SIX
Essays on
Integrated Design

Village Homes Community on the left in this photo still has not been equaled in thoughtful sustainable planning and passive solar design in the United States.

Introduction to Synergistic Design

Integrated design involves bringing together all the factors discussed largely in isolation in the previous chapters to create a workable whole. As the examples of designs and built projects at the end of each of chapter have shown, integrated design often involves having single components perform multiple functions. The goal is to remove redundancies that exist in the strictly additive assemblages used in most modern buildings in order to reduce cost and to achieve greater performance and efficiency.

The key to success with this integrated approach to environmental design is achieving synergy. Synergy happens where and when the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts, and the parts become optimized in relationship to the whole. The concept of synergy is not difficult, but it is overlooked in most design. There are common examples of dynamic synergy all around us:

• In metallurgy, when an alloy of two metals is stronger than each component.
• In plant and animal breeding, when hybrid vigor can improve offspring of the parent stock.
• In team organization, when a collection of individual specialties fit together so well as to become invincible.
• In a good marriage, where each partner adds to the union in a way that the two can do much more together than apart.
• In aesthetic compositions, where color, form, and proportion interact to achieve that level of transcendence so common in great architecture throughout history.

Sadly, our industrial-era mind-set is obsessed with efficiency based on parts and narrowness of view rather than integration, systems, and synergies. The efficiency of a synergetic whole, once achieved, will always be greater than its components.

In this concluding chapter, we have invited two of our colleagues, Pliny Fisk III and Richard Levine, to join us in presenting longer-range views of how we can achieve a level of integration in architecture and planning where the whole exceeds the sum of its parts and becomes synergetic design. Our complementary approaches for exploring this new design frontier all have the same goal—sustainability—but each takes a different tack based on its author’s training and experience.

Fisk is well known for his intricate and sometimes difficult graphics (some of which illustrate his essay), but he is nonetheless on the cutting edge of graphically modeling the complexity of scales—from the planetary to the microbial—involved in any attempt to illustrate the interdependence and interactivity of ecological structures and issues, cultural and social concerns, and material and economic conditions. His work represents the beginnings of a new working language of sustainable design.

Levine’s essay on city-regions quite succinctly critiques certain ideas about sustainability that are in themselves unsustainable. His advice is “Don’t pick the low-hanging fruit.” In other words, we need major changes, not just a few compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

Together, these four views illustrate the complexity and diversity that is inherent in synergetic design for our time and place. Use the one or a combination of approaches that best suits your interests and fits the challenges you face.

Fig. 6.1. Topics of essays.

Essay 1: Sustainable Communities

David Bainbridge, Associate Professor, Marshall Goldsmith School of Management, Alliant International University, San Diego, California

Community Matters

The growing awareness of very serious problems with global and local ecosystem stability and resource availability is encouraging new consideration of the sustainability of our current lifeways and communities. The World Commission on Environment and Development (1987), chaired by Norwegian Gro Harlem Brundtland, defined sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This definition, the best that could be agreed upon from a diverse group with very different worldviews, emphasized environmental constraints; but I believe the social and cultural factors may be more important.

To be fully sustainable, a community must not only understand its dependence on nature’s provisioning services (air, water, flood control, food) and natural capital while also meeting the psychological and social needs of its residents. This is not a new challenge; the Greek writer Alcaeus, writing in the seventh century BC, commented, “not houses finely roofed nor the stones of walls well built, nor canals or dockyards make the city, but men [and today of course women —eds.] able to seize their opportunities.” This overview of social and environmental issues involved in sustainable, integrated design is just a start (refer to the references and further reading list for more detail). There is a spectrum of needs that must be met, beginning with physical needs for food and shelter and moving to more complex emotional needs. Most of these have direct implications for resource use and sustainability.

Physical Needs

Although we all depend on natural systems for the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, and the materials we use to build our homes, we have lost touch with this connection. Water now comes from the faucet or in a bottle; food comes packaged, prepared, and free of dirt; energy flows from the wall socket from distant power plants; and wastes are simply flushed away. But natural and managed ecosystems still provide us with the requirements for life, and every one of us has an impact on our planet. We need to rebuild a cultural awareness of our relation to and dependence on nature. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975*) provides an entertaining fictional account to help people understand this connection and is a good book to introduce the concept to students in high school and college. As he commented in a more recent article, “It is just as important for all of us to grasp an ecological vocabulary as it is for us to understand arithmetic” (Callenbach, 1999*). His work also illustrates the slow change in culture, with Portland, Oregon, adopting many of the ideas he suggested after twenty or thirty years (Timberg, 2008*).

In chapters 1–5, we showed that it is possible to utilize renewable resources and dramatically reduce ecological impacts, often at little or no additional cost. In many cases, the individual building is an appropriate scale at which to work, but in other cases the subdivision scale or neighborhood or city will be more appropriate. Simply ensuring that new housing and buildings will be sustainable will not suffice; we need to rebuild our wasteful, unhealthy, and very inefficient neighborhoods and cities as well.

Fig. 6.2. The eco-footprint of Tokyo illustrates the challenge we face.

A Big Challenge

How big is the challenge? We can begin to explore the problem by calculating our ecological footprint to see how much productive land, water, and resources are needed to support our current lifestyles. Examine your own lifestyle with an ecological footprint quiz at http://ecofoot.org. The average American in 2006 required 24 acres. This seems plausible and even possible in a rural setting, but when we examine the ecological footprints of cities and countries, we begin to realize the enormous challenge we face. London’s ecological footprint, for example takes up almost the entire country (Srinivas, 2006). Tokyo’s footprint is three times the size of the entire country of Japan, and the Netherlands’ ecological footprint is five times the land area of the country.

Improving the physical sustainability of communities and cities will not be easy, because we generally haven’t studied these issues much, the flow pathways and impacts can be complicated, and they often have difficult-to-predict long-term consequences. However, the issues of buildings, energy, water, waste disposal, and air quality are generally well understood, and technical standards and solutions are known. The most basic goal was well stated by Aldo Leopold (1949*): “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it does otherwise.” But the second goal is to protect, enhance, and maintain the culture and community.

Cultural and Psychological Needs and Health

To be sustainable, a community must have a healthy economy and a culture that provides support for interconnection and cooperation, safety, cohesion, education, opportunity, health, and equity. These issues are complex, interrelated, and often very difficult to change. We have spent too little time thinking about what a community should or might provide and what our goals for the future should be. Too often the greatest investment has been in programs and polices that are driven by special-interest groups that have disastrous health and environmental costs, such as “making commuting by automobile from distant bedroom communities easy and inexpensive” and “producing electricity by burning coal.”

Everyone would perhaps define his or her ideal community a bit differently, based on his or her own experience, philosophy, and education, but consensus can emerge about the priorities for a sustainable community. Is it creativity, health, support for the disadvantaged, satisfaction, love, education, opportunity, income, identity, participation, safety, friends, volunteers, freedom, privacy, recreation, health, religion, lack of crime, affordable housing?

