Tidbit on building material

A quote I found ages (it seems) ago, that suddenly seems to bear a lot of relevance:

"The common building material with the least embodied energy is wood, with about 640 kilowatt-hours per ton (most of it consumed by the industrial drying process, and some in the manufacture of and impregnation with preservatives). Hence the greenest building material is wood from sustainability-managed forests. Brick is the material with the next lowest amount of embodied energy, 4 times (4X) that of wood, then concrete (5X), plastic (6X), glass (14X), steel (24X) and aluminum (126X). A building with a high proportion of aluminum components can hardly be green when considered from the perspective of total life cycle costing, no matter how energy efficient it might be." - Peter Buchanan, Ten Shades of Green

... which would suggest that, if you choose to build intentionally in a style that requires large amounts of high energy materials (glass, steel, aluminum - cough, "warm modernism," cough) , your most important objective here isn't really being green, is it? Mayhaps it is attracting customers with its image of a progressive, Southern Californian, Case-Study lifestyle?

According to Buchanan, aesthetics alone cannot justify the sacrifice of green principles. Though LH1 uses a great deal of sustainably harvested wood detailing, LH's marriage to the idea of prefabrication and to architects working in a contemporary Modernist style does feel rather suspect in the end.