Roundtable February 2008 - How should we define “sustainability”?

roundtable 2008

Michael Carey: How should we define “sustainability”?

Michael Mehaffy: The common definition that everyone seems to fall back to these days is the Brundtland Commission definition: meeting the needs of the present “without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” A deeper meaning than that is that you have a high quality of life that can endure.

Michael Lykoudis: I’m a little more pessimistic. I don’t think we can sustain this quality of life in the future, not at the rate of growth to which we have become accustomed, not at the pace at which we are using our natural resources and our fossil fuels. We will have to change our way of life, it’s that simple. Now, whether or not we will be able to keep our infrastructure the way it is, at least in places like New York City, which operates primarily as a sustainable enterprise for the most part, with mass transit, pedestrian proximities and the like, is still in question. In any case, we’re in for some radical changes. I think sustainability has to be framed in terms of how we will share the resources of the world equitably and in terms of the best quality of life that that equity will produce.

Walter Sedovic: Iceland is a sustainable country and it’s interesting that they don’t necessarily use the word sustainability. I think we’re still in the process of trying to tag actions and interactions that relate to our definition of global sustainability, of which buildings comprise a part. It’s a culmination of efforts that are related to economy, that are related to environment, that are related to education and to so-called social equity and senses of community. It’s really a way of understanding how the parts and pieces can best come together. We tend to separate out issues related to energy conservation, or we tend to separate out issues related to the environment, and that’s a mistake. So for us, it’s really taking every opportunity to springboard aspects of education toward economic revitalization and of course, toward the environment.

Carey: I might be presuming too much here, but I think that everyone would agree that sustainability, in architectural terms, isn’t only about building performance, or the building at all, necessarily, but about ways of life and how the building meshes with ways of life. In more global terms, on the other hand, how we think about sustainability is often subordinated to economics. I think the statement of principles on the website for the U.S. Green Building Council is very telling. They use the “triple bottom line”: societal prosperity, economic prosperity and environmental prosperity. It seems to me that this framing of society and the environment in economic terms is a dangerous way to think.

Mehaffy: The danger of the current way of thinking is that it focuses upon a technological solution to a technological problem and it doesn’t look at the long-term historic evolution of how we got to where we are. We’ve started using energy in a very different way and started consuming resources in a very different way and on a very different scale. Looking at old buildings – first of all there are many of them. If you’re talking about any program of sustainability you have to look first of all at the existing inventory of buildings, many of which are historic buildings. So that’s a huge challenge in itself. Secondly, many of those buildings are very well adapted to a low carbon pattern and to an integrated model of the way people live with their resources. There’s a different idea of technology, if you will, in those old buildings – a collective intelligence, so to speak, that we can go back to and apply to new construction. And that’s what I think is interesting about New Orleans as a project, and other challenges before us: how can we use that knowledge, that intelligence, to deal with our current crisis?

Sedovic: I think that we, in partnership with the building community, have a great effect on the way people think and the way people act overall. It is such a large industry and it does affect virtually everyone. But then again, if the idea is to truly be sustainable, we need to engage on the political side so that we can put them into effect in a meaningful and lasting way. That, in turn, plays into economics so that we make wise decisions. I don’t think anybody would agree that the decisions relative to the aftermath of Katrina are economically wise.

Mehaffy: Talk about un-sustainability. That was exemplary.

Sedovic: So all of these become coupled and I think that once we begin to uncouple them we start to run into problems. Each of us has unique abilities to be either more politically inclined, or more economically inclined or more environmentally inclined. And so we all sort of link arms and I think that’s what has begun to happen, that there are certain groups breaking off from this larger sustainable organization, and working quite well together. I was really intrigued by the first U.S. Green Building Council conference, which was the first international conference on sustainability. What was so remarkable was that there were people who were microbiologists, there were attorneys, there were educators, there were politicians, there were some architects, there were engineers and there were social scientists. And it was this incredible group of people who all had something in mind and that conference stayed full from the very first opening statement to the very last. By the following year, it had switched gears and become much more about buildings and I would say 75-80 percent were architects and engineers and the allied professions. That greatly diminished this wonderful, fresh sense of being able to talk to people who were doing something completely different, but with the same mindset. That’s what I’d like to see us get to.

