Ecobuilding's New Mortar

By Jane Holtz Kay

This article appeared in the October 29, 2001 edition of The Nation.

October 11, 2001

The marching order to "leave nothing but footprints" enlisted an infantry of green builders this season, before our collective attention turned to security. While our man from the Midland Petroleum Club (a k a George W. Bush) dissed environmental causes and dismissed global warming, before his attention, too, was turned, a growing number of land-shapers and place-makers began to cast an ecological eye toward planning and construction. Whether labeled green building, sustainable architecture, organic architecture or what one inclusionist calls "The Whole Building," this new constituency of ecologically attuned and everyday builders has begun to consider environmental values in building inside and out--from the materials in the making, to the siting of the structure, to the energy it consumes.

"Every architect wants to build green," one would-be organic architect says longingly, listening to speakers at a conference on "Building Energy 200l." Sponsored by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) at Tufts University, the assembly was one of two events pulling in record numbers of builders looking to tread more lightly on the land. The second, "Sustainable Communities by Design," the Southface Energy Institute's annual Greenprints meeting in Atlanta, likewise drew green-minded "carpenters"--sick-building doctors, clean-air experts, developers, engineers and construction firms--as well as professional architects, landscape architects and planners with a growing green agenda.

"What is starting to change a heretofore esoteric or niche market to make it more viable?" Peter Yost asks rhetorically. "People are starting to make a value connection between health, sustainability and the environment," says Yost, senior editor of Environmental Building News. The biological impact of building has begun to enter their calculations, in other words.

Subscriber Login

4 ISSUES FREE

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

.

About Jane Holtz Kay

Jane Holtz Kay (JHoltzKay@aol.com), The Nation's architecture critic and author of Asphalt Nation and Lost Boston, is currently writing Last Chance Landscape: Taking the Earth in for Repairs. more...
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

Blogs

» The Beat

Another Helping of FDR Please | Obama should follow the New Deal president's example and make his Thanksgiving Proclamation a call for economic justice.
John Nichols
67 Comments

» Editor's Cut

Filibuster Follies | "The filibuster has become a cancer growing inside the world's greatest deliberative body."
Katrina vanden Heuvel
93 Comments

» The Notion

Bad Black Mothers | For African American women, reproduction has never been an entirely private matter.
Melissa Harris-Lacewell
95 Comments

» Act Now!

Coal Country | Stunning film reveals new dimensions to the cost of America's over-reliance on coal.
Peter Rothberg
112 Comments

» The Dreyfuss Report

A Kingdom of Bicycles No Longer | China's ambassador for climate change speaks on the eve of the Copenhagen summit meeting.
Robert Dreyfuss
59 Comments