The Green Building Wave

Over sixteen years ago, in the December 1990, issue of PERMANENT BUILDINGS & FOUNDATIONS, I wrote a column titled, “Keep Your Chin Up.” I began, “Every day for the past month the business news reports have made me want to go back to bed and pull the covers over my head. No one seems willing to actually say the “R” word. You know, the word that means we’re teetering on and rhymes with depression.” Then, as now, house building was in a slump. Then, as now, I was worried about the war in the Middle East. Then, as now, there was much spin on global warming.

What happened next over the following few years was borderline miraculous. Granted, it took a little while to get the wheels in motion, but you’ll recall we entered nearly a decade of the best economic conditions the home building industry has ever experienced.

Nearly two decades on, we’re in another downturn but America’s building community is taking the concern of fighting greenhouse gases with more verve and force than ever before and this might be what will pull us out of our current slump. Recently the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the International Code Council (ICC) appointed their members to the Consensus Committee on the National Green Building Standard. This Consensus Committee represents the industry in its efforts to develop and publish an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) approved standard on residential green building. Its purpose is to review the working draft of the national standard based on NAHB’s Model Green Home Building Guidelines and to develop ICC/NAHB National Green Building Standard. Unlike the Guidelines, which are intended to be used in the construction of one- and two-family homes, the new standard will be applicable to all new home construction, including multifamily units.

You can be forgiven for being initially overwhelmed by this wave of green building talk; from Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” to the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program, the environmentalism is, in layman’s terms, hot. Will the moment last? Trends burn brightly for a time then fade to be replaced by some other fad. What is interesting about all this interest in Green building nowadays is that it finally has reached a point of consensus at which we agree that it is a force for good, and we should devote resources and energy into changing our building practices.

This is good. A little tear wells up in the corner of my eye every time I see a stick-built home or light commercial building going up. Besides signaling the location of a future bonfire, I am saddened at the audacity of builders to continue building “temporary” structures that may fly apart in the next wind storm or collapse in the next flood. Where is the integrity in this?

If you are in the midst of the permanent building battle, or if you are just now enlisting, the reporting on the following pages will clear your mind and arm you with ideas for the long war ahead.