WalkerARCHITECTS
Joined: 25 Sep 2007
Posts: 292
Location: BRIER WASHINGTON
|
 Posted: Sat Mar 06, 2010 2:36 pm Post subject: TOO LONG BUT WORTH READING |
    |
|
There exists little reason to assume that a LEED rating actually creates a reduction of the carbon footprint of built environment. We would be better off rating product in testing labs with established criteria. With very little of that nature, there is very little credibility to assign.
"Sustainable building design" was once all in the eye of the building team making the claim." LEED changed that, somewhat, creating a national standard for green buildings where none existed before, meeting pent-up demand for reliable information with a "rating system" and a "checklist" for going green. We question this accomplishment.
The USGBC has been enormously successful at publicizing the need for sustainable buildings. Interest in sustainable building is exploding. However the system is flawed, and with some municipalities, states, and corporations adopting LEED as a standard, we should be questioning it's actual capacity to deliver sustainable built environment.
Thanks to the USGBC and LEED, we now have momentum, media attention, motivated clients, and an expanded understanding of "green" building. Green building and sustainable design and construction are not on the same page.
LEED is a checklist driven design process. It is a paint by number system, where almost every color somehow meets the standards. That approach could, theoretically, produce buildings that conserve resources, reduce operating costs and pollution, help address global warming, improve marketability and durability, preserve the ozone layer, protect occupant health, and improve worker productivity, or not. When the program was launched, the hope was that it would transform the design and construction of commercial and residential buildings, usher in a new age and more sustainable way of building.
LEED's credibility is fading. Sustainable building has a robust future, but this certification system does not. LEED is broken. It simply does not work because it is not based upon certified scientific testing, that actually captures the embodied energy, in product, material and construction processes. There are insufficient standards and no unified testing lab system, ANSI, ASTM, ETC do not have or test for the energy embodied in product or the energy saved by using the product or material. LEED is not based upon hard fact established by rigorous testing. It is in fact a game, where claims have more weight than facts! Walker Architects has no desire for LEED certification. Someday we hope we will be able to embrace the program and drive a code for sustainability in the United States, that works.
The program's results are very disappointing. Since 2000, LEED has certified only 285 buildings. That is a complete failure. By contrast, over the same time period, the U.S. Department of Energy's Building America program helped builders design and erect more than 20,000 new homes, with a minimum 30 percent reduction in energy use for heating, cooling, and hot water at no net additional cost burden.
Walker Architects is concerned that LEED has become expensive, slow, confusing, and unwieldy, it is a death march for applicants administered by a soviet-style bureaucracy that makes green building more difficult than it needs to be. We need only accurately measured material and product performance, and application & installation requirements. Where is the index of material and product and the research and testing that backs up the LEED system. The result of a failure to provide a foundation of reliable testing:
mediocre misguided objective, "green" buildings where certification, not environmental responsibility, is the primary goal.
token response level only a few super-high-level eco-structures sustainable often expensive design driven built by motivated owners outside the normal market paradigm.
worthless credentials, an explosion of LEED-accredited architects and engineers designing a few "rated but untested" buildings once in a while.
discouraged professionals who want to design sustainable buildings, but can't afford to certify themselves or their buildings. LEED has a price big tag on everything!
Falsified reports on cost An avalanche of reports imply that green building -- and LEED certification in particular -- doesn't cost more than conventional building. These reports are wrong. The second you start a "green-building project", it costs more than conventional construction. In the real world, LEED certification typically adds 1 to 5 percent to the budget.
A myth that going green costs nothing is damaging to clients who discover the real cost of the process. Based upon fuzzy math to show that green building doesn't add costs, let's test and then establish the material and product that is more sustainable and and worth it.
LEED certification simply costs more and does not equate to a more sustainable built environment. The marketing of LEED is so huge that buyer pressure forces developers to pursue LEED -- and build a few certifiable buildings and thereafter be "GREEN" builders. Why not every building? Just upgrade the efficiencies, provide a photovoltaic system, work at daylighting during the design phase, design for passive solar and site the buildings with solar orientation then use tested assemblies with established thermal efficiencies.
Only measure results have value.
Milwaukee's new Urban Ecology Center is one of the greenest buildings in the upper Midwest. It is a truly sustainable architectural work. It is not certified. "Because it could have added as much as $75,000 to the cost, just for the paperwork," said Ken Leinbach, the center's executive director.
In LEED, you need 26 of 69 possible points to get certified. It is a numbers game. All points, for some reason, are weighted equally, even though some have far greater environmental benefits than others.
Point-mongering is what happens when a design team becomes obsessively focused on getting credits, regardless of whether they add environmental value. In the office here we coined the term "LEED brain", this term describes what happens when the potential PR benefits of certification drive the design process. If you know how to scam LEED points, not difficult to do, you can get the PR benefits without doing much at all. We see simply too much of that.
Walker Architects has been designing passive solar buildings since the early 1980's and we know it takes more than mountains of paperwork to produce sustainable energy efficient project with low carbon and toxicity impact on the environment. We do it the old fashioned way, by established principles, by the numbers with tested reliable assemblies.
The LEED rating system does not make sense in terms of dollars spent or performance achieved. Walker Architects is calling for a national code for sustainable built environment based upon a testing program managed by the DOE.
LEED credit reviews are not based upon building performance. The goal is to fail as many applicants as possible. Sustainable built environment requires design intelligence which should count for something, "Green building" is costly but not effective because design intelligence and building performance does not count, where the USGBC should be aiding and empowering sustainability they are crushing with a faceless technocracy based upon misguided criteria and measurement systems.
I have been told by fellow Architects that "The review process is heavy-handed, it's as if the review contractors are trying to impress the USGBC with their thoroughness and nitpicking. ... the review comments are brief and impersonal, without the slightest hint of support, actual building performance is irrelevant."
There is no physical examination of the actual building, LEED evaluators do not come out and spend a few days looking at a project themselves? They do not personally verify the dual-flush toilets, examine the HVAC controls, meet the design team, discuss the design strategy, experience the effect of thermal mass in the building or the phenomenal impact of movable insulation. If there are questions, based on physical reality they could be resolved on the spot.
The review process needs to be dramatically improved and streamlined. t needs to be injected with a serious dose of science and engineering, valid testing and considerable humility and humanity. That said USGBC consulting engineers are well-trained and should be given more discretion and latitude for subjective decision making. Only building performance has actual contribution to the mission. It has to be solid science based and verifiable, to accomplish a reduction of the carbon footprint of built environment.
The idea behind LEED is laudable. The execution, so far, has been disappointing. In the final analysis, the world needs more sustainable buildings, we need better physical performance from our buildings and more "green buildings" that work, need LEED certification. If LEED continues to cost too much in dollars, time, and effort, the industry is not going to stop building green projects, we'll just stop certifying them. LEED certification is not a process in an awards program, there should be a qualified certification agent in every city.
We need sustainable building to triumph, to take over our culture like computers did. We need LEED -- or something better to accelerate that transition. See our post on Passive Solar Retrofit. Let's roll up our sleeves, get to work, and re -design LEED around design intelligence and established passive solar principles-- for our children, and for the future of our planet.
_________________
WALKER ARCHITECTS |
|
blogger
del.icio.us
digg
slashdot
