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PrintBuilding “Supergreen” to Conserve World Resources Makes Vital Sense
What Will Future Cities Look Like?
“Thinking globally” can easily lead to despair, or at least queasy anxiety, considering what we humans are doing at the top of the food chain: consuming precious, dwindling resources whose inestimable value will be better grasped as a growing global population’s demand for petroleum-based products and more importantly, food production, increases over time. To tip the scale in favor of hope takes an active effort of will. Watching the Gulf oil-gusher befoul us all, we can feel helpless – or energized to think differently, to do differently.
There is no greater challenge than to understand our place in nature and the responsibilities of stewardship, allowing provisions for seven generations ahead, as Native American culture saw it. Even in the near-term, resources will not become cheaper or more readily available.
A sustainable way of life has to be built, not simply day-dreamed.
Changing habits means rebuilding the infrastructure of urban living. The UN-Habitat biannual State of the World Cities report states “now over half the world lives in cities, but by 2050, 70% will be urban dwellers...The worlds‘ mega-cites are merging to form vast ‘mega-regions’, stretching hundreds of kilometers across countries, home to more than 100 million people”.
So what will future cities look like and how will they function?
I had the recent privilege of hearing a world-class, award-winning practicing green architect, Christoph Ingenhoven of Dusseldorf, Germany, www.ingenhovenarchitects.com, offer what he refers to as a “supergreen” vision of the future of architecture – the possibility of rebuilding cities to reflect permaculture design principles that integrate buildings into their surroundings, preserve public green space and conserve energy and resources for maximized functionality and efficiency. As an architect of hope, Mr. Ingenhoven poetically equates with timeless beauty and truth. His futuristic buildings are stand-outs in Europe, re-making the Old World as a place to go to find evidence of the design renaissance shaping the future as much as to see the glories of centuries past.
Christoph Ingenhoven’s idea of a skyscraper is a soaring, organically shaped, airy glass “breathing” structure that utilizes natural light and circulating air from rooftop air wells and windows that open, an organism that “behaves” to modulate seasonal fluctuations of temperature, light and moisture. His aim is to create “zero net energy” buildings that respond to their surroundings, to make obsolete the expensive energy draw-down of traditional HVAC systems for heating, ventilating and air-conditioning that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, and which also contribute to stale “unhealthy” high-rise living and working conditions.
An Ingenhoven building is not a showcase “look-at-me” confabulation set apart like an alter to the architect’s ego. Rather, his structures seem more of an organic “result” of deft hands, hearts and minds aligning with Mother Nature, as well as the prospective owners, to allow for spacious, invigorating interior living and working environments that include botanical gardens, tree canopies and areas for recreation. Imagine snowy winter conditions outside, with gently filtered sunlight streaming indoors that warms the interior “just enough” as it illumines a volleyball game being played on beach sand under palm trees.
One plan on the Ingenhoven drawing board is for a new train station in Stuttgart, one that will be built below ground to save a whole valley’s ecology for a public park. Saving the land’s topography means protecting the natural wind currents and patterns that ventilate the entire city season to season. The station will be illuminated from great light wells that are dome-shaped as seen from above in the park, but as seen from the train platform below will look like smoothly tapered pouring spouts that cascade light from the sea of sky above.
Considering his enormous achievements and multiple awards that put him in demand for speaking engagements across continents, Mr. Ingenhoven is modest and measured, light on his feet when speaking of the venerable green truths he avows as his design mantra. “Small is beautiful again, density is better,” he chimes. At the Clift Hotel in S.F., he kept a packed room of engineers and fellow architects rapt for two straight hours, showing examples of projects he’s guided around the world. The event was more than inspiring for all of us assembled who know that the transformative energies of “thinking green globally” have to be put to work by all of us “acting green locally”.
And to that great work, I want to pay tribute to the event's sponsor, Glumac, a green west coast engineering firm headquartered in San Francisco, whose tag line is “Engineers for a Sustainable Future.” www.glumac.com. One of Glumac’s senior partners is Mike Steinmann, a Benicia resident and personal friend. www.glumac.com. A year ago, “acting locally,” Mike advocated for the adoption of the LEED rating and certification system [“Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” USGBC: Intro - What LEED Measures] to guide new development under consideration by our city council for a proposed Benicia Business Park, to be located on 527 acres of prime land within our city limits. We can take pride in our council’s decision to take the LEED step, thanks to Mike, who talks as if mounting a campaign to do green development should take no convincing. “It’s not hard to sell the idea”, he says, “because most people want to do something to save the earth.” This, said by a seasoned engineer, who during business hours is helping to plan “cloud computing” data storage centers across the country that require design ingenuity to be kept cool. That’s one giant energy draw that’s hidden from most of us, unless we happen to know engineers like Mike.
In the last two years, Benicians have had to think about what is truly meant by the term “sustainability” – a word used so frequently now that we almost can’t hear it. It was the concept farsightedly chosen to define the overarching goal of our 1999 General Plan. Locally, Mike helped us clarify the term in relation to how we build infrastructure that will meet current and future needs without squandering resources.
As our city’s Climate Action Plan reflects, one of the best ways to save resources and cut humans’ contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is to design conservation fundamentals into the structures of everyday urban life, whether new, from the ground up, or by retrofitting existing infrastructure. Just like what Christoph Ingenhoven has proved is possible to do.
The US Green Building Council (USGBC) states, “Buildings are part of the solution. While accounting for nearly 40% of our country’s carbon footprint, the building sector also serves as a low-cost, high-return investment strategy to reduce energy consumption and associated emissions, yet their potential remains largely untapped. McKinsey and Company estimates that increased efficiency would save the U.S. economy $130 billion per year, while reducing emissions by 1.1 gigatons a year. Moreover, programs dedicated to spur the retrofit of old, inefficient homes and buildings will create jobs and save consumers money.”
Right now, our measurable, giant-sized carbon footprints won’t easily be eroded by sands of time; we’ve already left our mark on future generations, “come hell or high water”, as the saying goes. In a hundred years, our children’s children might look back on our cities and burbs as decadent signs of a time when resources were cheap and peoples’ imaginations were lulled into complacency; OR, they could look back and be grateful for the wise choices we made in the nick of time, adopting green practices in whatever we do, like Christoph Ingenhoven, designing with respect for their children’s children’s children.
