The perks of passive strategies

We are back in the US! After two weeks here, we are still re-adjusting to an air-conditionioned life. In our bedroom we are trying to use mostly natural ventilation and a ceiling fan, but in the office we have to respect the comfort of our staff who didn't get to see how interesting it is to use passive-cooling strategies as we did.?

Passive strategies in construction are on my mind right now. So is vernacular architecture which is intuitively “passive”, and strategically so, in accordance to different climate zones where you can find examples of. I just started teaching again at the School of Architecture of Carnegie Mellon University for the Fall semester; our second-year Architecture Studio is dealing with how vernacular architecture is responding to specific biomes and climate zones. The emphasis is on the relationships between climate conditions and morphological aspects of the vernacular buildings. Stuff that is good for the students, but also for professionals like me that may get too busy with the humdrum and forget the basics. I am blessed to be able to talk about design ideas in such a vibrant environment.

While teaching takes a good chunk of my time, I am still working full steam on our projects at Fisher ARCHitecture. Moreover, I take every opportunity I can to stay tuned into the world of construction. Yesterday, for example, I followed an interesting panel organized by Bisnow dedicated to Repositioning and Adaptive Reuse strategies at a national level. The speakers focused mainly on ROI and how to recognize a good investment. It was a talk about money, but at the very end, as the speakers were drawing conclusions, Desa Sealy reminded everybody that adaptive reuse is not a new phenomenon, it has been practiced for a long time. Eric and I have lectured on the topic at the AIA National Convention in 2019 and couldn’t agree more on that. One difference from today is worth considering is that, in the past, renovations were done in an intuitive way, making things work ‘organically’, even ‘passively’ if we consider how they happened without real planning, but rather following what was most convenient to do.

Today, we approach adaptive reuse more violently, and we try to transform apples into oranges, just to discover that it is expensive to do - or that we don’t have “windows on four sides”.

Sheryl Schulze added that we have to look at buildings as perpetual assets. The single-use approach is not good from a sustainable AND a financial point of view.?

I completely agree also with this statement. There is more and more conversation about converting offices into residential, or similar, at a National and international level. Adaptive reuse is happening more often on buildings less “historically notable” than those built in the late-XIX century / early XX. Even shopping malls are being converted!?

Every day, I see exorbitant costs of construction every day, on our projects and in general (I just heard about a $550/SF estimate for an affordable housing project here in Pittsburgh). Every day I have to reconcile budget and scope of work. Often I hear people are shocked that their budget is exactly half of what the actual cost of the project is. This typically results in using lesser materials, because Clients prefer to have more space, rather than quality materials.

“Designing with climate” was one of the topics discussed today in class. We were invited to think carefully about what kind of buildings we want to build: Buildings that use materials in a smart way, banking on passive strategies, or buildings that have to rely solely on HVAC and active strategy, creating a burden on maintenance? Also, building materials have a huge embodied energy, meaning the energy used to produce them (including extraction, production, assembly, and transportation) is huge. We cannot continue building structures with a single-use mentality, because we already cannot afford buying all those new materials.?

Yet, why do we insist on swimming against the current?!?

Despite some interesting experiments with selected building materials, we cannot yet compost buildings like we do with bamboo kitchenware. We can try to disassemble them (brave!!!) or recycle as much material as possible, as encouraged by the LEED “Materials and Resources - Solid waste management” credit, among other programs. My sense is that, as a society, we will have to pivot fast and be smarter at building and rebuilding our communities.

We cannot foresee the future, but we can study the past. It would be wise (dare I say, even financially smart?) to revamp some good practices - whether vernacular or more recent.? What can we learn from the past? Here is my take right now: Reuse, without overdoing it. Work WITH, not AGAINST, what you have at hand - whether it is an existing building or a particular climate.