Lykoudis: Many years ago, Leon Krier – I’ll paraphrase poorly – said that the destruction of our cities and countryside can not be reversed except through an economical, political, cultural and environmental project – an ecological project. So the ecological aspect encompasses virtually everything – it is not just how we build, but also how we live together. It is about humanity understanding that we will have limited options and great difficulty in the future. Also, we talk about this country as being one of the largest users of energy and the source of environmental deterioration, but in fact the aspirations of the Chinese cannot be ignored. They’re telling us, “You’ve had your day in the sun, now we want ours.” That whole idea has been unleashed on 1.4 billion people and we have to come to terms with it and what it means for our way of life.

Carey: George H.W. Bush told us that the American way of life is not negotiable.

Lykoudis: And in fact it is very negotiable, because nature has a way of not negotiating with people. Someone once said that we need nature to survive, but nature does not need us to go on.

Sedovic: I’d like to go back to what Michael Mehaffy said earlier about buildings – early buildings, historic or not, being intrinsically more adaptable. I think part of the reason for that is not because anybody was being particularly altruistic, but because there was a very strong understanding of where your next meal would come from. We don’t have that direct sense of nature now. We manipulate things so inventively that I think we lose the sense of the preciousness of the environment that we’re working with.

Mehaffy: Contemporary buildings are just adapting to very narrow engineering criteria. If you really have to make a mutually adaptive system, which is what people had to do in a low-carbon society, before the 20th century, there’s a real sophistication in that. Even the most technologically savvy engineers are now starting to recognize that. There has been some research on how historic buildings actually performed and it’s pretty remarkable. A Tudor house in 1560 was more energy efficient than a mock-Tudor house in 1960, for instance. You have this image that they are primitive, leaky, cold and uncomfortable, but in point of fact, they were very sophisticated in their own way.

Lykoudis: We’ve learned a lot and when we select knowledge from history we can be eclectic; it’s all there for us to put together in synthesis for the best possible outcome. I think that is a mindset that is sorely missing from the universities and educational institutions in the world. The solutions to the problems will require an interdisciplinary and holistic systems approach. That’s the only the way that these massive solutions for energy and environment, which I see as completely linked, are going to be found. One also has to also look at the embodied energy tradeoff. You can fire bricks, but bricks, if installed properly, can be reused for thousands of years, as they have been in those parts of Europe built with Roman bricks. So while we may have spent a lot of energy firing those bricks and accepted their accompanying pollution and carbon emissions, they have lasted a thousand years. The same cannot be said for glass and steel, which have high embodied energy but relatively short life spans.

Mehaffy: Many traditional buildings do last 200-300 years or more. They exist today at that age, and yet today we’re designing buildings, if we’re lucky, for 60-year lifespans. We should really be thinking longer term. In order to think longer term, we also have to think adaptively in terms of how the building can change. I mean if it’s one kind of iconic skin that can’t be modified, and the material is high energy and high maintenance, that’s going to make it a much tougher sell. One of the other things that research is showing is that there are some real issues arising now with new buildings that are claiming to be energy efficient and sustainable. The glass curtain wall, for example, has drawn criticisms from a number of building researchers, including those who are pointing out the solar gain and the heat loss from all the glazing, plus the cost of the materials and the maintenance with the use of the building over time. Is it going to become dated precisely because it is “of its time,” so strongly “of its time” that in 40 or 60 years, it’s going to be torn down? Something like half the energy of a building is embodied in its construction. These are really disturbing questions that I think we have to answer.

