Different ways of experiencing architecture?

A research point that I really need to look more into: how do people experience a building differently when they are in possession of it, as in a private home, vs. when it is a public facility like a workplace? Is there a difference between how people feel about a home if it is rented or owned?

Might lead to some juicy tidbits about the idea of "consuming" a building, as a big part of it is clearly about ownership.

EDIT: Found a huge, 50-page survey of studies on the effects of home ownership (vs. renting) on X. For one (this may seem obvious, but now I have tons of cited studies to back it up), homeowners are much less likely to move than renters. This alone could have an effect on community involvement and attachment to "place." A great deal of the sustainability literature on urban planning deals with the importance of place attachment, in that attachment to a particular place is highly correlated with stewardship and care of that environment.

Also, re: suburban sprawl: "One question is whether homeownership affects the areal size of urban areas, so-called sprawl. There is agreement that the primary determinant of the spatial expansion of cities is increased demand for more housing in the form of larger homes and lots (Brueckner [28]). This increase in demand is not necessarily linked with homeownership. Although owner-occupied dwellings are generally larger and have larger lots than rental units, a community of rented residential dwellings could contribute to urban sprawl. Critics of sprawl are primarily opposed to particular building types and the low density of dwellings, not to homeownership per se." So the relationship between ownership and sprawl is not tenable, but the built form raises interesting questions: A thing that might be worth critiquing LH on: by focusing the buyer's attention so much on energy and material savings, the buyer misses out on learning about other, just as important, facets of sustainability. This is a critique that could be applied to much of the high Modernist style, High Tech skyscrapers like the Commerzbank or Ken Yeang's bioclimactic skyscrapers. Built forms are as important as environmental footprint themselves, but LH certainly perpetuates the form of the individual suburban plot and the unattached single family home. Multiplied in thousands, It inevitably contributes to the unsustainable scenario of sprawl.

Regarding the environment specifically: "Homeownership is found to increase significantly the occurrence of recycling. The authors speculate that homeowners are more sensitive to environmental concerns. They also argue that homeowners are more involved in their communities at a political and social level and are therefore more likely to be knowledgeable about local environmental issues." However no causational relationship between homeownership and recycling is implied in any of the cited studies so I should be careful what I extrapolate from this.

An explanation of why homeownership influences social behavior: "Cox [46] indicates that homeownership influences social behavior through two mechanisms. First, 'interest theory' holds that homeownership alters the financial stake of households. Homeowners have a financial stake in local affairs because these affairs, whether social or political, may influence the home’s price. Second, as discussed in Section 5, homeowners are less mobile than renters and thus they are more likely to remain in a neighborhood. Undesirable changes in the neighborhood will affect the consumption value of a home. Homeowners are thusmotivated to engage in political and social activities, including community activism, to reduce the likelihood of these changes." This might argue on behalf of consumption as a way to ironically bolster sustainability because self-interest (in property values relating to environmental quality) can produce sustainable results. The ends justify the means?

So in the end, you could extrapolate that consumption through ownership of a home leads to more responsible, stewardship-like feelings. Makes sense - for instance, I would not drive a car I owned like... well, like I would a rental.

Provisionary new outline

If I were to focus on the relationship between consumerism and sustainability in architecture, my chapter breakdown might look something like this:

1. Intro - this should remain pretty much the same as the current outline
2. Chapter2 - Argue that LH promotes consumer culture as much as it does sustainability. Show that LH is in ways more similar to a marketing firm than an architecture firm, thus it represents a direct way for people to experience sustainable architecture through ownership (rather than just occupancy as in a work building, touring, reading about it, passing by on the street, etc.) Arguing that LH is both a consumerist product (in the way it is "packaged" and marketed); contrast this to other ways that architecture has tried to address sustainability (academic, aesthetically focused, or community-based). Outline ways in which LH seduces with luxury products.
3. Chapter 3 - Theories about why sustainability and consumerism are at odds (good handful of these abound...); all-around critique of LH's business-oriented approach to architecture
4. Chapter 4 - Why sustainability requires political power and consumerism can actually help ("voting with the dollar") - assess LH's overall role in promoting sustainability through consumerism
5. Conclusion/wrap-up chapter

