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Rise in Tornadoes, Floods Poses Risk to Colleges
What if the sort of extreme weather that has left the University of Iowa inundated in floodwaters is not a freak event? What if it is a sign of things to come? (Photograph by AP Images)
Art & Architecture Renovations Near Completion at Yale U.
Paul Rudolph's 1963 Brutalist icon is getting a makeover, plus an addition by Charles Gwathmey.
Guest Blogger: Anne Stephenson
Even the greenest construction project increases a college’s carbon footprint.
Other News
Land-Rich Universities Weigh New Options for Real-Estate Development
Universities are taking advantage of new ways to develop their holdings through corporate partnerships, a new report says.
U. of Iowa Begins Mucking Out and Assessing the Damage
The university's insurer spent the weekend starting to assess the damage to the auditorium and 19 other flooded buildings.
U. of Iowa Flooding Takes Costly Toll in Research and Equipment
Parking lots are under water, some roads leading to the campus are closed, and the campus utility infrastructure is damaged.
New campus buildings
Multimedia
A Green Building as a Billboard for Science
(A 2006 Chronicle video)
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About Buildings & Grounds
Buildings & Grounds is written by Scott Carlson (left) and Lawrence Biemiller (right). Scott Carlson writes about architecture, facilties, energy, and sustainability, among other topics. Lawrence Biemiller writes about architecture and facilities and contributes to Notes from Academe. What's happening on your campus? Let us know.
Guest Blogger: Tweaking Won't Assure Sustainability—but Reimagining Might
Building B of the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State U.: True progress? (Chronicle photograph)
Almost every day, press releases for new green buildings show up in my inbox and on blogs like the one you’re reading. One striking example—Arizona State University’s new Biodesign Institute, a soaring, uber-chic, high-performance, LEED-certified center—gave me chills. The built-in “third spaces,” natural daylighting, and funneling of air-conditioning condensation for a shade garden are particularly striking features, and there is a beautiful symbiosis between purpose (interdisciplinary research on everything from bioenergetics to nanotechnology) and aesthetics (transparent, complementary buildings connected by glazed passageways and social space).
 Xarissa Holdaway |
However, a certain amount of frustration comes with these announcements. For example, a 167-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system is in the works for one of the buildings, but is only expected to offset six percent of its energy needs—340 homes could be powered on the four megawatts the Institute requires. And no matter how much water is reused or recycled in building operations, the fact remains that metropolitan Phoenix—which encompasses Tempe—is situated in a harsh, arid desert, and the area continues to expand far beyond the capacity of the landscape to support it.
To be clear, such buildings are undoubtedly a step up from their fossil-fuel-guzzling brethren, and the research being done at Arizona State is tremendously important. I don’t want to dismiss the efforts that are being made at similar “going green” colleges across the country. But as the threshold of sustainable building lowers and materials and expertise become more affordable (particularly the “low-hanging fruit,” like compact fluorescent bulbs), these buildings begin to feel like static interference, rather than true progress.
Is it enough to tweak individual factors like flooring materials and HVAC systems? Even converting an entire building to solar power feels like patchwork when the building squanders water or its neighbors run on coal-fired plants. Most LEED-certified or -certifiable structures still stand alone, and the experience visitors have when inside, however lovely, quickly dissipates on the street.
What we have is a problem of design: an attachment to the genius of decades (or centuries) past, when each building set out to make its individual mark in the service of an idea, a god, an architect, or an architect who thought he was God. By contrast, good design can be strikingly simple, like Hippo Rollers which can transport days’ worth of water over harsh terrain without back-breaking labor.
Good design can also be deeply defiant of existing systems. Truly world-changing thinkers like Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur brought us vaccines by being crazy enough to think that injecting patients with a disease would prevent it. Hausmann’s Paris avenues reimagined a city as a grand place of beauty, rather than a sewage-lined medieval warren. The Internet created an almost unbelievable democracy of information. (Of course, none of these developments were without fault: Vaccines can go wrong, the wide streets of Paris facilitated a Nazi invasion, and Internet trolls are getting crueler by the minute, it seems.)
Thinking of buildings as single structures that demand energy from the grid in a one-way transaction is outmoded. Dividing districts from each other based on arbitrary zoning laws rather than topography or renewable power sources is counterproductive. Separating universities from their towns and natural habitats is blinkered thinking. An interdisciplinary approach should not be restricted to curriculum, but extended to campus planning and building.
Progress is being made on these fronts: The U.S Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program now has a neighborhood-development component that is being adopted in places like Dockside Green, in Victoria, British Columbia. The program aims to address the isolation of green buildings, and it would fit well in higher education.
Smart grids, which use demand-response and automation to enable communication between power suppliers and purchasers, are also a step forward. Some architecture firms are even experimenting with symbiotic buildings to incorporate human shelter and greenhouses.
But I don’t need to tell you this. Isn’t half the point of higher education to reimagine our lives and societies? In his excellent book Design on the Edge: The Making of a High-Performance Building, which chronicles the building of the Lewis Center at Oberlin College, David W. Orr writes that we may be on the edge of a thought revolution on the scale of the Enlightenment, where we transform “fields as seemingly different as agriculture, manufacturing, waste cycling, technology, shelter, and human settlements” into a future characterized by elegance, efficiency, generosity, and fairness.
“We have reason to hope, as well, for a deeper reconciliation of our wants and needs with what the Earth can willingly provide,” he says. Universities have historically been at the forefront of such movements, and have a responsibility to be cooperative and determined. So now I’m asking you: How can we create a bright, green, democratic future through our buildings? —Xarissa Holdaway
Xarissa Holdaway, one of May’s Buildings & Grounds guest bloggers, is campus e-news coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation’s campus-ecology project. You can read her previous post here.
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