Finding the Limits of LEED

Fast Company is probably not the kind of magazine that designers, university architects, and facilities managers are reading on a regular basis. But you should pick up the October issue for an article by Anya Kamenetz on Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. (In fact, the entire issue is devoted to the intersection of design and business. There are excellent articles throughout.)

The article focuses on the flaws of LEED’s rating system, in which builders get various points for “green” features. But that point system has become a target of complaints. Ms. Kamenetz asks why constructing a bike rack outside a building and buying 50 percent of power from renewable sources each get one point in the LEED system. Shouldn’t buying renewable power be worth more?

She points out that many buildings that earned high LEED ratings don’t perform nearly as well as they should. Getting certification from the U.S. Green Building Council is also expensive; the Park City Ice Area took the nearly $30,000 it would have spent on certification and purchased three wind turbines instead.

We at The Chronicle have heard many of these complaints, too. Not long ago we had lunch with an architect from a West Coast firm that specializes in renovations. It’s not fair, the architect said, that saving a building, with all of its embodied energy, earns one point, while installing a bike rack earns the same.

LEED doesn’t always reward out-of-the-box thinking. In a discussion about sustainability featured in The Chronicle earlier this year, the architect Ellen Watts described a law-school building she had worked on in Florida. She found that although students lived close to the campus, they were driving to class because they used their car trunks as book lockers. So she installed lockers in the building to get students to cut down on driving. Unfortunately, you don’t get LEED points for lockers, she said.

This summer in Chicago, at the Society for College and University Planning conference, an architect from a prominent planning firm said, “LEED is going away in 10 to 15 years.”

Now, “going away” might be a bit strong, but his point was clear: States are already adopting regulations that make the equivalent of LEED Silver a baseline for all construction. And at some point, one hopes, installing energy-efficient features, making accommodations for commuters, and using recycled and low-toxic materials will be expected.

It will be much like installing ramps and elevators for the disabled is today — you just do it, the architect said.