A hallmark of the Green Man movement of the late 1800s, this face on the Swedenberg Chapel in Cambridge is representative of over 200 Boston-area buildings which were decorated similarly and characterized by hair, eyebrows and beards made of leaves.
An exhibit featuring the latest green designs of Europe shines light on the path America is bound to follow. “Ten Shades of Green” is an exhibition of drawings, models, photographs and computer simulations of contemporary European buildings on display now at the Boston Architectural Center. Assembled by the Architectural League of New York, the show’s focus is on leading European architects who are producing innovative, high-performance buildings that characterize the “green” movement in architecture and culture worldwide.
This is an exhibit about 10 key issues – “Ten Shades of Green” – that will guide the design and construction of the next generation of American buildings, not because of any federal mandate or popular moral transformation, but rather because of market forces within the building and real estate industry itself. As the work on display shows so powerfully, these issues already guide the builders and designers of the current generation of European buildings. In this country, where 5 percent of the world’s population uses 30 percent of the world’s resources – we’re next.
Only 100 years ago, humans on the planet numbered just 2.5 billion people. Back then – when much of the local building stock was constructed – builders, developers and architects didn’t concern themselves with issues like “replenishable resources.” Water pollution didn’t worry America then; the burning of fossil fuels to power buildings didn’t seem to be a problem. One hundred years ago, more people worked out of doors; healthy materials to construct buildings weren’t a concern. Where to get the energy to build and run buildings wasn’t, at that time, an issue of national defense. Now, in a world of 6.5 billion humans, all needing buildings in which to live and work, the result is:
Can these new buildings be as inept in their relationship with the natural world as all those we have built until now? No, they can’t. Will green architecture fix this? No, it won’t. Truly green architecture, even as a concept, is almost unimaginable. But its possibility must exist. “Ten Shades of Green” shows how to begin.
The “Ten Shades” have been chosen to illustrate what a fully green approach to architecture might be. They describe issues of energy use and building performance, recycling building materials, total life-cycle costing of building projects, preserving a sense of place, accessibility and city form, human health in buildings, quality of life – criteria that require a high level of creativity on everyone’s part to meet. No building designed and built today meets all 10 of these criteria; instead, the buildings that are included in the exhibit demonstrate various degrees of “greenness.” Peter Buchanan, the exhibit’s curator, said they were chosen because each is a complete work of architecture whose designers have integrated environmental responsibility with their design ambitions for the buildings. Each responds to and supports an enlightened vision of community life. And each is an example of leading-edge engineering applied to structure, materials and mechanical systems.
Examples include the work in Europe of architects who currently have clients in Boston as well. One of these, Sir Norman Foster, literally reinvents the skyscraper at the new Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany. He turns the building inside out, placing elevator core and stair towers at the edge of the building, allowing natural light and fresh air to flow through gardens that spiral up through the building’s center, and which act like lungs to the office tower. Another, Renzo Piano, has created an extremely energy-efficient home for the Beyeler Foundation Museum in Basel, Switzerland. Its extraordinary roof, made of layers of glass – both clear and milk-colored – and perforated metal, controls sunlight and heat in the building by both reflection and refraction. In Wurzburg, Germany, Webler and Geissler Architekten have designed hollow glass walls in their Gotz Manufacturing Headquarters building that do all the work of a normal heating and ventilating system. The glass is loaded with electronic sensors that automatically control blinds, open windows, slide roof vents and operate fans, making the building function almost as a flower does, opening its petals when necessary to achieve an optimal balance of comfort, light, energy efficiency and beauty.
“Ten Shades of Green” shows that for truly green architecture to spring forth America must alter its current practice of making buildings out of dead material and inserting them into the web of life that it terms the natural world. These dead buildings, the entire current stock, and the 38.4 million acres of roads and parking lots (in the United States alone) that connect them, are an enormous burden on the earth’s surviving biota. Man has long since conquered nature on the ground. We conquer a little more of it with every building we construct. The challenge now is to make an architecture that integrates man with the nature that remains and which supports the lives of more than just the human species.
Architects in the late 1800s conceived architectural ornaments in Boston and other major U.S. cities that were images of the heads of men whose hair, eyebrows and beards were leaves, all carved of stone: Green Men. The movement stopped abruptly at the beginning of World War I, and with the development of stripped-down international-style architecture. After that war, it ended altogether.
But Green Men still adorn more than 200 standing Boston-area buildings. To see their leafy imagery reminds us of the intertwined relationship of mind and nature. It is this connected understanding of life on earth, and the place of architecture in that life, that “Ten Shades of Green” invites us to really see. It is not too late to develop an architecture of possibility in this country. This exhibit in Boston gives us a glimpse of what it might be.
“Ten Shades of Green” runs through Nov. 1, 2002, in the McCormick Gallery of the Boston Architectural Center at 320 Newbury St. in Boston.
To learn more about the exhibit, see the Web site: www.archleague.org/tenshadesofgreen. To explore the state of green Architecture in Boston, visit the Boston Society of Architects’ Committee on the Environment at: http://committees.architects.org/green/newcote.htm.