A number of cities in the United States, Europe, and Asia have now started sustainability programs, with an emphasis on environmental considerations. Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Freiburg, Munster, London and other European cities have made it clear that developed countries can make changes that improve sustainability. Curitiba, Brazil, has proved that even a growing city in a developing country can do a great deal as well. The United States has generally lagged, although Davis (California), Seattle, Portland, Scottsdale (Arizona), Boulder (Colorado), Santa Monica, and San Francisco have made a concerted effort to improve their sustainability.

Fig. 6.3. Community markets bring people together and support local enterprise; this one is located in Davis, California.

Sustainability Across Time

Sustainability evaluation and assessment require a view across time. Oregon has perhaps done the most work in evaluating community sustainability over time, with some data series going back to 1990–1991 (Schlossberg and Zimmerman, 2003*). Surveys in person and online can help refine the community indicators and increase public participation in the process. Ultimately it is not what the data say, but what people feel that matters. Bhutan’s use of Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead of Gross National Product (GNP) may be a more tenable approach for measuring community progress. This approach may seem idealistic and removed from hardheaded conservative administration, but as a few examples will show, it has clear and important cost implications.

Health

Health may be one of the most important criteria because it carries such large cost burdens if it is missing. Toronto, Canada, helped start the healthy cities movement with a meeting in 1984. This program overcame early objections in Toronto and has now spread to many other cities around the world. City restrictions on smoking have gained ground, adding immense health benefits to people and reducing health care costs, but other equally important factors, like obesity, have been largely ignored.

One of the results of the current disconnection between design choices and health has been the rapid rise in obesity. By 2014, the obesity and overweight rates in the auto-dominated countries are predicted to reach 70 percent in the United States, 65 percent in the United Kingdom, and 50 percent in Australia (Sassi et al., 2009*). In 2000–2001, the obesity rates in these countries were 31 percent US, 22 percent UK, and 21 percent Australia.

In contrast, countries with better bicycle and pedestrian planning and mass transit are less fat, but obesity is still cause for concern with Denmark at 10 percent, the Netherlands 9 percent, France 9 percent, and Japan 3 percent (OECD Health Data, 2003). Building our communities and cities for cars has made them distinctly unhealthy for people, with enormous long-term costs for medical care. Investing in bicycle and pedestrian facilities pays immediate health dividends and has a very high benefit-to-cost ratio. Amsterdam’s excellent bicycle infrastructure was built and is being improved with an investment of millions of dollars—the cost of a short section of freeway or one freeway interchange. Forty percent of the commute traffic is now by bike in Amsterdam!

States and communities can also play a key role in getting people out and active (www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html). Only Colorado was below 20 percent obese in 2008. Although Colorado still holds the title of “leanest state in America,” the percentage of overweight and obese citizens in the state is on the rise. LiveWell is an NGO committed to fighting the obesity epidemic through consumer education and policy and environmental changes. The investment of money for health instead of professional sports would provide great returns.

Fig. 6.4. Childhood obesity rate.

Fig. 6.5. Bicycles are good for people and the planet.

Education

The most critical challenge for sustainability in the long term is education. This includes developing ecological literacy and a near-universal understanding of sustainability, and providing the quality of education needed to remain globally competitive. Reductions in education spending in many areas as a result of the recent financial meltdown have reinforced a growing divide between rich and poor and have priced bright and hardworking minority and working-class children out of the educational systems. Opportunity for all should be the priority, with more full scholarships for outstanding students and more opportunities for students to work on paid community sustainability projects.

Sustainability issues may provide the compelling topic needed to reengage students in learning, combining hands-on work in food production, energy and water management (helping improve efficiency and comfort), and waste handling at every school. More than a third of students in the United States considered “school a place they do not want to go” in 2000 (Lyne, 2001*), and with the growing emphasis on teaching to the test this number has probably increased. One of David’s best students looked back on his years at a San Diego high school as being “just like prison.” Sustainability as a comprehensive theme for learning across the curriculum can help reengage the full student body from Advanced Placement science to auto shop. Education, engagement, and hope are also the best tools to fight gangs and crime.

Fig. 6.6. Solar building class project, AIU.

Interaction

The design of neighborhoods for automobiles instead of people limits interaction and community. Judy and Michael Corbett designed interaction into their innovative solar subdivision, Village Homes (see here). They created common spaces that were shared by several homes so that neighbors would have to meet and vineyards, fruit orchards, and gardens for people to work together. They also made the development for people instead of cars. A survey showed that residents of Village Homes knew forty of their neighbors, while residents in surrounding developments knew less than half as many (Bainbridge et al., 1979*; Corbett and Corbett, 2000*). In Village Homes, children play safely outside as part of a known community. These intertwined factors improve health, cohesion, equity, and quality of life.

Urban streetscapes in Europe and a growing number of American cities create spaces that bring people together. Music, art, food, festivals, and community-action projects can help create community among strangers and can solidify and support neighborhoods.

Fig. 6.7. Michael Corbett, developer of Village Homes.

Participation

Community involvement is also essential, but difficult to measure and rarely used as an indicator by politicians or decision makers. In general, community participation has gone down in the United States, particularly for the important thirty-through-fifty-nine age group (Putnam, 2000*). The increasingly long work hours, the necessity for double or triple incomes to support a family, and longer commutes (a design decision) are making volunteer work and community participation more difficult. The loss of these key players represents a loss of billions of dollars once contributed to these communities. Policies and programs can identify and encourage participation. Starting the search for community assets instead of focusing on community needs is helpful (Kretzmann and McKnight, 1993*).

Economy

A sustainable economy should generate good jobs, provide sufficient funding to maintain and upgrade infrastructure, education, and health, and offer opportunities for advancement and security. Innovation is increasingly important in the face of national and global competition.

New jobs should be at wages above the living wage, with opportunity for advancement and satisfying careers. Income should be sufficient to allow for saving, and hours worked should allow time for volunteerism and community involvement. Income inequality should be declining, because increasing inequity can lead to conflict and long-term instability. Income inequality and unequal access to medical care can also lead to a wide range of problems.

The health of the economy is also measured in government accountability and fiscal health. Sustainability requires well-funded and -maintained infrastructure and capital improvements made in a timely manner. Income should be balanced with expenditures, and costs should be paid by users from current accounts, not by bonded indebtedness of future generations. Broader measures of economic health, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), should be used to measure the progress of communities, states, and nations. GPI integrates health, education, environment, and economics and more accurately reflects how people feel they are doing.

Fig. 6.8. GDP versus Genuine Progress Indicator.

Eliminating the Drivers of Unsustainability

Awareness of sustainability issues is growing, but understanding does not change behavior very readily. Economic signals do. Uncounted and incorrectly attributed costs lead the market to perform very poorly. Consumers make unsustainable choices because prices reflect only a small fraction of the total transaction cost, leaving many “externalities” out of the picture. These externalities include the costs of social disruption, pollution, disease, and damage to vital ecosystem services (such as the impact of the Gulf oil spill on fisheries and tourism). These externalities are integral costs of goods and services and often exceed the current “price.” Three examples will show how these costs can be incorporated in products, and the impact this would have on communities.

