Jean Nouvel, Agbar Tower. Photo by marcelgermain
I don't understand how to register to leave a comment at TNR, so I'll have to response here to a comment left there. If you were to take LEED certification and build it out to regulate for a coherent, totalistic notion of sustainability, you would see that much of the work that Risen and commenters correctly suggest as green would not pass muster. There is a difference between what green and sustainable, and to get from one to the other, architecture will necessarily change in some fundamental ways. There is much more to sustainability than energy efficiency and passive heating; it is misleading to say that the work of 2008 Pritzker Prize Jean Nouvel represents sustainable architecture because some of his projects feature innovative energy solutions.
You in fact see the U.S. Green Building Council addressing this limiting aspect of LEED certification today, as the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, with a revision to LEED cert that expands its scope:
The new system will award more points for such measures as using solar energy or building near a city center or mass transit. Those changes help reduce energy use, address climate change and combat suburban sprawl, Holowka said.That raises the bar and brings the field of architecture another (indirect) step closer to the carbon pricing scheme Avent describes.
Let's say that architecture invokes carbon pricing tomorrow. My prediction is that the work of Rem Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron, John Utzon, Zaha Hadid, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, and Jean Nouvel would be transformed utterly, so as to be virtually unrecognizable. Glen Murcutt and Thom Mayne, architects who both work with smaller footprints, thrive. This list of names, of course, represents the Pritzker Prize winners from the last decade—a supremely elite sample. Going further back, it is possible to find architects whose works heralded significant achievements in energy efficiency and so on. (Renzo Piano looms large here.) But few—exceedingly few—champions on this list champion a robust sustainability.
More on the subject here, if I haven't totally and shamelessly and ex ante-ly talked out that piece by now.
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