Our buildings, ourselves.

• Author: Roodman, David Malin
• Position: Environmental impact of buildings

SINCE THE END OF WORLD WAR II, MOST MODERN BUILDINGS HAVE BEEN ECOLOGICALLY ABUSIVE BOTH TO THEIR INHABITANTS AND TO THEIR ENVIRONMENT. BUT THAT'S BEGINNING TO CHANGE.

Compared to most species, homo sapiens inhabits an extraordinarily large portion of the earth. From the Inuit who circle the Arctic to the Bedouin who range across the desert of the Arabian Peninsula, people have found ingenious ways to live in climates for which our biology does not predispose us. Today, almost all of us live in places where we would die without shelter. Our buildings function as second skins--huge extensions of our bodies--protecting us from the elements, storing food, and regulating internal temperature. Through our buildings, we have become superorganisms, capable of evolving rapidly to adapt to life anywhere on the planet.

But profound problems have arisen with buildings since the advent of the industrial revolution. While mechanization has enabled modern structures to provide services once undreamed of--hot water on demand, precise climate control, lighting at the flip of a switch, remote communication, and even entertainment--it has also had more insidious effects. By magnifying human capabilities, buildings have also magnified some of our weaknesses; by insulating us so easily from the cold, for example, they have allowed us to forget what it costs to generate heat. In a thousand ways, the cheap conveniences of modern buildings have driven from our memories a kind of knowledge--painstakingly gathered by previous civilizations--that was once, and may still be, essential to longterm survival.

Today, as much as a tenth of the global economy is dedicated to buildings: to constructing, operating, and equipping homes and offices. In terms of materials, this economic activity uses even larger shares--one-sixth to one-half--of the world's wood, minerals, water, and energy. Blame for much of the environmental damage occurring today, from destruction of forests and rivers to air and water pollution and climate destabilization, must be placed squarely at the doorsteps of modern buildings. And many buildings do harm on the inside as well: they subject us to unhealthy air or alienating physical environments, making us both less healthy and less productive than we are capable of being.

The root cause of this architectural sickness lies within the tremendous complexity of our own society. The motive forces of industrialization--mechanization and specialization--have created an economy that straddles the globe and produces a vast array of goods and services. But paradoxically, this is also an economy in which individual people fill ever narrower roles, giving us little appreciation of our relationship to the larger world. These changes in our roles are directly reflected in the buildings we inhabit; as we become less responsive to our ecological connections, so do our buildings.

To begin with, mechanization has enabled miners and loggers to extract raw materials on an unprecedented scale. Yet, the remote locations of these activities tend to insulate consumers from such environmental consequences as massive deforestation or toxic runoff. The appetite for ever-larger homes continues to grow, untroubled by thoughts of their real cost. New U.S. homes--90 percent of which are framed in wood--have grown from an average 102 square meters in 1949 to 187 today, and floor space per person in new homes has more than doubled. Gopal Ahluwalia, of the U.S. National Association of Homebuilders, describes the phenomenon: "Everybody wants a media room, a home office, an exercise room, three bathrooms, a family room, a living room, and a huge, beautiful, eat-in kitchen that nobody cooks in."

Today's buildings are wasteful in other ways. From refrigerators to shower heads, the appliances typically found in them draw two to four times as much energy and water as the most efficient models available, making them cost more to use in the long run. The complex, hidden mechanical systems in buildings can also lead to extraordinary waste when they silently malfunction. In U.S. homes with forced air climate control, up to 30 percent of heating and cooling energy escapes unnoticed from leaky or uninsulated duct work.

And industrialization has split the building business into a maze of specialized roles--architect, engineer, financier, supplier, builder, inspector, broker, buyer, insurer, and sometimes, tenant. As a result, the parties who have the most influence over a building's ultimate form have become increasingly removed from what they make, and from the experience of inhabiting it. Instead, each participant behaves according to the imperative he or she faces, whether that be minimizing up-front costs, maxi-mizing a commission, or meeting a deadline. Meanwhile occupants often lack the knowledge and the tools to gauge today's complex buildings for some important characteristics: healthy interiors and low utility bills. And since consumers do not know what to ask for, they do not get it. The industry instead produces what is most expedient for it: generic, quick-to-build structures that tend to neglect long-term costs and health concerns.

Such buildings have come to dominate the landscape wherever modern commercial or residential "development" is at full throttle. Their conquest has been so sweeping, and their size and technical virtuosity so dazzling, that we tend to forget--if, indeed, we ever knew--that over the broad span of history, destructive buildings have been the exception rather than the rule. Impressed by the fashionable, high-tech look of most new houses or offices, we would never dream that these spaces could be more dangerous to health--directly and indirectly--than the more "primitive" structures of earlier times.

But for thousands of years, indigenous cultures have crafted homes that have sustainably exploited local resources--an elegant mediation between the vagaries of the weather and people's need for shelter and comfort. Since they couldn't expend huge quantities of oil, coal, or fir to stay comfortable, most people found that survival demands careful adaptation to local climatic and geologic conditions, and to the limits of local materials--whether wood, earth, straw or even snow. And since the people who lived in these buildings were the architects and construction crews, they rarely ended up in something they did not like.

Modern architects could gain much from emulating techniques traditional builders discovered long ago--for example, how to make walls from earth and how to make the most of the sun's rays in winter--yet they need not simply turn back the clock. Designers can now improve on ancient techniques without rejecting them, by integrating them into efficient new technologies such as insulating windows and low-energy lights.

The most important lesson that traditional architecture teaches is that making good...