Autos

A conservative estimate suggests that Americans currently pay only one-third to one-half the true cost of driving (Bainbridge, 2009*). Others suggest it is closer to one-tenth, if a broader range of environmental and societal costs were factored in and if the true cost of infrastructure were more carefully costed out. The highway current infrastructure repair backlog in the United States is estimated to be almost half a trillion dollars and continues to increase daily.

Imagine what people would do differently if they had to pay the true cost of using an automobile. They would walk and ride bicycles more often, and they would change where they live in relation to work. Denmark recently committed $400 million for bicycle system upgrades; this would be $22 billion if we spent the same amount per capita in the United States. This might seem high, but it represents the estimated health costs for obesity in this country for less than one month in 2018.

Stormwater

Making the polluter pay impact fees is usually the most effective manner of addressing environmental problems, and stormwater is a perfect example. It is relatively easy to charge fees for both stormwater pollutants and stormwater runoff. For the pollutants found in stormwater, a pollution charge should be added at point of sale for nonrecyclables, and a deposit fee should be instituted for materials such as motor oil, pesticides, and fertilizer that show up in stormwater.

Stormwater-runoff-related flooding can be minimized by charging for runoff exceeding natural rates in undisturbed ecosystems. In the United States, a few cities have adopted stormwater fees, but rates are usually nominal. Denver collects a fee based on the impervious surface area for each property estimated using digital global satellite mapping.

Table 6.1. The Denver Stormwater Fee Structure in 2007.

In Germany, fees more realistically reflect costs, with cost per square meter of impervious surface (McCann, 2008*) running about five times Denver rates. Rainwater harvesting and green roofs have been booming in Germany because they can minimize stormwater fees. These green solutions are also supported by codes and incentives. These types of incentives are also appearing in the United States. In Boulder, Colorado, systems that meet hundred-year storm requirements are eligible for an 80 percent fee reduction. Stormwater fees can reduce taxpayers’ traditional general fund subsidies for developers and builders and support education, restoration, and repair of waterways and natural areas as well.

Food

Student food programs have traditionally emphasized lowest cost instead of best value. Low-quality, high-fat, and high-sugar convenience foods have contributed to the growing problem of diabetes in the United States. One in three children in this country is now expected to be diabetic by the time he or she graduates from high school. For African American children, it is likely to be one in two. These problems carry enormous costs to society in lost productivity, suffering, and medical care. Medical care costs alone for diabetes are now estimated at $45 billion a year. Berkeley’s innovative school food program with curriculum and activities that embrace organic gardening, healthy and tasty food preparation, and sustainability has demonstrated what can be done (Waters, 2008*). The cost is not insignificant—almost $400,000 a year for a gardener, garden supplies, chef, and teaching support. But if just one student each year does not develop diabetes, the lifetime savings fully cover the added cost.

Fig. 6.9. Stormwater costs paid by taxpayers, caused by developers.

The Goal

Improving sustainability is a long-term goal and process. It will take inspiration, action, research, and monitoring. Monitoring and reporting are essential, because what isn’t measured, isn’t managed. Recycling of waste is a modest success in a sea of environmental failures, in large part because it is measured and carries penalties if diversion levels are not achieved. True-cost accounting is an essential element of sustainable management. This should include a careful review and dismantling of subsidies and perverse incentives for nonrenewable uses and waste and special-interest domination of the political process. Sustainability reporting and labeling can help investors and consumers make wise choices. Development doesn’t have to be a dirty word—if it is done well!

The ultimate goal of development should be a healthy, happy, and productive human community in a stable, rich, and productive environment. This is possible and perhaps essential; but it will not happen with current development focus on short-term profit based on exorbitant subsidies. In most cases, we can improve both function and structure rapidly by managing organic matter and water more wisely and limiting ecotoxicity impacts.

Fig. 6.10. Ecosystem descriptors useful for designing sustainable development.

Fig. 6.11. Development impacts by land use type.

Fig. 6.12. Time scales of concern.

Fig. 6.13a. The edible schoolyard, Pittsburgh. www.growpittsburgh.org/growpittsburgh/Projects.

Fig. 6.13b. The edible schoolyard, Berkeley, Alice Waters. Photo by Thomas Heinser.

The important ecosystem-level issues that need to be addressed in sustainable development include ecosystem structure and function. The regulation of ecosystem processes, the relationship of ecosystem structure to function, the control of ecosystem dynamics over time, and the interchange of materials and energy with the surrounding landscape are all important parts of the puzzle. These are often explored in studies of landscape ecology (Naveh and Lieberman, 1994*), ecosystem restoration (Ehrenfeld and Toth, 1997*; Bainbridge, 2007*), and sustainable development (Mollison and Slay, 1997*; Termorshuizen and Opdam, 2009*).

The key to planning a sustainable development is understanding the ecological and cultural histories of the site. The tools of environmental history are better than ever before and can help us understand the ecosystem conditions we see today, by better understanding what was there before. These critical insights can help us plan a development that restores ecosystem structure and function and improves the quality of life today and for future generations.

Fig. 6.14. Wolken Environmental Education Center at Hidden Villa in Los Altos, California, integrates straw bale construction, passive heating, passive cooling, natural light, and solar electricity production for a net zero energy building. It was among the first projects to integrate FSC-certified wood for the trusses, and even though regulations have not allowed gray-water or rainwater harvesting, the building was pre-plumbed to utilize these on-site water resources.

Essay 2: Prototypes for a Living Future

Pliny Fisk III, Co-Director, Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, Austin, Texas

The key to understanding and regenerating the ecology of place such as a city is establishing a framework to understand the conditions that influence how decisions are made and how the altered ecology of the city-region is evolving.

Fig. 6.15. Austin’s Multi-Green Roof Concept to Develop City Wide Green Utilities.

This realization grew out of our Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS) National Input–Output/Life Cycle Assessment/Geographic Information Systems model (page 208). Correlation of dollar equivalency and human impact revealed by a cell-by-cell accounting showed the greatest impact located along the urban edges. The pattern was consistent: Urban areas of higher population tended to mediate impacts, while rural environments took on the brunt of the pollution. If we are to “save our planet,” a very different planning paradigm is needed that uses the city, combined with its rural partners, to trigger systemic planetary health and well-being.

A recent experience from Austin illustrates the need to understand the city as a system of public-, nonprofit-, and private-sector actors and the use of creative intervention to move toward a regenerative mode. CMPBS and associated activists recognized the land-use environmental challenge posed by the ubiquitous big-box-warehouse typology as an opportunity for Austin to continue its steps toward becoming a model green city. The plan that emerged involved retrofitting big-box buildings with rooftop systems for rainwater harvesting, ecological wastewater treatment, high-yield organic food production, high-efficiency organic fertilizer production, solar photovoltaic panels, and algal-based liquid fuel systems—all existing technologies. The plan incorporated the guiding principles of previous work by balancing needs with local life-cycle procedures that involved prioritizing local sourcing, transport, processing, and re-sourcing of needed materials and components. Without adding a single residential photovoltaic panel or LEED-certified building, this system as proposed was estimated to supply almost 20 percent of Austin’s electric needs, more than 15 percent of Austin’s water needs, exceed Austin’s fresh-vegetable food demand, and meet close to 20 percent of Austin’s biofuel needs. The plan illustrates the potential productivity and efficiency of synergistic design.