So yeah! Looks like something more interesting might happen here; if I have to write a shorter paper and make it a senior project, then so be it. At least I'm not wasting my time writing from an angle that even I don't find interesting anymore. =)

Prefab and sustainability - all in the name of marketing

There is a lot of interest brewing lately (e.g. Inhabitat, a green building blog, has their Prefab Fridays column) in the idea of prefabrication as a more sustainable way to build.

The usual arguments supporting its "green" stance are:

- Traditional site-built houses produce a lot of on-site construction waste (extra materials, etc.) that end up in landfills whereas, with prefab, there is significantly less because materials that aren't used up at the factory just go "back on the shelf." The LivingHomes website claims that up to 40% of a site-built homes' construction materials can end up in the landfill!

- Site-built homes consume a lot more fossil fuels in transporting materials from multiple warehouses to a single site. Site-built also requires construction workers to shuttle back and forth for a longer span of time to complete the house, thus adding to the carbon footprint. With prefab, all the materials are at the factory and only the finished product gets transported, all in one go.

This is in addition to other pros, mostly economical, which include:

- Prefab allows for more precision and quality control over the manufacturing process because the units are built at a factory where state-of-the-art equipment can cut more exact pieces.
- Prefab saves time because the foundation can be laid while the house itself is being built off-site.
- Prefab modules are made indoors, so rainy days don't impede construction as much. Also, the materials have less of a chance of contamination from mold, rain, etc. so the resulting product is more healthy and sanitary.
- Prefab has to deal with more demanding loads (due to crane lifting and truck transportation) and it has to comply with more stringent national quality codes, so by definition, it has to be better (more safe, better built) than the average site-built home.
- Prefab is cheaper due to economies of scale (logic behind mass-production applied here) and centralization.

A lot of these were taken from the LivingHomes website. (It is curious, however, that the point about factory built modules having less exposure to the elements during construction, was placed under the "sustainable building practices" header in their section about modular building. I'm not sure how this is related to sustainable building. Copy-editing oversight?)

Prefabrication does seem to have a lot of overall pros (and some cons, but I won't get into them here), but the debate rages on about whether it actually is a more sustainable way of building than traditional building. Only two points above were actually directly related to sustainable practices, and even the veracity of these two are contested. So when a company promotes itself as green and uses prefabrication to bolster this image, is it being bona-fide green or is it (gasp!) greenwashing?

I found an article on Inhabitat today dealing with this exact issue. The author, a seasoned builder, contends that the relationship between prefab and greenness is overstated, and overarching generalizations such as "prefab is always a better way to build in terms of environmental considerations" should be treated with suspicion. He argues that, while it is true that, in certain cases, prefab does result in a more efficient use of material and a smaller carbon footprint, even prefab builders can be unscrupulous about saving materials. It costs labor hours to sort scrap and isolate what is still usable, so sometimes it just makes more financial sense to toss everything, even at the factory. He also contends that the gas burned transporting modules to a site can be just as much as in traditional building. Modules require a crane, which gets 2-3 mpg, so that is clearly inefficient if your site is in a small remote town far from construction resources. The module-shipping trucks also require as an escort service of several smaller trucks on the way from the factory. And factories are fewer and farther between than building material supplier warehouses, so if the site is remote, the module likely has to travel a much longer way. Finally, because of the aforementioned greater loads in transportation, modules have to be intentionally overbuilt, wasting materials.

