last night a very important question was asked; but it is far from being answered.

I was privileged enough to attend a casual talk at Archeworks last night. The talk was intended to be a celebration of their 5th and final book in a series about ethics and design. Bruce Mau had an essay in the publication and was supposed to attend. He wasn’t there last night and his absence was noted. Nobody mentioned why he wasn’t there; but I would say that it might have to do with the remarks on his essay made by Stanley Tigerman in the afterward of the book which were critical of Mau’s recycled prose—but only to keep in the new tradition at our school of saying snarky things about Bruce Mau.

The real interesting thing that happened tonight was only obliquely related to Mr. Mau and his objectives, namely that they’ve been met. The idea of “green Design” has become common knowledge as it has been christened by design, architecture, and finally, and most successfully, branding. I’m not trying to say that sustainable initiatives have been met and we are now living in the green new world. What I would rather posit is that sustainable design has made two important transitions in the past 5-10 years.

1. “Green Design” has become marketable. (**See comments**) Flipping through the Reader, or looking for apartments in Dallas, or seeing car ads on TV. (How ironic I know) is enough to show that even ad execs have been able to note sustainability as a desirable characteristic. Sure, there is a little “green-washing” going on; but hey, there’s also an energy crisis going on, I’m sure they’ll even each other out soon enough. What’s important to note is that sustainability is in the public consciousness. The fight for green design is over, the tide has turned, things are going the right way for real change, (well, not real-real change; but things will at least be made more efficiently). Why?

2. The ideas of “green design” have moved out of the socio-political sphere and into the realm of science and engineering. That’s not to say that there aren’t a bunch of Hollywood lefties driving hydrogen-powered beemers and that there still aren’t smelly aging hippies wearing Birkenstocks and doing their own gardening; but those people have begun not to define green design. Terms like “embodied energy”, “efficiency”, and “long-term costs” have begun to embody what green design really is: not a life changing movement (although lives do need changing) but a set of serious considerations given our energy production timeline. That and the hybrid Chevy Tahoe, green technology has caught up to design and aesthetics. A green home doesn’t have to look like a hippie shack from the 70’s but can now, in all of its technological glory, look like the nice glass and steel boxes from the 50’s and will soon most likely be found in the McMansion mould. All kidding aside, sustainable design has arrived, and it’s here with its own bushel of problems and qualifications; but I would confidently say that sustainability has made its way out of theoretical conversation and into mainstream conversation. And the question posed by a member of the audience at Archeworks tonight had to do with this transition.


This guy asked: “Now that Green Design has made its way into mainstream thought, what do we need to do in order to get other social issues into the same realm?” one should be careful not to conflate scientific and social issues (which the questioner did); but there was a real and interesting understanding of sustainability underneath the naïve rhetoric of the question. Let me re-state the question: if green design has now made the transition out of the realm of theory and discourse, what can we do with the space it was taking up? Or, more simply, if fighting for sustainability is no longer important, what is worth fighting for? Or, again, and as it has been said before, Now that we can do anything, what will we do?

There were responses from the panel; they were varied and roundabout; but the questions above slowly began to reveal themselves as the underlying theme of the conversation. Another question from the audience, aimed towards the educators on the group (Hennie Reynders, Chair AIADO, SAIC, Bob Somol, director of architecture, UIC, and Martin Felson, Co-director of Archeworks—basically every avenue for high level architectural education in Chicago with one obvious exception) was, and forgive me for re-phrasing a bit but: “why can’t architecture schools just teach green technology as technology and call it a day for “green” which would leave more room in discourse and conversation for other issues in architecture like, space, form, and the like?

The responses to that question specifically were interesting. There were two people involved in that response Hennie, and Martin (see above) Martin made a point of saying that he doesn’t remember much of the technological training he got in school because it didn’t mean anything to him at the time compared to other topics in design. He said that he learned about tech stuff on the job when the applications were more specific and immediate. He could have been saying one of two things either that

building technology is meaningless in the face of larger design issues; or that

relegating “green” design to the realm of technology wouldn’t be able to imbue green initiatives with as much meaning as they were entitled to.

Meaning is the key word here. The first statement could then be understood as saying “green design is meaningless in the face of larger issues (right on!!)…. Maybe. I was there, I felt like that’s what Martin meant; but you can’t say something like that in Chicago can you? Anyway, you could respond to the first statement, or you could respond to the idea that green is too important to be only technology. That’s what Hennie did. His response was accented and very soft-spoken; but went something like: yeah green design is too important to lump in with all other building technologies and its import can be made by combining green technology issues with other issues and subjects. OK, fine. That’s scary that our school is going to be raising green design to the level of more important and complicated issues in design; but I suppose that just now is a little late to lament that.

What is really scary is that nobody had a eureka moment. Nobody, after students and practitioners batted around the idea that engineering (aka good green design) might be irrelevant and that they’d be willing to concentrate on something else, maybe something more important, nobody said HELL YEAH, NOW THAT THAT’S OVER, WE CAN GET TO WORK ON SOMETHING GREAT! And who wouldn’t have been excited to say something like that and even more to be able to act on it? The real question is, as has already been stated, what would we all run out of the building to do? What wild ideas would we be furiously sketching out in hopes to flesh out that inkling idea? What’s the threat here? Maybe the threat is that there are no inkling ideas left after the green movement. That it is too comfortable to couch yourself on a supposed ethical issue in design and ignore the rest. To me, that is the very threat of sustainability as a primary motive for design: that a preoccupation with the how would eclipse the why—and that is a scary idea. I would really love to see for the next few posts on this blog to be about something relevant in design not related to the how but to the why.


Isaac Smith
BFA, AIADO
SAIC