Our previous experience with developing Austin’s award-winning Green Building Program, the first in the nation, shows what must be done to achieve a project of this magnitude even in a location with great advantages. The Green Building Program was a result of a progressive mayor and city council, forty-two supportive citizen commissions, and many activist renewable-energy groups. Furthermore, we established a very futuristic, “maximum potential” model as a goal to strive for. Our success was the process itself, one that capitalized on existing checks and balances within Austin’s urban system, resulting in a program that used a fiscal and environmental accounting and balances system. The green building program required the following steps, and the Multi-Green Roof City Wide Green Utility will have to be even more rigorous.

• A city/region planning framework must be identified and put into practice so that all stakeholders (the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, citizen commissions, the mayor, and city council) understand their interrelated responsibilities with a system for monitoring and measuring.
• An understanding of the four essential flows (information, currency, energy, material) and how they organize society and resources in general.
• How best to strategically affect these flows. For example, if currency is not available for the support of venture capital applied to eco-technologies, action needs to be taken. The media and information regarding the regionalized flow of energy and materials will play a key role in finding new sources of funding.
• The need to identify the state of systems accounts (air balance, water balance, food balance, energy balance, and material balance).
• The need to find and apply appropriate information regarding place—for example, the project area’s climate, hydrology, soils, and ecosystem with monitoring to track trends of improvement or decline.
• The need to identify influential and effective partners in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors to facilitate the process and to engage the community.
• Work within a national/international worknet to help keep us abreast of developments in other similar programs around the world so we can benefit from lessons learned and new strategies and technology.
• Integrate an information-dissemination network to reach practitioners, stakeholders, and the general public simultaneously.

Two conceptualization tools—one contextual and the other operational—have helped us understand how Austin, or other city-regions, could learn from and build on lessons to shape future programs. The contextual tool is the Development Ladder; it addresses the city-region’s state of development at varying stages of its evolution. The operational tool, ProtoScope, provides a systemic representation of how the city could potentially function and has evolved from our experiences with a range of cultures around the world. This idealized, systemic view of the city-region became what now call a ProtoCity, or an idealized place-based prototype city of the future.

Development Ladder

The Development Ladder establishes the current status of a place and identifies effective action steps. It is structured around four basic stages: surviving, maturing, anticipatory, and worldly. The first step in effecting positive development at any scale is by determining the city-region’s position on the Development Ladder. The goal is not to state that any of these stages are superior or inferior, but simply to help identify and recognize key attributes. The Development Ladder can apply to the city-region as a whole or can assess a city-region’s position in terms of specific issues such as public health, education, governance, employment, environmental sustainability, or superstructure.

Four essential flows determine a city-region’s position on and movement along the development ladder:

1. Information: The most fluid and most useful as well as the most easily disrupted of all the flows. We use it in several ways such as locating global partners who have had success dealing with similar issues in similar conditions. Embedding measurement and feedback mechanisms is essential (information progress improves feedback, such as the smart grid, where home energy meters and systems are interlinked and communicate with the utility).

2. Currency: The strategic flow of money through the city-region. This flow includes the strategic placement of available dollars to improve specific triggers for change. Innovation financing that ultimately accounts for ecosystem services is particularly important.

3. Energy: The energy flow, like the material flow, needs to be understood from an EcoBalancing standpoint with an emphasis on localized sourcing, processing, use, and re-sourcing. Energy flow must be worked with at every level of society so that codes, investment, design, and engineering become fail-safe owing to scalar life-cycle redundancy from home to neighborhood to region.

4. Materials: Similar to the flow of energy, material becomes a significant area of a localized creativity of use, so that it is not only sourced within the region but is low in embodied energy, efficient in the amount of material used, and is sophisticated relative to reuse through either shape or constituents.

Development of the ProtoCity

In 1990 while developing Austin’s Green Building Program, CMPBS adapted Ashby’s conceptual model of the brain as a tool to understand the interaction of the city’s public and private sectors. The model that evolved placed public bodies in the role of the environment (better described as the keepers of the commons) and the private sector as the organism trying to respond to the environment but also effecting and helping to develop policy. Monitoring occurred via the commissions that kept close ties with the city, reporting to them if, and when, environmental problems arose.

The original model considers the city-region in homeostasis without accounting for change; we have since determined that a dynamic representation is required. For example, urban vegetation may increase in extent and diversity with increased urbanization, just as locally produced, organic food may become more available. Additionally, a damaged ecosystem needs to be repaired and restructured not only so it is self-healing but even more, so that it can be revitalizing and regenerating at a system level. A further adaptation of Ashby’s diagram provides opportunity to create dynamism in the limits of a system. This is accomplished with ProtoScope.

Fig. 6.16. (a) City of Austin, Texas, Green Building Program 1991. (b) CMPBS ProtoScope 2008.

ProtoScope

ProtoScope provides the ingredients for triggering a city-region to move through the Development Ladder by creating the context for change. One may enter at any stage recognizing that every community is in one of four stages of development.

The initial steps in ProtoScope establish the biophysical metrics of how your location relates to global ecological, hydrological, climatic, and soil trends. This locates ProtoSpace (patterns of place on earth like your own), helping the citizenry to connect to relevant issues in other cities with similar biophysical conditions.

ProtoPartners are peer groups within these city-regions that can be linked by topic and location. These are our new global network partners that have been successful in helping bring these places to their next step in the development described in the Development Ladder.

In short, ProtoScope is a tool that helps identify systems for planetary revival. It helps search the world for solutions using pattern-finding algorithms that will soon be available to mine within eight different global databases.

Fig. 6.17. The Development Ladder helps assess the current status of a community and its potential for development by tracking four essential flows in one or more indicator categories.

Fig. 6.18. ProtoScope, ProtoMetrics, and ProtoSpace for Galveston, Texas.

Fig. 6.19. ProtoPartners example for Galveston, Texas.

Fig. 6.20. ProtoScope applied to development in Galveston, Texas.

Fig. 6.21. An open-building system for disaster recovery in Galveston, Texas.

Essay 3: Sustainable City-Regions

Richard Levine, Architect, CSC Design Studio, Director of the Center for Sustainable Cities, University of Kentucky, Lexington

Sustainability: Living within our fair share of the earth’s resources on a renewable, regenerative basis is the great challenge of our generation. While it would be difficult to argue with the goal of sustainability in the abstract, the means to achieve it, and indeed the effective meaning of sustainability, is highly contested. Analytical approaches to sustainability are typically couched as wish lists of what you might find if you happened to stumble upon some future sustainable city. Though it makes for easy proposals, this approach is highly problematic.

The many dimensions of unsustainability are understood as a global problem, but the earth is far too large a scale to analyze the dynamics of unsustainability or to create programs to confront it. While many aspects of what is understood as the sustainability crisis—excessive consumption, resource depletion, water shortages, climate change, the energy crisis, peak oil, financial meltdown, and so on—are described in global terms, all contributions to unsustainability arise in a particular local place. It is also true that, although there are many actions we can choose at the scale of our homes and individual lifestyles to marginally lower our personal load on the environment, this is far too small a scale to make any real difference. In considering the many possible scales at which to tackle the question of sustainability—from local to global—the city and its supply region stands out as a scale that is both large and systemic enough to make the difference, yet small enough to be manageable.

