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GREEN
BUILDING
Foe or Friend of Historic Preservation
 At
the August Landmark Commission meeting, a property owner requested
permission to put a standing metal seam roof on a house in a historic
district, citing the material’s green–friendly effects.
The material was not appropriate for the neighborhood and the commissioners
denied the request. This is not a case of historic preservation
impeding a property owner trying to go green, but it alludes to
the decades–long debate between historic preservation and
environmental design.
Actually, preservationists and proponents of green building agree
on the fundamentals: the reuse of existing buildings is one of the
highest forms of sustainable design, demolition wastes natural resources
(both the original materials and the energy used to construct them),
and traditional building methods used in historic buildings take
advantage of passive heating and cooling systems, which reduces
energy costs. Most historic buildings were constructed with the
climate in mind—houses such as the Alfred and Juanita Bromberg
House (1939), above, by architects O’Neil Ford and
Arch B. Swank, provided breezes and shade in the summer, and absorbed
heat during colder months.
While advocates of both accept these fundamentals to be truths,
most historic buildings have a low rating on the green chart. This
is because the system used to certify a building green was not devised
with historic buildings in mind. For instance, the Leadership in
Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gives a mere three points
out of a total of 69 for reusing an existing building. Furthermore,
LEED does not consider embodied energy, or the energy it
takes to create, harvest, transport, or install raw building materials.
LEED also does not take into account the cost of demolition, transportation
of debris, or land fill waste. The result is that many historic
buildings do not receive high or even medium grade marks in efficiency,
which gives the false sense that historic buildings are not green–friendly.
In the last two years, there has been increased discussion and
even conferences on how to resolve some of these issues. The National
Trust for Historic Preservation, the American Institute of Architects,
and state and local preservation organizations are working with
environmental design groups to develop a new version of LEED that
will better address the contribution of historic buildings to the
green movement. We look forward to the improvements and increased
dialogue.
Katherine D. Seale
Executive Director |