Lykoudis: In the end, we will have to go through some very difficult times, but I think that there is no other way but to press forward and there is a great reason to be optimistic because we have the knowledge to save ourselves and we know what we need to do if not in the details at least as far as the big picture is concerned. Think, for example, of where we are now: Manhattan has an average carbon footprint per person that is dramatically lower than say, the suburbs of many U.S. cities, yet nobody would argue that Manhattan doesn’t have a very enjoyable lifestyle. I think there’s a particular burden on us in the U.S. to get our own house in order, and thereby correct the model that we’ve created for places like China. This model suggests that the only way to have a high quality of life is to have a high pattern of consumption and emissions and that really isn’t true. We can show that it’s actually incredibly wasteful to live a high consumption pattern and that the waste is not necessary to our economic and cultural well being.

Carey: But that’s against the interests of the powerhouses of the economy.

Mehaffy: It is right now, but that’s a game they have to play just like everyone else. If you change the rules of the game, that goes to the politics again and I think the tectonic plates are shifting on that score.

Lykoudis: The Pentagon has conducted studies on the impact of global warming on international securities. The insurance companies know very well what’s happening with global warming.

Mehaffy: Exactly.

Lykoudis: And even Detroit and Tokyo know what’s happening with respect to oil. The aviation industry knows that there is an end of sorts coming up, and the wars between Boeing and Airbus reflect – perhaps I’m speculating more than I should be – that there will be very little jet fuel to go around in 20 or 30 years. Jim Kunstler talks about the fact that there have been no new refineries built. Why? Well, they are very expensive and the oil companies know that there isn’t a lot of that stuff out there that’s easy to get out. So I think the present powerhouses will hold on as much as possible – that’s their nature – but other powerhouses will emerge and other economic realities will change things. What we need to do is offer guidance and direction, lest we lose our stability. I think Americans in particular are very open to this discussion, as we’ve always been an earnest people. We can pat ourselves on the back. Winston Churchill said, “You can trust Americans to do the right thing, but only after they’ve exhausted all the other possibilities.”

Mehaffy: This economic issue is fundamental, as is this question of how the big players are playing the game right now and how they are actually able to essentially spend our grandchildren’s inheritance, our grandchildren’s natural capital. That’s a rule of the game that I think needs to be changed somehow. I think we see that in a place like New Orleans. What’s happening in New Orleans is that the more sustainable, walkable, transit-served, mixed-use, older parts of the city are not getting rebuilt, and what is getting rebuilt are the sprawling suburbs that are dependent on cars, strip malls and all those kinds of high-consumption things. How the heck are we going to get there if we can’t fix New Orleans? If we can’t fix New Orleans, we’re in trouble everywhere else.

Sedovic: Other cities though are reinventing themselves to become more sustainable. Portland, Seattle, Austin – a number of cities in the heartland.

Mehaffy: In the city of Portland, where I live, that is true, but the suburbs are not unlike suburbs elsewhere with the same kinds of problems. Downtown Portland is an interesting story because that was some visionary leadership, which took a lot of early criticism and still has a lot of political controversy. It’s not by any means perfect, but it has had its successes.

Sedovic: It’s a very enjoyable, very livable place.

Mehaffy: It’s a very livable, convivial city and there’s some research that shows that the carbon footprint is indeed quite a bit lower and in fact if you believe the research, the greenhouse gas targets have been brought down to 1990 levels in Portland. But that’s the city of Portland, and again, we must look at the whole systems.

Lykoudis: And do people in Portland buy the plastic tubs made in China as much as they do in, say, Chicago?

Mehaffy: Yes, then we look at all these externalities; the food miles, the food that you get from South America or wherever it’s coming from, and all the other things you factor in.

Carey: What do you think Portland has done well?

Mehaffy: Portland emphasized the downtown and the older, inner neighborhoods and said, “We’re going to make a commitment to these places, and make them successful.” They thought of things that would damage that, such as the Harbor Freeway, which they actually tore down, and created a riverfront park. That was public policy.

Carey: So this was top-down?