It is at this city scale where sustainability becomes possible. Historically, ecological balances were negotiated within the scale of the city-region. We have called this historic balance-seeking process “proto-sustainability.” It is achieved and maintained through a negotiated long-term balance between the needs of a town and the ability of its agricultural and natural countryside to provide for those needs on a continuing basis.

The passive solar movement, along with the environmental movement at large, has moved ahead in small incremental steps. Since the birth of the passive solar movement in the mid-1970s, each succeeding year brought the question: “What’s the next step?” and each year saw new emerging trends and innovations: from active solar calculation methods, to passive solar test structures, electronic-network-analysis-derived passive-calculation methods, roof ponds, super-insulation, and many other small and sometimes significant breakthroughs and changes in emphasis. In the earliest years, scientists and engineers formed the backbone of the solar movement in the United States. Their forays into developing solar hot-water collectors were backed up with extensive technical analysis and testing.

By 1978, the passive movement had demonstrated the efficacy of passive applications through both instrumented test cells and thermal network analysis pioneered by Phil Niles and popularized by Doug Balcomb. It was a very exciting time; each year a different approach reached ascendancy, and experimentation proceeded at a rapid pace. Many innovations stemmed from solid theoretical principles, but their actual levels of performance were initially unknown. As innovations developed in parallel with one another, there was an inevitable, if usually friendly, competition—active versus passive, passive versus super-insulation, Trombe wall versus direct gain, water-based systems versus air-based systems, et cetera. Both discussion and construction were largely limited to a building type that is not particularly sustainability oriented—the single-family house. These solar houses were built in diverse climates, with few being monitored and all being vulnerable to the vagaries of greatly differing usage patterns. Because of the additional difficulty of comparing relative costs and economics, it was not easy to draw any real conclusions. With the sheer volume of projects built, some applications inevitably proved much more effective than others, while still others revealed unforeseen negative consequences. It somehow came as a surprise to solar scientists working from an analytical perspective that an excellent, optimized solar collector might not necessarily work so well in a given system, and even an effective system might not perform as desired in an actual building. It is important to note that a given sustainability-oriented building might not necessarily fit well into the system of a particular sustainable city-region.

Fig. 6.22. New Hope II, Berea, Kentucky, 1985–1986.Using an economical out-of-season heat-collection system that stores summer heat below the village with an appropriate thermal lag so that the temperature beneath the dwelling’s floor slabs is hottest in midwinter—along with passive solar, super-insulation, and PV strategies—this retirement community would be food and energy self-sufficient. (a) Plan. (b) Model.

These were the days before we had an integrated theory of sustainability to work with. There was no clear idea of any overarching goal as to just what it was that we were trying to achieve. And then there was the question of use and appearance. Should a passive solar home be designed differently and look different (and possibly weird?), or should it look like any other home, but with better performance? In the funk of the decades that followed after funding and support for research evaporated, the passive solar movement languished in the United States, but important progress and implementation continued to be made in Europe. With a renewed interest here, some of that European progress, particularly its emphasis on integrative systems, is returning to the United States. The passive house (Passivhaus) movement originating in Germany, which builds superbly well-insulated, tight houses and buildings of the sort that were first built here more than twenty-five years ago, is particularly noteworthy. It has now been well developed by the Germans in a formalized system of analysis and building standards. With its emphasis on extremely low energy usage, the age of economical zero net energy houses and carbon-neutral buildings is upon us.

The solar movement has gone through a series of names—solar homes, active solar, passive solar, energy-conscious design, sustainable architecture, and so on. It has finally landed on the most nondescript and indefinite name of all: green building, which tells us little, and promises even less than any previous description. Green quickly becomes “greenish,” which can mean anything anyone wants it to mean. “Green” is still applied only at the scale of the building, with arbitrary measures of performance parading as standards. The long trajectory of passive innovation points most of all to a need, not for required prescriptive or performance standards, but rather for an overarching goal linked to tangible evidence of “sustainability.” The list of certification schemes is a long one, with the dominant standard in the United States currently being LEED, an aggregated checklist approach that awards different medals—Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum—depending upon the total points amassed in many different, unrelated categories. All this is done in the interest of making better buildings, and seems a desirable goal, but ultimately does not guarantee any particular level of performance and has little to do with sustainability. Although most point categories in the LEED system are composed of positive, sustainability-oriented contributions, there is nothing that holds it all together. A LEED Platinum building is not a “sustainable” building, because as we now understand the concept of sustainability cannot be properly applied at the scale of buildings. In terms of certain aspects of performance, LEED buildings are better buildings, but in German there is the expression: “Better is the enemy of good.” In this time of gathering crisis, better just isn’t good enough.

For all the contributions made through passive solar design, its ultimate value will lie in its unique capability for supporting the sustainability of the human project on Planet Earth. Through passive solar methods, we understand that the importance or emphasis of any given idea or application cannot be known in isolation. Its quality can only be known through the balanced ways in which it may be integrated into a building seen as a larger system, and ultimately to support the sustainability of an even more encompassing system. When pioneering the operational definition of sustainability, we observed early on that the pursuit of small-scale efficiency gains and innovations can have the tendency of limiting the possibilities for systemic change on a more meaningful scale. Our frequent rejoinder has thus been, “Don’t pick the low-hanging fruit.” No farmer would choose a strategy of picking the low-hanging fruit, as each succeeding layer of fruit represents a succession of diminishing returns, becoming more difficult and more expensive to pick until finally, the fruit at the top of the tree is too expensive to pick at all. There are many small actions that make sense in our individual lives, like changing lightbulbs or installing low-flush toilets, but these things can only be done once. The next levels of performance are gained at increasingly greater costs. When the easy, affordable moves have been exhausted, we still find ourselves far from where we would need to be to approach a model that supports true sustainability. In this sense, ecological actions are “nonrenewable resources.” You can only upgrade to a compact fluorescent or an LED once and then you have to look for something that is more difficult to do. Moreover, this response fosters the habit of doing the small easy things and avoiding the more significant, larger-scaled, systemic changes necessary to create a sustainability-driven culture. Fixing small problems does not develop the integrated solutions that make a difference.

So the quality of a particular application—in “passive” terms, a direct gain, a Trombe wall, or a super-insulation approach—starts with its contribution to the balanced performance of a particular system or a particular building in a particular climate or application. We cannot stop there. We must ask the question that finally is unavoidable: “How good is good enough?” As well as the question: “What scale is large enough?” Unless we are content with pursuing medals (silver, gold, platinum) with no particular meaning, we cannot be comfortable with any given level of performance. We must demonstrate how given achievements relate to building performance within a sustainability-balancing process in its neighborhood, within its city-region. In the incremental worldview, you can’t argue with changing lightbulbs, but success at this scale requires the investment of time and resources that tend to divert investment in larger-scale patterns of development. If we reject picking the low-hanging fruit, how then do we proceed with a plan of both action and substance? The question becomes, “What is the first action or the smallest activity that we can take toward sustainability such that each subsequent action is rendered easier and not, as with the more common, but unfruitful approach, more difficult?” This question requires that we both define sustainability in a more concrete way and identify a scale at which it can become operational. We maintain that the most appropriate larger scale is the sustainable city-region, the smallest scale at which human and environmental ecosystems can negotiate material and energy balances.

