Roger K. Lewis, FAIA

We must shift focus

Professor Emeritus of Architecture, University of Maryland, May 08, 09.

Tagged with transportation, urban planning, sprawl, green design, sustainable communities, green architecture

In response to a recent article in the The Wall Street Journal on “The Green House of the Future,” architect Roger K. Lewis states that, while inventing ideas and technologies for green home design is a “tantalizing” exercise, the benefits of this kind of speculation are relatively small and can be a distraction from the more serious challenge of creating greener, more sustainable communities:

Entire metropolitan regions need to be green. This means creating more compact land-use patterns; diverse transportation options that enable fewer automobile trips; greater mixing of land uses at higher densities; and, of course, greener residential, commercial, and civic buildings.

Focusing on hypothetical designs of free-standing houses can even be a distraction. It can mask a more serious aspect of the challenge: the diminished sustainability of low-density, residential subdivisions in suburbia where most free-standing houses of the future are likely to be situated.

No matter how green individual homes are, suburban sprawl is intrinsically anti-green. It generates infrastructure inefficiency; car dependency and rising fossil fuel demand; carbon-emitting, time-wasting road congestion; and, despite availability of inexpensive land at ever-greater distances from jobs, escalating development, construction, and public service costs.

To make America greener, we must shift focus. We need less attention on how to shape the individual house and more attention on how to shape—and reshape—communities. And we must focus attention on changing rules and public attitudes that make green design harder to achieve.

Full story: Shaping the City: How a ‘Green House of the Future’ Can Impede Environmental Progress
Source: The Washington Post, May 2, 2009

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