Mehaffy: It was top-down and there was bottom-up too. Also there were a lot of fertile conditions for the bottom-up approach there – a lot of artists and creative people. Plus there was the happy accident of a small, walkable street grid, which Jane Jacobs talked about as being really an ideal street grid. So it was really both. What we’re trying to do in New Orleans right now is both, but we’re having a heck of a problem with the top-down side of that. The bottom-up has done some remarkable things in New Orleans, but they can only do so much.

Lykoudis: I think, also, that there have to be different scales of intervention. We have to discuss all the different scales of human habitation. At the end of the day, however, there are two questions: How do we as individuals act? How do we as architects act? How do you build, and what do you build? What do you say no to? What do you say yes to? And as educators, what do we impart to our students? What is important for them to know? We have to balance both the pragmatic nuts-and-bolts issues with a broad, philosophical spectrum of thought so they can find purpose and meaning. Linking these two is always difficult and unfortunately most schools haven’t been teaching what students need to know. They are teaching that green buildings are off the grid, that they have this, that and the other techno gizmo bells and whistles. It’s about an individual building, a consumable footprint, rather than how it involves society. On the History Channel a few months ago, I saw a very nice exposé that talked about the Flatiron Building and spoke about it as a green building. Why is it green? It’s green because it has thick masonry walls, which are supported laterally by its steel structure. The walls are thick enough that the windows are set back so that they create shadows to avoid heat gain. The cornice is deep so it offers shadows at the peak of day down the façade. The floors have flow-through ventilation and each room has a transom window, which allows air to circulate freely through the building. And the masonry reflects the heat at night and absorbs it during the day. Of course the show quickly panned over to a building with a glass curtain wall, and the narrator indicated that the new building does exactly the same thing. They didn’t tell you how, but they talked about that building as being green, because it has all the bells and whistles. But it does not behave in the same way that the Flatiron Building does. The Flatiron Building is part of an ecosystem. One building, if it is not integrated completely into this realm of ecosystem, simply is not part of the organism of the city.

Mehaffy: I want to pick up on your point – and I find this alarming as well – the schools, by and large, are teaching a very narrow technological notion of sustainability. They are not really preparing students for what’s coming in the real world, and they are certainly not doing a very good job of teaching historic preservation, for example, and historic patterns in general. It is a huge challenge before us, to take care of all these buildings that we already have, and to reuse them and to make them more useful.

Sedovic: I don’t want to preempt what I’m sure will be a thoughtful response, but I personally and professionally have always been involved with historic buildings and actually count myself as an early sustainable architect, because that’s the way I was taught. Preservation and architecture have nearly always found it rough to find a happy common ground at the university level. I’ve never quite understood that. I think part of it has to do with the separation of skill sets – architects tend to be looked upon as designers, not as builders. And that’s certainly indicative of what we see of people coming through school and starting at entry-level positions. They really don’t know how to build. The other interesting thing that has occurred is that there’s a great interest in sustainability, so now we’ve got people coming to us specifically because they’re looking for a combination of sustainability in preservation, or sustainability in architecture.

Lykoudis: The idea of sustainability is the same idea as preservation – to preserve oneself. It came out of a need to sustain the values of civilization in the early ’60s, when it was really being threatened by so-called urban renewal. So preservation programs teach what architects need to know to build sustainable buildings. They are probably the only programs, except for the University of Miami, Notre Dame, Maryland and maybe a handful of other programs in the country. But except for those schools of architecture programs and curricula, the preservation programs are the only place that you really find a worldview that allows you to build well and to build sustainably.

Mehaffy: What can be done about that? It seems to me that that’s a fundamental obstruction to any real, sustainable architecture.

Lykoudis: I think one of the problems is that the design culture in most schools is to simply bring out the innermost anxieties of students into some convoluted personal aesthetic expression.

Mehaffy: That’s the problem. It’s a lie they’re selling the students, because they’re not all going to be “starchitects.” In fact only a tiny, vanishingly small percentage of them are going to do that, and the rest of them are really going to have to take some remedial work.