We can confidently say that what is good enough is sustainability at the scale of the city-region. “Sustainable architecture” is an oxymoron—a building is too small a scale at which to design or to negotiate sustainability. Conversely, no one can think globally, much less have any illusion to effect any sort of global change. These truths are borne out in important lessons from history. Towns and cities, whose origins go back thousands of years, have been the cradle of our civilization and its progress. One thing they all seem to have had in common until modern times is that they operated as what we would now call “proto-sustainable” settlements. That is to say that from a food, energy, and material-flow standpoint, they all had to develop a long-term balance-seeking relationship within the carrying capacity of the immediate environment that supplied them with almost all the resources they needed to maintain their way of life. Though we live in a time of unprecedented material wealth and technological innovation, today there is no city on the face of the planet that is able to do this.

Historically, in most locations, living within a city’s carrying capacity was not a matter of choice. A town that started to live beyond its means or began to deplete its resource base would quickly be faced with the ecological signals of resource depletion and population decline. If these patterns of unsustainable consumption or inadequate production persisted, the town soon disappeared. Feedback as to the state of balance with resources was local and swift, so local communities quickly learned what their lands could provide. In the continual quest to improve individual and social well-being, these communities developed within the boundaries of innovations that worked. These living experiments happened in the continual spirit of experimentation and betterment that is the nature of our species. As we no longer live in a local or self-sufficient world, the boundaries that once made it possible to understand and react to the metabolic stresses of a locale as a largely autonomous system no longer exist. No feedback leads to no control. A system without effective boundaries cannot be maintained in balance. But if a local, resilient system has strong internal balance-seeking capabilities, it can actually thrive with changing conditions at its system boundaries even when those boundaries are rather porous. This is a fundamental characteristic of living systems.

Fig. 6.23. Sustainable Urban Implantation, Whitesburg, Kentucky, 2001–2007. Remediating the toxic characteristics of an unreclaimed strip-mine site with an inexpensive out-of-season solar collection system that also puts summer heat into mining bore holes for winter retrieval, while using the mining high wall as a backstop for the proposed Sustainable City. (a) Perspective sketch. (b) Model.

The sustainable city is to become the unit through which the human experiment will not only survive but also thrive. This is really our only choice. The future sustainable city will conform to the following operational definition:

“Sustainability is a Local, Informed, Participatory, Balance-Seeking Process, Operating within its Sustainable Area Budget (SAB), and in doing so exporting no harmful imbalances beyond its Territory or into the Future, thus opening Spaces of Opportunity and Possibility” (Levine, Dumreicher, Yanarella*).

Despite the proliferation of abstract and even poetic definitions of sustainability, this is the only operational definition of sustainability currently in use. There is reason to believe that any alternative operational definitions of sustainability will cover much the same territory. Much has been written explaining the meaning of this definition. It may be enough in this overview to briefly explain the sustainable area budget, or SAB. Many readers will be familiar with the ecological footprint concept, which is a powerful analytical tool that aggregates many different factors to reveal to us just how badly we are doing. But the ecological footprint cannot accomplish an essential task. It does not instruct us in what we should be doing except to say that we should be doing several times less than we do in our current grossly unsustainable living patterns. The sustainable area budget is the design side of the analytical ecological footprint. The SAB tells us that each one of us as 1/6.4 billionth of the earth’s population is entitled to the use of 1/6.4 billionth of the earth’s resources on a renewable, regenerative basis—resources that are interpreted as biologically active land area (further information at www.centerforsustainablecities.com). Because we are a social species whose civilization can only exist through the emergent properties of aggregation, each community or city is then entitled to aggregate the SABs of its residents. This is their fair share of the earth’s resources as well as their land and resource budget. Creating a way of life within the limits of this natural budget then becomes a question of negotiation and design. These design negotiations are conducted in a game-like construct of bottom-up participation in a multiple-scenario building process conducted by local stakeholders with a range of experts. Communities play this sustainability game with the assistance of the Sustainability Engine, a computer-aided design (CAD) or building-information-modeling-like tool (BIM) we also call the SCIM (Sustainable Cities Information Modeling) utility. We have kept the system boundaries both tight but highly flexible so that this process is able to function as a system while maintaining a great amount of variability in order to accommodate the many goals and interests of the various stakeholders as they build their competing city models and scenarios. Through several iterations of the Sustainable City Game, different competing scenarios come closer to balance, and begin to converge with one another, incorporating the better features of their counterparts and responding to the critiques of competing stakeholders.

At this moment in history, the SAB-based sustainability gaming process will have difficulty transforming the existing city, whose fabric and processes are deeply rooted in unsustainable principles and habits. What is needed is a new urban form whose structure is well suited as a supporting framework for the above-described principles and processes. The Sustainable City-as-a-Hill, sometimes called the Sustainable Urban Implantation, is such a new urban form.

The form of the Sustainable City-as-a-Hill is inspired by many historic towns around the world, but the primary inspiration comes from the medieval Italian hill town. These settlements, many of which have histories that pre-date the Roman Empire, bear the record of millennia of use and reuse—responsiveness to topography, climate, agriculture, the need for defense, but primarily the changing patterns of human culture and human use. Their organic, responsive character gives them an overwhelmingly human scale and a sense that they are good places to live at a high quality of life even though, as historic structures, they lack some amenities found in modern cities.

The City-as-a-Hill is designed to support the sorts of life patterns and metabolic requirements of a sustainable city as well as the process by which the participatory aspects of the Sustainable City Game facilitates the design and evolution of the city. Rather than starting with the form and structure of the existing modern city with all its problems and trying, one by one, to resolve them, the new model has evolved over time as a city form where these seemingly intractable problems don’t exist in the first place.

Fig. 6.24. Coupled Pan Space Frame (CPSF), 1960–present. Spanning large spaces (up to 60 × 60 feet) lightweight (100 psf), moderate space frame depth (3 feet), with high live load capacities (130 psf), and having the capacity for running all service systems within its own depth, using a simple, repetitive forming system, the cast-in-place, concrete, CPSF offers the flexibility of being the underlying structural framework for Sustainable Urban Implantations. (a) Model. (b) Isometric.

Over many years, we have evolved a family of modern urban forms that mirror many of the humane characteristics of these towns, but that are capable of supporting a modern, sustainable infrastructure and way of life. To do this, we have transformed the original concept. Instead of the medieval city on a hill, we project a city as a hill—a city as a single building, a compact pedestrian town that places those functions that in the modern city can be a blight on the visual and social landscape below the new ground surface of a constructed hill, yet organized along three-story-tall gallerias daylit through courtyards above. In this way, all large-scale commercial, institutional, and industrial facilities, most service functions, parking, and other activities and infrastructure that create often unsafe dead zones in a conventional town, are located within the hill. The “upper town” is supported by the Coupled Pan Space Frame (CPSF)—an innovative, economical, cast-in-place concrete structural system capable of large two-way spans that creates the space of the inner hill as well. All the service systems needed for city are housed within the systems space of the CPSF.

