of commitment to environmental principles, that perhaps some buildings are just a deeper tint of green than others. This notion is reminiscent of a frequent assertion first made by Arthur Bowen (personal communication, 1975) that “all buildings are passive, some are just more passive than others.” (Arthur Bowen was a cofounder of PLEA, the international organization for
Passive and Low Energy Architecture.) He meant by this that all buildings provide some level of environmental comfort and amenities of light and air by virtue of the designed interactions between building and environment. Obviously enough, and to the point of Bowen’s comment, some architects make environmental response the focus of design thinking and others leave it to standard practice. The relative level of environmental ambition and the ultimate ecological result is always somewhere along the ecospectrum, a selective shade of green. Fundamentally, the specific hue and brightness achieved are predetermined by value decisions declared in the building program. This declaration is the ethical context of ecological architecture. As in regard to political issues, there are zealots and ideologues at both extremes of environmental issues. Taken in their entirety, the ranges of opinion form a wide expanse of belief systems, moral stances, and shades of green.
Part of this ethical diversity arises from issues of scope. Given the traditional realm and domain of architectural accomplishment, the newcomer determinants like solar geometry, aerodynamic form, and thermal zoning may appear to usurp some more accepted concerns such as materiality, progression of space, and formal expression. Furthermore, environmental benefits like energy savings and reduced ecological footprint are often difficult to transform directly into architectural features. These challenges lead to separations between the two poles of commitment to green architecture. The pioneering and radically unself-conscious solar designs of the 1960s for example, often seemed rather like quirky science fair projects to many architects and their public audience. It didn’t help that green precedents were so hard to pinpoint. If solar buildings at first seemed like things unto themselves, it is probably because there was so little to go by. The commonly quoted indigenous architectural examples were noble enough, but did not employ modern building physics or the latest in high-performance components. And all the epochs of architecture since the preindustrial builders had been dominated more by structural challenges, and therefore more by issues of construction and materiality, than by environmental ones. It has taken the most recent generation or two of architects to refine this issue of scope.
Because of this lack of clear evolution from precedents within the continuum of architectural progression, the exact origins of green design will never be marked by a distinct building or series of works that herald its birth. There is no Crystal Palace of Solar, no Notre Dame de l’Ecology, and no Acropolis of Sustainability. As Butti and Perlin’s book, A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology, so notably documents, the pioneers of green design have been many and their works are diffused throughout every stage of architectural history.
The time has arrived, however, when the demonstrated environmental responsiveness of any building has become a golden measure of its merit as architecture. The professional status of ecological design and the celebration of its cultural value is now status quo. Recent winners of the Pritzker Prize and other international awards are more often recognized and self-proclaimed green advocates than not. The Ten Shades of Green exhibit marks an impressive recognition of this ascendant ethic.
A second distinguishing ethical factor of green architecture is the humble submission to nature, or at the very least a proactive cooperation with its inevitable forces. Entropy, landscape, weathering, heat transfer, resource consumption, even the eventual reuse or destruction of the building, are all seen as programmatic truths beyond resistance or denial. More important, natural factors are perceived by green advocates to embody what John Keats phrased in the closing lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
In ecological ethics, Keats’s vision of self-evident beauty is magnified by the inescapable verity of natural events, ecological processes, and environmental limits. What gravity is to structure and materiality, ecology now is to Green. Through all the Ages of Gravity, architectural thinking venerated the tenets of constructability as a vital means of endowing built form with meaning. Moving into the ethic of ecology, design looks to other laws of nature and the romantic ennoblement of servicibility.