Lykoudis: They’re not learning anything that will make them useful. They’re only playing the roulette wheel and hoping they’ll get lucky and become the next Rem Koolhaas. At the very basic level we have to change the culture of universities. Universities are beginning to also deal with education as a commodity, and, in fact, education is in very grave danger of becoming entertainment. I tell our students at the beginning of every year: “You’re not here just to become better and more successful, you are here to give something back to society.” Society educates its young so that we can have a better place in the future. So if it can’t begin in the universities, I don’t know where it can begin. The universities have to teach citizenship again, not consumerism. Schools of architecture have to teach useful things as well as philosophical aspirations and citizenship. Only then will we begin to actually see a shift. It’s happening, people are craving it.

Mehaffy: And I do take heart that a lot of people are starting to discuss this issue. Kenneth Frampton talks about this commodification of architecture, turning into what he calls “architainment.” This is happening certainly in the schools.

Lykoudis: I think you hit it right on the nose. Architecture has become another form of entertainment. In fact, consumerism is becoming entertainment. The commercials are entertaining and they have to be – funny, witty or obnoxious. Architecture is entertainment, education is becoming entertainment and hospitals are becoming entertainment. Everyone is getting into the business. Everything is media, so the substance becomes subservient to the image.

Carey: Is aesthetics the enemy of sustainability?

Lykoudis: Absolutely. I think sustainability must trump style. Let’s imagine what architecture would look like if we didn’t have petroleum. Say we had coal and we had discovered all sorts of other things that gave us cheap energy, but no petroleum. We wouldn’t have the gaskets that help keep water out artificially from flat surfaces. We would have to flash things with other materials and curtain walls wouldn’t be what they are. Everything would have to be different and at some point in time we would have to start making buildings that last for a long time, because it would be simply too expensive to do otherwise.

Mehaffy: Another way of looking at it is from the point of view of a physicist who is looking at what you might call “solution space.” Physicists have noticed that if you graph the solutions to a problem there are certain clusters that naturally tend to keep recurring over and over and over again – they call them “attractor basins.” And you as a designer create a physical response to that. Let’s say it’s a pitched roof that sheds the rain or something like that. If you had a design philosophy that said we did pitched roofs before but we can’t do them anymore – now we have to do something else because that was then and this is now – then suddenly you have to come up with another kind of roof. Maybe it’s a flat roof and then you have to flash it. So what I’m getting at is that by having this standard that says you cannot do anything that was done in the past, you’re actually creating a burden on yourself when you’re trying to create a sustainable building culture. You really need, just as nature needs, to reuse that which works, and if you don’t do that, you’re going to paint yourself into a gradually tinier and tinier corner of the “solution space” where you’re going to have to come up with more desperate kinds of inventions to solve the problems.

Lykoudis: Well that really describes the present state, doesn’t it?

Sedovic: It does. We still have the ability to engineer nature out of our solutions, but there are great models of sustainable ways of building. I’d like to mention the Tudor example, because that’s exactly the opposite of what should happen. If we’re going to mimic the past or if we’re going to learn from the past and incorporate elements of the past, then why do our solutions perform worse than something several hundred years their predecessor?

Mehaffy: Because we’re just acting on the image and that’s what we consider the “style.”

Sedovic: That’s exactly it.

Mehaffy: It’s very much a question of adapting to the current condition and not just pretending that it’s the same when it’s not. History is full of examples. Greek temples were originally made of wood, then became stone, and then you have, many centuries later, Bath being built from similar Greco-Roman architecture using that wonderful Cotswold limestone. It has its own lovely characteristic, like no other place in the world, and yet it follows a lot of the same Classical principles of design. So I think we’ve got to get to a more organic view of these things, taking what works and adapting it to something new. And you don’t artificially abstract the image or the commodity of it, you look for the deeper patterns and you apply those to the problem that you have to solve.

