Building Green History

Any study to understand what green building is could not begin without first learning why this trend began. A future student of history could unwisely skip over the answers on how we came as a society to embrace this technology and go straight to lessons on constructing green buildings. However, doing so would undercut the valuable journey that to know where we are going one must know where we have been.

Ironically, we tend to identify/label many things green as new ideology/invention when in fact some of our green technologies and products derive from ancient times. Water conservation products like rain barrels and other catchment devices dates back thousands of years when the Romans used systems to collect water runoff for using in pools and bats. Passive solar design has been around since the beginning of building construction. Architects today often design structures to utilize the sun's solar heat to reduce energy costs over the building's life cycle. However, before the era of modern air conditioning and heating, architects knew how to use the sun for it's benefits and how to shelter against it for its negatives as some of our earlier commercial building features clearly demonstrate this with their orientation and design. It seems like there is a new 'green" product on the market popping up everyday promoting itself as natural or organic. Before the Industrial Age eventually yielded the wide use of chemicals, synthetics, and other inorganic compounds to manufacturer millions of consumer goods, man-kind often used natural products for common taks such as cleaning, bathing, cooking, and painting.

From the previous examples, it may seem that a minor part of green building and green living today includes simply bring back the 'old ways". However building green is much more than that. The history of our modern green movement in the U.S. has its birth in the 1960's and '70's when the environmental movement was getting started.

The 1960's produced influential writers like Rachel Carson who was a biologist and wrote Silent Spring in 1962. A bestseller of its time, her book about pesticides is often cited as one of the major influences for like minded environmentalists, activists, politicians, architects, and lawyers of that period. Her book helped lead to government investigations of the chemical industry and eventually helped inspire (among others) the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by 1970.

In the 1970's, the U.S. faced the hard lessons from imported oil. In 1973, the oil embargo brought high fuel costs andcaused many people to rethink the use of petroleum. In addition to worrying about fuel costs, others began to examine the environmental impact on fossil fuels on our environment. Inspired by these issues and more, a few architects achieved some modern accomplishments in building green during this era. As an example, the Gregory Bateson Building in California was built in 1978 and has photovoltaic panels, underfloor cooling, and zone limate control.

These issues behind building green are vast to say the least. At the heart of the green building movement in the 1970's and into the 1980's was the key term "sustainable" accompanied by the top priority of sustainable design. During these two decades architects along with government agencies like the EPA, Department of Energy (DOE), plus other organizations were instrumental in laying the foundation work towards studying and improving sustainable design in buildings and addressing environmental issues of today. their work is one of the primary reasons sustainable design is the major strategy in the green buildings of the 21st century.