The sustainable City-as-a-Hill is composed of a network of level streets, crossed by sloped streets that wind their way to the top of the hill. In addition, there is a system of main streets sloping at a gentle 6 percent grade that create small parks or squares as they pass by each level path of the constructed hill. Like its historic predecessors, the town generates a rich diversity of public spaces; from narrow lanes to grand plazas and from commercial streets to monumental stairs, public amphitheaters, parks and greens—all supportive of a rich civic life. There are also elevators that connect the inner hill with the levels above. This pattern assures an unprecedented level of handicapped accessibility, as each building entrance and every level is accessed without having to negotiate any stairs or segregated spaces and machinery. The City-as-a-Hill is a much denser yet smaller town than would otherwise be possible: large enough to provide a full range of urban services and life opportunities, yet small enough to be manageable as an intelligent balance-seeking system, in partnership with an agricultural hinterland. Such a walkable town would typically be too small to contain the necessary variety and diversity of services, while maintaining the human scale essential for convivial living, but the vertical layering of different functions in the City-as-a-Hill combines the complexity and dynamism of a small city with the intimacy of a human-scaled town. This sustainable urban implantation also makes more land available for agriculture and recreation while facilitating the reclamation of land back to wild nature, which is also valued for its unique ability to balance greenhouse emissions and become the supply area for energy, food, and materials (on a net basis) as the town’s SAB.

Fig. 6.25. Obidos, Portugal, city on a hill.

The Sustainable City-as-a-Hill is a new urban form with a number of levels of structure, collectively managed by a sustainable city information management system (SCIM), which is derived from recently developed building information management software. The underlying structure is the coupled pan space frame (CPSF), which—although it is actually a continuous structure—for planning and modeling purposes is divided into three-story-tall, 100-foot-square building modules. These modules are seen as families of stackable building blocks, housed in the SCIM library. These blocks start out as being identical, but are developed into many different building forms and types with searchable characteristics that can be quickly assembled to form a primitive model of a new City-as-a-Hill. As the participatory scenario-building process proceeds, it is paralleled by the construction of three-dimensional urban models using the increasingly sophisticated, intelligent building modules that become part of an interchangeable “intelligent” module library. As these module-based city constructs are assembled, the stakeholders receive feedback as to the state of balance of their emerging cities within their given sustainable area budgets. As they develop their competing scenarios, the stakeholders playing the Sustainable City Game can receive both qualitative and quantitative feedback as to the consequences of their emerging proposals both as sustainability-driven systems and as visual images of the cities being developed.

Summary

The Sustainable City Game is a safe place for conflict—a safe place to make mistakes. It is the sort of trial-and-error process that was played out over many generations in the medieval hill town: Decisions were made; over time the unworkable ones would fall away to be replaced with new experiments, while the workable ones would be incorporated within the traditions, crafts, and social patterns of the town. Any city that over the course of hundreds of years culls the negative influences in architecture, culture, and agriculture, and preserves and enhances the experiments that succeed, can’t help but become a robust, supportive society as well as a wonderful place to live. Today we don’t have the luxury of that sort of time span, but we do have computer-enhanced methods for setting up an interactive environment where the numerous mistakes as well as conflicts become the very source of emergent creativity in developing robust, beautiful, sustainable cities.

In a postmodern world there is little likelihood that a consensus will emerge among large groups of diverse people that pulls together the many disparate solutions of the different problems society faces. People may agree on the existence of these problems, but are unlikely to agree on any given list of specific proposed solutions, much less a singular overarching strategy or concept for their realization. People no longer believe in the pronouncements of experts, especially as there are no specialist experts in the category of the “whole.” But they may believe in a process that is able to marshal the expertise of stakeholders and specialists alike, particularly if they can see and understand the quality of cities that emerge as the products of such a process. There is only one objection that can be raised against the emergence of sustainable cities, and that is the belief that one cannot be accomplished within a reasonable economic framework. Once the first sustainable city is built through these methods, it will be seen as an affordable and good place to live. This moment will instantly represent a paradigm shift. At the point that the viability of such a city is validated, no other sort of city or economic model could be seen to be viable, and every city, each in its own way through its own sustainability game, will be obliged to come up with its own model and process for the future within its own sustainable area budget.

Fig. 6.26. Westbahnhof Sustainable Urban Implantation, Vienna, Austria, 1994–1999. Using the coupled pan space frame for spans across a large existing rail yard, this sustainable urban implantation heals the wound in the existing city created by the railroad and creates a dense human-scaled, walkable City-as-a-Hill with all large-scale facilities—commercial, institutional, industrial, infrastructure, and parking—tucked neatly inside the constructed hill, giving the new ground surface above to people-oriented urban space, which combined with its rural “partnerland” balances its metabolism within the natural limits of its combined sustainable area budget. (a) Model. (b) Isometric plan sketch.

Through the analytical approaches that dominate our science, technology, and economy as well as our very thinking processes, we are able to pinpoint the many increasingly threatening problems that challenge the continuation of anything like our current trajectory of progress and material comfort. The design-based approach outlined here depends not so much upon the skills of good designers, but rather on the collective genius that lies among the competing interests of different actors and sectors of society through the dynamics of multiple alternative scenario-building processes, where competition and conflict drive emerging scenarios toward greater quality. If we are to survive, it will be through the creation of such sustainable cities of the future.

Fig. 6.27. Sustainable Public Administration Town-as-a-Hill (S-PATH) Korea, 2006–2007. Utilizing the Sustainable Area Budget concept, this competition entry for a new administrative capital for Korea assembles a Sustainable town-as-a-hill for twenty thousand people using many variations of a standardized module to create a dense, walkable, and livable pedestrian city that is crowned by the iconic buildings of the government ministries while retaining the small human scale of its streets, squares, and parks. (a) City plan. (b) Computer model of city.

Essay 4: Where Are We?

Kenneth Haggard, Architect, San Luis Sustainability Group

Fig. 6.28. (a) Linear plot of history of human population. (b) Fractal view of history of human population. (c) Time charted on logarithmic scale. (d) Repetitive pattern that has occurred in each cultural era.

Saying we are in the middle of a cultural transformation may sound like a stretch but becomes convincing once we look at patterns revealed in plots of human population growth over the last million years.

This type of analysis reveals cyclic patterns, each different, but similar in form. The three cultural eras indicated by these patterns are obvious, an era of hunting and gathering followed by agriculture and husbandry and now science and industry. The chart also shows that the life span of each era consists of a formative, flourishing, classic, and stressful period indicated by the slope of each point in the curve. This chart was first published over fifty years ago and has been accurate in predicting the stress occurring at the beginning of the twenty-first century we are now experiencing.

Fig. 6.29. (a) Cultural comparisons of the definition of efficiency. (b) History of architecture as related to four cultural eras. All this indicates that in terms of design, we are not just dealing with modern (industrial era) architecture in green clothing, but a whole new direction that has its own philosophy, techniques, and expression. Therefore, the traditional core design concerns of history, geometry, and aesthetics are drastically changing.