Lykoudis: We are so object fixated in our culture today. When we look at a column, let’s say a Doric column, we forget that it’s actually part of a colonnade and that the character of the building is about the proportion of the column and the space between the columns. Hawksmoor’s Mausoleum colonnade with its very tightly spaced columns has a completely different character, and evokes a different feeling, than the Parthenon. It’s about looking at the relationships between things. What is the brick’s relationship to the other brick? What is its relationship of a column to a wall? What is the wall’s relationship to the opening? And then what is the building’s relationship to other buildings that creates the character of the city? That’s why Bologna is not the same as Modena even though it’s 20 kilometers away. So it’s all about the relationships between things, and education has to focus on that stuff, on the dark matter of space if you will, as well as on the planets.

Mehaffy: Yes, well said. And you remind me of this crucial topic of local identity, which people seem to be very worried about as we globalize. The worry about globalized architecture, which is a universal phenomenon, is that we’re losing the authentic local character of places like New Orleans. That’s exactly what people love about New Orleans – even though some of the architecture might be Greco or Roman or Victorian or whatever, it’s combined in a way that’s absolutely unique to that place.

Lykoudis: There was a Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) council in Charleston years ago and one of the issues that came up about one of the architectural projects that were being displayed was that of authenticity. None of these places look authentic because it has all been designed at once with an image in mind. It doesn’t come out of any deeper purpose.

Mehaffy: This is Christopher Alexander’s criticism as well.

Lykoudis: It just comes from an artificial image and it comes from an attitude towards building that is not a culture but a technocratic system of consumption. So of course it doesn’t have a deeper purpose and it never will. Some of the best architects today can do very, very good traditional architecture but I have yet to see an exemplary project.

Carey: I wonder if this whole discussion isn’t basically about two things, scale and time.

Mehaffy: Absolutely. They always are.

Lykoudis: I just want to say, before we go on, that one of the big dangers I see in the future to all of this is a rehabilitation of unjust movements. At the passing of Jane Jacobs, I found really troubling an article in The New York Times, in which Nicolai Ouroussoff tried to rehabilitate Robert Moses. You know Robert Moses may have done some marvelous parkways, but in the end his dismissal of Jane Jacobs and the humanity she brought into the city and into the architecture was just outrageous. The media, and particularly the architecture critics, have done a horrible job of misinforming – well they’ve done a very good job of misinforming – the public, misdirecting them into issues which are red herrings, and have nothing to do with the poetry and the pragmatics of life.

Mehaffy: I think that there’s a phenomenon of collective amnesia that’s quite alarming and the treatment of the death of Jane Jacobs is a case in point, as is the rehabilitation of Robert Moses. It’s because a city like Portland resisted Robert Moses and pulled down the freeway that it became the walkable, convivial, sustainable city that it is today. It’s because we recognized our mistakes and learned from them and reversed them and went on from there. And I find it astonishing that suddenly we’re going to dismiss all that. And again, it goes back to the issue of scale and time, and the question of scale and the accepting of large-scale projects, deep-block projects of the kind that Moses advocated. In terms of large-scale transport systems, these things that are not moving in the direction of fine-grained adaptivity, which is what we need to have if we’re talking sustainability. I think it’s quite alarming, and we do need to respond to that vigorously and put out the counter argument that Jane Jacobs was right. I also think that the CNU is fascinating as an organization in that it actually is identifying a common theme on which people who are very much on the right, very much on the left, very much all over the map politically, have converged. It’s about conviviality and the civic realm and how we actually have a collective responsibility for that. Where else do you find that kind of thing? It’s very hopeful to see people starting to cross the divide and talk about these things, particularly in light of this whole sustainability discussion and how we are actually going to do this together.

