I enjoyed Jeff Stein’s interview with Alex Wilson in the Measure issue.  I disagree, however, with Wilson’s opinion that designers need only know the proper resources to achieve good “green” results, and that the “intelligent” people who write the standards can handle the rest.  To the contrary, I believe architects need to be exceptionally sharp and critical, especially when it comes to intelligently engaging environmental standards—and more importantly, SURPASSING them.

When it comes to thinking “generations” in advance and pursuing truly zero-carbon architecture (a step beyond being ‘less bad’), we- as an industry- need to start being critical of our own decision-making processes, and develop robust design methodologies, rather than using green guides as a crutch to limp towards a slower rate of environmental decline.  We need to integrate environmental intelligence into our practices in a way that turns the checklists into a formality, rather than a prevailing catalyst for decision-making.  We need to create a professional culture which produces designers who ask informed, critical questions, who can assess the complexities of “greenness” within a coherent, intelligent framework; who can identify and resolve the most critical problems, and who can do all this without compromising their design integrity or restricting the creative flexibility our industry needs to thrive.  Their environmental skills need to be inseparable from their design skills.  In other words, we need to fundamentally change the way we teach and practice architecture.

Sustainability is, by definition, how well an entity withstands the test of time and maintains its expected level of performance.  The practice of architecture is fundamentally an industry of knowledge and expertise. It’s no more sustainable to “out-source” our thinking and problem solving, than it is to “out-source” the manufacture of green products.  By extension, the manufacture and maintenance of environmental design knowledge and the construction of robust design methodologies need to “move closer to the point of use.”  As an industry, we need to evolve.

Lisa Ann Pasquale
M.Sc Candidate, Sustainable Environmental Design
The Architectural Association, London