A highly simplified picture of the basic relationships among population, resources, and environment is shown in figure 6.28. Energy and resources are drawn from the environment and utilized by the human population. Design decisions including the invention of technical devices, establishment of social organization, and development of communication enhance the ability to extract energy and resources and determine how the population as a whole will utilize them.

These relationships can be visualized as a dynamic living system. At the beginning of a successful design development (one that provides more energy and resources than were previously available), times are good. Relatively large amounts of energy and resources are available to a relatively small population. There is usually a period of experimentation where trial and error are needed to develop the designs that provide these advantages, but once successfully synthesized, the system’s success can be dynamic; it may result in relatively rapid population growth. We can call such a period in history a formative period evolving to boom and expansion.

Fig. 6.30. (a) Characteristics, implications, and guidelines for sustainable systems. (b) Interacting loops of characteristics of sustainable systems.

As design techniques are formalized and the population expands, systems tend to become comfortable and relatively static. This can be referred to as the classic period. At this point, however, the population is now large enough that pressure on the environment has increased, causing changes that affect the available resources. If a society is to maintain itself, some design efforts must moderate this pressure on the environment and social organization. Techniques for achieving energy and resources are then fixed into relatively static patterns, and social and cultural patterns are adapted to try to moderate population growth and more obviously destructive behaviors.

As the population continues to grow, resource consumption increases pressure on the environment, leading to inevitable chaotic changes in climate and society that further stress the environment, the source of available energy, water, food, and materials. As this continues, the entire system enters the period of stress. Societal and cultural dysfunction becomes more common. Anthropologists have traditionally called this a decadent phase. If enough stress occurs, the whole system will collapse or be replaced by a new cultural era. History is littered with examples. The only difference today is this is not isolated to one particular geographic area, but is worldwide.

Fig. 6.31. The characteristics and guidelines for sustainable development were used for the redesign of Los Osos, California, from a bedroom community to the nearby county seat to a sustainable community. This prizewinning entry in an international competition offers a clear view to the future. This fractal scan served three functions in the sustainable design process: (1) creating a framework that gave order and aided the information-gathering process; (2) digesting information into a concise graphic package directly usable in the design process; and (3) illustrating some comparable patterns with regard to existing elements and proposed elements. In this way, connections between different scales can be easily visualized. This holistic perspective allowed the development of a design theme, which evolved as the regeneration of the health of the watershed of Los Osos valley. Once this theme was determined, certain design decisions were relatively easy to make.

A cultural shift of such great magnitude will change goals and perceptions as well as design and construction; see figure 6.29a.

At the beginning, most architecture movements start on the right side of figure 6.29b. As the culture enters the classic phase, it moves to the left side, where it eventually stagnates in the stressful phase.

To make the transition to the era of sustainability, we need to adopt a new approach that is holistic and evolutionary, figure 6.30. This will change the perception and practice of planning. Development will be understood in its place in the biome, as will the cycle of decay and renewal, figure 6.31.

Fig. 6.32. Los Osos was platted in the nineteenth century with small 30-foot lots meant to serve the standard nineteenth-century row house. In the twentieth century, this evolved into typical suburban housing by requiring two lots per unit. This twenty-first-century hybrid goes back to narrow lots but with a new urbanist pattern and optimized passive design for each unit. This allows twice the density of the existing suburban pattern while also allowing twice the potential interior square footage than the typical suburban house in Los Osos, if desired. The new urbanist arrangement of riparian greenways, enclosed garden/courts, and alleys provides more spatial and social flexibility. (a) Perspective sketch of community. (b) Area plan. (c) Section sketch through community.

Architecture in the Era of Sustainability will:

1. Embrace Complexity

The value of simplicity in “modern” architecture has in this period of stress evolved to merely a simplistic response to complex conditions: “just change the size of the air conditioner and heater.” Design must once again embrace complexity and natural flows. The geometrical basis of architecture will shift from harshly Euclidian to incorporate fractal forms.

2. Optimize Building Metabolism

All buildings have a metabolism that can be either parasitic or symbiotic. A symbiotic building can produce scarce and costly resources—including energy, water, and more—rather than just consuming them.

3. Express a New Aesthetic

Design will use universal architectural elements to create more fluid compositions to convey the emotion of peaceful connectivity to site, society, and the planet.

History: Our past will be looked at more as a process, a worldwide process as indicated in figure 6.29. Geometry: Fractal geometry will be as important as Euclidean geometry. Aesthetics: An expression of connection, continuity, and fluidity will replace the aesthetic of reductionism, compartmentalization, and isolation characteristics of industrial-era architecture.

Forty-year-old passive solar building in Davis, California, still operating and performing as designed.

Proposal for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in San Jose, California, utilizing a translucent photovoltaic roof for passive heating and electricity production and cooled by night ventilation over distributed thermal mass.

Summary: Buildings for Comfort and Joy

We wrote this book because we wish to share the discoveries we have made about creating buildings that use the sun and microclimate resources to provide heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting. These strategies are not new; some have been well understood for more than two thousand years. But they are not well known in the architecture and development industry today. We have had the opportunity to help many of our clients discover the comfortable and health-giving qualities of these buildings. In most cases these buildings can be built for the same cost or perhaps just a little less or more than a conventional building that is on mechanical life support.

These buildings may be built with cement siding in traditional styles that look like all the other homes nearby. Or they may include plastered straw bale walls to get the desired super-insulation at a more competitive cost. They may rely on added thermal mass from counter-height waterwalls in front of operable south-facing windows to provide winter heating and night ventilation cooling in the summer; or a roof pond to provide powerful cooling in the hottest desert. Daylighting may be enhanced with south-facing light shelves or a roof monitor. Visit or stay in one of these delightful buildings and you will want one of your own—at home and at work.

As we hope we have shown, these buildings are not hard to design or build; but to make these even more sustainable, they should be built using local resources that are adapted from and local to the bioregion. These locally adapted designs and materials return the beauty of place to design. A courtyard-oriented building made with local earth materials for a California climate will look very different from a compact two-story solar Cape for a snowy site in Maine. But both utilize the same principles and can provide the same level of comfort and security.

And while having a comfortable home made with local materials to fit the local bioregion is a great beginning, most of us do not live well in isolation. Ideally this building, whether home or office, will be an integral part of a vibrant and sustainable community. Using the concepts and strategies we suggest here, it is possible to build sustainable buildings in sustainable communities. How nice it is to walk or bike to work in a daylit sustainable workplace, rather than driving on crowded freeways from a delightful home to a sick, sealed office building. And this sense of place, community, connection, and security enables us to experience improved health and joy.

The supporters of the fossil-fool industry have tried to characterize conservation and solar as inefficient, uncomfortable, costly, and unproven. We will “shiver in the dark” if we follow this path, they argue, but they are the ones who are headed for trouble. When the price of oil rises, the power lines go down in an ice storm, or allergies and asthma from sick buildings lay you low, remember that there is an alternative. We can be dancing in the sunlight instead! And in buildings that will remain comfortable and secure even without electricity or heating oil; buildings where the daylight plays across surfaces and brings connection to the outside, where the air is fresh and clean, and where comfort is the norm instead of a fleeting feeling. Choose health and sustainability!

The end.