The Late Spring of American Green Architecture

Once upon a time, American architects were innovators of sustainable design. Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra made buildings that embraced nature; Bucky Fuller invented the geodesic dome; the Whole Earth Catalog led people off-grid.

In the present, however, Europe's new tradition of green building is far more sophisticated than our own. Energy efficiency regulations passed over a decade ago have produced a generation of beautiful and sustainable large-scale buildings; in the US, green architecture is limited largely to residences, and is expressed in skyscrapers and other large buildings as a set of objects to be purchased rather than a fundamental value.

After more than a decade of tightening guidelines, Europe has made green architecture an everyday reality. In Germany and the Netherlands especially, a new generation of architects has expanded the definition of sustainable design beyond solar panels and sod roofs. As Matthias
Sauerbruch put it to me: “The eco-friendly projects you saw in the
1970s, with solar panels and recycled materials: they were so self-conscious. We call this Birkenstock architecture. Now we don’t need to do this anymore. The basic technology is all pretty accepted.”

In the United States, architects cannot make the same claim with equal confidence. Despite the media attention showered on “green” issues, the federal government has yet to establish universal efficiency standards for buildings. Yet, according to some estimates, buildings consume nearly as much energy as industry and transportation combined. And the average building in the U.S. uses roughly a third more energy than its
German counterpart.

Is the US doomed to ugly, energy-gobbling architecture? Will a new generation of architecture students save us? The answer, ultimately, lies with developers -- in other words, with the people who've given us the dominant architecture of the early 21st century: faux-colonial
McMansions, housing projects, office parks and shopping plazas. This is a disturbing thought -- but as the price of energy continues to rise, perhaps developers' sense of greed will be stronger than their lack of vision. We can only hope.

Related Wired coverage here and here.

Why Are They Greener Than We Are? [New York TImes]

Image: Chris