Just judging from the miles of comments underneath the article, you can tell that this is a hotly contested matter. Some were quick to defend prefab as being almost always better than stick built environmentally (at least in Cananda?). Others, like the author, are more reserved in giving prefab accolades, saying that it is very dependent on individual cases. But the general consensus among readers and the author is that one should never take "prefab" to denote sustainable without looking more closely at the wide range of variables. All this was shadowed by the fact that there ARE companies out there who promote prefab and claim that it has green benefits when in fact the companies are not taking the steps to ensure that those benefits actually take place.

Suffice to say, in LH's case, the company is certainly promoting themselves as being extra-sustainable because they use prefabrication, but is it greenwash? Greenwash is when a company makes false claims about being green. I don't know if it is greenwash; I'm not an undercover reporter, and in the end, I don't think that even matters. For now, I still have faith that LH is a good company, with honest aims (the paper is not out to bash them, but to critique their methodology in the wider context of sustainable debate).

What matters is the mere fact that LH recognizes that the public clearly perceives an exciting, promising relationship between prefab and sustainability (as made evident by Prefab Fridays and sites like fabprefab.com) even if the relationship itself is hotly debated (as made evident by the long comments). Thus it is openly doing its best to promote the fact that it builds prefab to bolster its green image despite that its actual sustainability benefits may be quite small. (Again, I'm not out to determine how small; not important.) LH may well be just using prefab for all the other aforementioned, non-green benefits, but it has created a special section on its website for pointing out that they also chose prefab because it is green. This is a clear marketing move, showing that LH is very intent on selling a product by pleasing a perceived market sector (reactionary), perhaps more intent than they are on promoting an ideology (proactive). (I believe that many sustainable architects put promoting ideologies before selling products.) This goes to further my argument that LH plays a big role in furthering the consumerist approach to sustainability.

EDIT: I found another blog that highlighted some of the better comments from the long discussion. In particular Philip Proefrock's blurb is a good way of summing up prefab's relationship to green building.

EDIT: On another blog, there is a reference to a UK-based organization's report, which provides an empirical research-backed proof that prefabrication does, on average, reduce construction wastes by a lot (up to 90%...), and for this reason alone, the organization encourages builders to consider prefab. So the claims to greenness have footing in reality after all! I am glad, because any step towards saving waste, no matter how small, is an improvement. It seems that most of the griping against using prefab to enhance a company's "green cred" occurs when the company overexaggerates the importance of prefab, placing it above other concerns. So while the truth of certain prefab claims can no longer be contested, its relative importance in the network of strategies comprising sustainability still is.

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.

Consumerism?

If I were to take a new direction, would it save my thesis? I am trying to think back to what initially attracted me to the idea of studying LivingHomes.. I think much of it was due to the fact that I am a steady reader of "green" (and rather trendy) weblogs and it has repeatedly come up in the popular press. Moreover, I am interested in gadgetry and the technophilic Wired magazine recently had a sensational, headline-making home built by LH for them. It may suffice to say that I was seduced by LH's ability to make headlines, but not satisfied by how much I knew about it, so I undertook this project to see if I could learn more.

In the process of learning more, I learned how LH may well have been overrepresented. in my mind. In the wider context of sustainability, it is but a tiny sliver, more concerned with business feasibility, it seems, than seriously tackling larger issues of sustainability through community intervention, education, or politics. Though it has saturated, for a while, the media, I'm still not finding mention of it in the academic literature, except in passing. Jennifer Siegal's Office of Mobile Design is even being taken more seriously (Siegal is, perchance, also a recent darling of the popular green and prefab architecture blogospheres.)

This is probably because, after all, LH is a business venture - a development firm - rather than an architectural design office. It outsources design work to consultants and big-name architects such as Ray Kappe, a move that feels more like branding than of putting forward a particular architectural stance. In the end, LH seems more about marketing a product - green upscale living - than working to solve the societal issue of sustainability through proposing creative alternatives.

