Process of harnessing nature to help reduce energy use

Real Estate Weekly,  May 9, 2007  by Hugh Hardy

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Americans have constructed an elaborate myth. It supports the idea that we can have whatever we want, whenever we want it, without regard to time or place. Long ago, our ability to extend daylight by using electricity changed night into day, and now the constant temperature and humidity of air conditioning are considered an assumed right.

Currently, it is petroleum that provides both the energy and plastic products that sustain our consumer culture, a phenomenon that teaches the public to buy things it doesn't actually need, but believes it must have to look good or stay in fashion. To make our economic system work, we travel, employing the internal combustion engine by air, land and sea-even though emissions from airplanes, cars and ships clearly contribute to global warming and a widening hole in the ozone layer.

But transportation consumes only 27% percent of the energy used in the U.S. Buildings consume 48%, with industry using the remaining 25%. This makes it particularly important to educate architects and their clients about more responsible energy use.

To reduce dependence upon fossil fuel, instead of using technology to separate us from nature--with long-term side effects now proven to be harmful to the planet--we should better align ourselves with natural forces. The process of building buildings consumes prodigious amounts of energy. Both the manufacture and transportation of materials and labor to the site and the fuel machines use in construction consume almost half of all the energy used each year in the United States. And once erected, the systems in new structures represent a major additional energy requirement.

Architecture's current quest for "cutting edge" forms calls for larger, more fashionable shapes to provide clients dramatic public identity. But instead of a process that makes architecture just another consumer product, we should opt to explore new ways to make our built environment habitable--without creating pollution elsewhere.

The Glimmerglass Opera House, located in upstate New York, is an example of harnessing nature to reduce energy use. The auditorium is linked with the outdoors through thirty foot tall sliding doors that together with a rooftop monitor system permit natural breezes to ventilate the hall. Except for occasional discomfort in the balcony from heat on the hottest of marl nee days, this building serves the opera company well without an energy-guzzling mechanical system in place.

At Bear Mountain State Park, New York State has funded a geo-thermal loop, the largest in the northeast, as part of the Inn's current restoration. Using year-round, 50 degree water from nearby Hessian Lake, an energy efficient mechanical system has been developed that greatly reduces energy use and operational cost.

There are two competing points of view about how to responsibly live on planet Earth. One pursues the romantic idea of a return to nature through small-scale organic food production, pedestrians replacing automobiles, zero-carbon emissions and naturally ventilated buildings covered with moss and grass. The other suggests that new technologies will emerge to replace the current dependence on fossil fuels. It imagines an increasingly "green" but industrial production of food and alternate energy systems for heating and cooling without drastic environmental consequences.

Certainly the increase in awareness of the effects that carbon emissions have on the planet has begun to shift public consciousness. Global warming has given us a new awareness, but the responsibility to act upon it lies with the marketplace. That means all of us. Architecture can lead the way.

BY HUGH HARDY, PRINCIPAL,

H3 ARCHITECTS

COPYRIGHT 2007 Hagedorn Publication
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning