Building Green
Green Party activists and architects design with sustainability in mind
Story and photos by Howard Switzer
Green Party of Tennessee

So-called "green building" has moved from the fringes to mainstream in recent years. But the fancy designs that shelter magazines promote don't necessarily embrace sustainable technology, and they rarely mention the politics that have motivated the shifts in public policy with regard to building.

Greens promote environmentally friendly technologies and design and lobby for legislation to incorporate green standards for everything from forestry and water pollution to economic development- including the structures we call home.

A straw bale house in Virginia constructed for two veterinarians.

The Green Party responds to the need for visionary people in government to help manage the decline of industrialized society with strategies to mitigate the potentially disastrous effects this may have on our environment and all its inhabitants. Greens are not so much concerned with political ideologies of the left or right as they are, as environmentalist David Orr puts it, with the present and the future.

Greens take the LEED

Mark Kresowik, a student at the University of Iowa and a Campus Green, has been lobbying for legislation in Iowa to require LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards for government-funded buildings and tax credits for other projects that get LEED certification. The U.S. Green Building Council created LEED, an environmental rating system that is now being considered by other countries.

LEED's mission is to define green building by establishing a common standard of measurement, raise consumer awareness of green building benefits and transform the building market.

"It's a great issue to get behind that very few people object to," says Kresowik. "Those that care about lowering government expenditures, decreasing environmental impact, improving work and education spaces, all down the line [all support LEED's objectives]."

Global corporations vs. sustainability

Gary Olp, principal of GGO Architects, a green sustainable design firm, says, "To many architects, sustainability is a relatively new concept. [It] begins with a global perspective. It requires a fundamental change in our application of the craft of architecture."

A straw bale workshop near Berea, Ky., installing the walls for a small seminar space.

With the accelerated environmental degradation driven by corporate globalization this issue is even more acute, and as the anti-globalization movement increases awareness, Greens are responding pro-actively.

"Poison is poison even if it is recycled," says Katey Culver, Green Party activist and partner in ecoville architechs, a green building design company. "I hesitate to call our buildings 'green' because the word has been so misused by some powerful materials manufacturers. In our work we look at the embodied energy of a product, including how it gets to the site, because, let's face it, the current transportation system is not sustainable."

Many products labeled green may be composed of recycled materials, but the manufacture and remanufacture of some of these products could hardly be regarded as environmentally benign. Plastics are widely used and billed as green products. While plastics and chemical companies claim their products are nothing to worry about, some independent chemists and researchers disagree.

The considerable resistance by the industry toward environmentally friendly products has changed as demand has increased. Awareness of building materials' toxicity became more prevalent in the '80s and '90s, and materials manufacturers responded with less toxic paints, carpets and other products.

Architects like William McDonough have been successful in convincing some corporations to reduce toxicity and increase the recycled content of building materials and products. The "Green Building Resource Guide" lists over 600 green building materials and products available to the design professional.

Back to basics

	Earth and stone at the entrance to an earthen building under construction.

Some of the most important work in green architecture has been in the noncorporate sector, among activist natural builders and designers. Taking cues from our pre-industrial past, they are relearning how to build with what nature has provided on whatever site they happen to be.

Many old buildings in Europe and England were built of earth reinforced with straw, as was the typical mud brick in the Pharaohs' pyramids, and such buildings are found on every continent save Antarctica. Nearly 40 percent of the population on this planet still lives in earthen dwellings, despite the massive industrialization of the past century.

The corporate incursion on cultures tends to make people feel like their housing is inadequate and primitive, as in India in the last half of the twentieth century. Building modern high-rise concrete apartment buildings, develpers lured many families to move into them as a symbol of their status. A major earthquake in the mid-'90s demonstrated that status was to cost 30,000 lives, while those who remained in their traditional homes of pristine white lime-plastered mud walls and thatch roofs suffered no such loss, and the buildings sustained only minor damage.

Mix it up

Natural builders use milled wood very sparingly. They often use natural wood poles instead, harvested locally for rafters, posts and beams. In mixing the mud for building the walls, many natural builders use time-honored methods involving their feet and hands-no machinery-to make beautifully sculpted walls. Thatch or wood shake roofs often adorn such buildings, as well as living roofs such as sod. Windows and doors are often crafted by hand, heating supplied by the sun with small, highly efficient contra-flow wood burners for backup. The sheer mass of the thick earthen walls coupled with ventilation tends to keep the buildings cooler in the summer.

Straw bales are also used for building energy-efficient, more natural buildings. They provide a high insulation value and a more natural, undulating aesthetic. While motorized machinery is used to produce most bales today, it is not necessary, and bales can be easily integrated into natural buildings.

A straw bale home under construction, left, and completed, right.

All of this is being done because of increased awareness of the precarious depletion of our natural resources. None are likely to have the impact of the lack of cheap energy from fossil fuels, especially oil. All the industrialized societies depend on this cheap energy for agriculture, transportation, heating and cooling and even health care. Certainly the current building industry mode, critically dependent on oil, is not sustainable, despite its green efforts.

Members of the Green Party have helped design community solid waste and pest control programs and have designed green buildings, including some that incorporate straw bale and earthen construction. Greens also support the boycott project of Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) in getting architects to pledge not to participate in the design, construction or renovation of prisons, in favor of using their professional skills to design more positive social institutions such as schools and community centers. The Green Party supports green building and green development as indicated in the party platform, and Greens all around the world can be found implementing green alternatives through their actions.

Howard Switzer is principal architect with ecoville architechs and is noted for his work in straw bale construction and natural building.

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