Clearly consumerism then becomes a big part of the picture. At this point it may well be worth looking into the relationship between consumerism and sustainability, as embodied through LH's marketing programme. Chapters could be built on first arguing that LH is promoting a product rather than an ideology, and then later deconstructing the pitfalls of this approach to sustainability. There should also be a section or chapter on why consumerism might be a viable approach to the question of sustainability despite that its fundamental premise - the valuation of material goods - seems allergic to some basic approaches to sustainability - making do with less, respecting the biosphere, etc.

The only question now, though, is how to bridge the gap between architecture and all this. Conceivably I could write a similar paper, making similar points, using... I don't know... Whole Foods organic pine nuts (yum yum)... or any other "green" product... instead of a house. But I guess that's where the first or so chapter would come in - arguing that even a house can be packaged this way, into a consumer product. Hmmm.. yes.

Forget this trying to prove that LH and sustainability is Modernist or not Modernist stuff... who really cares if you can call it by one name or another? It doesn't change the way it influences society and the public. It doesn't aid in community building or urbanization or changing the American landscape. (And this is why writing a thesis is hard: finding things that might actually matter to write about...)

Dwell and Worldchanging, this is all your fault...

In finally finding a pathway into the literature on sustainable architecture, I am realizing just how doomed my original thesis idea was!

I had originally thought to argue, using LH as an example, that the modernist, "technocist supremancy," as Simon Guy put it, misses out on other, better ways of approaching green architecture. Fundamental to this endeavor was first proving that there WERE other aspects founded on alternative philosophies, then defining what they were, and then seeing if they were "better."

2 problems that I now realize are going to kill this endeavor:

1) Turns out these alternative perspectives are already thoroughly acknowledged in the academic literature (if not in Dwell magazine) and have already been sought out and well-defined using various models. (see Journal of Architectural Education Vol 54 issue 3, pp149-8.) so to continue to pursue this vein of inquiry would be futile, as well as intentionally ignorant

2) I cannot write about whether something is BETTER because it would take years of research to even define what "better" means, as there are multiple viewpoints competing. This is in addition to the obvious issue that making value judgments belies the fact that I am not being an objective researcher. And I've already been warned from the beginning of writing a "manifesto."

So now there's the slight possibility that I will write a redundant , pointless thesis owing to the sheer fact that I did not known enough about the topic to start out on the right foot. The point I had originally thought to prove shows that I really had no idea what sustainable architecture was about, besides what little shallow tidbits I had managed to glean from the popular media, which is usually how one first finds out about these things.

So what now?

Help!

Moore & Engstrom on green building codes

The more I read, the more I feel that my outline is insufficient and that my topic, even, is too restrictive (and that I'm rapidly running out of time). At this point, looking back, I must admit that writing this thesis has been a bit of a blind stumble through unfamiliar territory. Because only now have I found some actual critical literature about sustainable architecture itself! (And not just books about nature, environmentalism, economics, history, etc. or pretty coffee-table compilations of spectacular one-offs.)

At this point I'm also wrestling with the gradual realization that my thesis may well fail because it took me this long to get to a point that despite all the hard work I put in, I should have gotten to months ago..

But I will at least keep going.. and if my outline has to take a fourth beating, so be it...

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Anyway, I finally managed to get my hands on a book called "Sustainable Architectures: Cultures and Natures in North America." It is a collection of articles that contribute to the central idea that sustainable architecture is more a symphony of different discourses and understandings than a single unified ideology stemming from a well-defined practice. (Like I said, I should have reached this point in understanding much earlier, had I known what to read.)

Among these articles, I found one titled "The social construction of 'green building' codes" particularly insightful.

The authors use a categorical analysis of several building codes and standards in the US to argue that the idea of "green architecture" is comprised of not one but several competing, sometimes opposed ideologies stemming from local discourses. They further conclude that that these differing ideologies are not necessarily tied to the type of organization (government, NGO, industry) drafting the codes.

Good points/quotes:
- "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." (52)

- The article also suggests that standardization is a sign of modernisation (read: cars, industrial processes, even going back to Le Corbu's interest in Greek temples...), so that the prevalence of green building codes today are a continuing relic of modernization. (Can use this to link LH's compliance to LEED with the interests of the Modernist school of thought) (52)

- Moore & Engstrom argue that sustainability can be viewed as the fusion of the (anthropocentric) public health and (ecocentric) environmental protection movement. Historically in America, the 2 were separate and even saw each other as the opposition (former emerged from Left, latte from the Right - p56). The link between environmental quality and human health was not explicitly linked until sustainability discourse came to the fore in 1980s, which is fairly recent. (Thus sustainability can be seen as a more holistic way of tackling the same issues, or as a compromise between various opposing interests.)

- However it's interesting to note that environmental quality had been linked to human health as early as 1840s in ideas of Edwin Chadwick in England. Then it was known as "the sanitary idea." (54) But then, it was in the hands of the ruling body, and has been criticized by writers such as Michel Foucault of being "little more than the illegitimate mechanisms of the modern bureaucratic state through which social deviancy might be eradicated." (bottom of 54)

- "By arguing that the concept of sustainable development can be understood as the fusion of the public health and environmental preservation movememnts, we do not mean to suggest that there is a single logic or set of ideas associated with the concept. Rather, we will argue two points in this section. First that 'sustainability' has become an umbrella for a number of competing social values and second, that contrary to an idealised model of sustainability in which competing values become balanced, it is far more likely that one set of values, or standards, will come to dominate the field." (57)

- Scott Campbell's "planner's triangle" provides an elegant way of looking at sustainable development. He sees it as the balance of economic development, environmental protection, and social equity, and that it is the role of a third party - a "valuable stranger" - to mediate the 3 forces to arrive at the center. However the authors point out that such mediators are in short supply and, when absent, the more powerful corners of the triangle dominate. The process of standardization suppresses "creative public conflict and alternative technological choices" that may occur in place of a mediating stranger, and standardization "consistently favour[s] the interest of economic development over those of environmental protection or social equity." (60, top)

- Point gleaned form looking at pictures: reading popular magazines such as Dwell and environmentalist blogs gives one the sense that a green house is a specific product that looks a certain way (modernist, highly designed), not that there are varying degrees of greenness and that ordinary homes can be green. Many of the building codes studied in this article applied to certifying ordinary homes built in vernacular colonial styles.

- The survey of building codes identified 4 types of logic: restrictive (efficiency for own sake, supports econ growth, defines unsustainability as lack of efficiency
sometimes seen as greenwashing), strategic (values efficiency but as means to protect home/industry owners, not for own sake; environmental problem defined in terms of conflict; sustainability seen as a "trade-off" problem, so seeks middle point where least is given up), adaptive (proactive, seeking long0term solutions; signs of first 2 logics; seeks to continuously redefine relationships between industry, gov't, public, and environment; constructivist worldview), and expansive (environmental problem understood as social problem requiring reform; whole-systems approach; "civilizational change" - society slowly modifying its values; seek concretization - process by which buildings are integrated into natural energy-flows - and fundamentally redefine limits of economic choices) (66-67)

- idea of concretization is most interesting: most green building interests would consider solar panels sand alternative energy sources exemplary additions to a green home, but this does not fundamentally change our reliance on energy add-ons. Solar panels are essentially the same as a/c in relying on an external source of power. Proponents of concretization support only passive processes such as passive heating, cooling, etc. (67, bottom)

- "Standardization is, for better or worse, the process by which local conflicts are commonly resolved. Interpreting this phenomenon positively would be to argue that the standardisation of green building practices reflects a changing cultural horizon and aticipates new technical codes intent upon altering the definition of 'good building.' To interpret this phenomenon sceptically would be to argue that standardization tends to suppress those local discourses that constitute what Kenneth Frampton has called 'tectonic culture.'" (68-69)

- Authors see the reason for LEED's pervasiveness as a matter of timing: it arrived early to the market and promoted itself strongly as an international standard. It also reflects the interests of shareholders by giving added market value to those products that it certifies.