Sedovic: My question on the CNU is why be a New Urbanist when you can be an old urbanist? It’s another tag that people get excited about and maybe they think that they’re looking at something new because they’re two generations separated from a concept that had been a natural part of life. From the end of World War II to the late 90s, I think we started forgetting everything we used to know. I was at a presentation a year or so ago on the development of a CNU project at the expense of exactly the same thing happening in the downtown, which was 12 miles away. So I actually brought this up and I was trying to be as polite about it as possible, but I did set it up as a loaded gun by asking, “Well is your project doing this? Is your project doing this?” The answer was yes and yes. I said, “But isn’t that everything that the downtown already does?”

Mehaffy: Right.

Sedovic: Nobody is doing anything downtown. Why not? That’s where the money should be going. I am LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) accredited and I stand behind the U.S. Green Building Council, but LEED is modeled on certain guidelines and there are other guidelines around the world that would be applicable to us here. It’s unfortunate that it has become a little bit of a monopoly in that there hasn’t been much competition introduced in the United States. The issue with that is that when the government or an organization or an individual says, “I’m going to design a LEED-certified building,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a sustainable product at the end of the day. It’s a checklist that you go down and you might hit it, or you might not hit it, depending on what all of the other variables are. So people misunderstand, because if they are handed a CNU brand – and it is a brand – or an LEED brand, they think they are doing the right thing and that may not necessarily be the case.

Mehaffy: In the CNU’s defense, it is a set of principles, which are often not very well realized, but it is a very ambitious attempt to try to realize them in the context of all these economic phenomena that we’re talking about. And the principles apply to development wherever it’s located. Often they don’t help older, established areas because economics dictate what’s going to happen. So do you just say – as many architects do – that you don’t care about the suburbs and you’re just not going to pay any attention to them, even though they constitute 95 percent of the development that goes on? Do you focus purely on the downtown – which is much more sustainable already – or swallow hard and actually tackle this monster in the suburbs and try to slow it down, even at the risk of being accused of being part of this monster? I think the CNU should get credit for trying even where it fails – for at least tackling that phenomenon. I’ll criticize a lot of other things about it, certainly the level of perfection and the goals yet to be realized, but I wouldn’t fault it for not being ambitious in the right way. Also the whole “new” thing is that it is new in the current context of trying to go back to the old, in the same way that architects today talk about how you can’t copy the old but you can certainly learn from it. When you do, that itself is something new.

Lykoudis: And nobody would have listened to them if they’d said it was old urbanism.

Sedovic: Yes, no question.

Lykoudis: One of the problems is not the CNU’s fault as much, I think, as the media’s for not playing up the projects in the inner cities that could have been seen as New Urbanist projects.

Mehaffy: Absolutely.

Lykoudis: Some of the Hope VI housing, such as the housing on 116th Street and Park Avenue in New York City, is not bad. It’s pretty good row housing in Harlem. That’s New Urbanism.

Mehaffy: Urban Design Associates does a lot of inner-city projects, as does Moule & Polyzoides. Quite a few New Urbanist firms do, but the greenfield projects get all the ink.

Lykoudis: I resent it when some newspaper or newscaster points a finger at traditional architects or New Urbanists and says, “All you guys do are suburbs for the rich.” It ignores all the hard work that goes into places like Harlem. Torti Gallas did some lovely interventions in places that people had given up on. It’s not cutting-edge architecture, but then I think we have a myth of what progress means today.

Mehaffy: Right. We need the background urbanism. Cutting-edge architecture can take its place, but…

Lykoudis: People forget that some of the great architects of antiquity did background buildings.

Sedovic: Modernism was terrific in that sense because when the first drawings arrived showing early Modernist buildings set in the context of 18th and 19th century buildings, that was fantastic. But if you’re looking down Park Avenue in the ’50s, or down around lower Manhattan in the ’40s, it becomes much less fantastic because the context is gone. So yes, I totally agree.

Mehaffy: This whole subject of contextualism is a hot one. How we respond to context and function goes hand in hand. If you’re dealing with the context in terms of the sustainable patterns of life, you’re probably also going to be dealing with some of the materials, the expressive characteristics of the place too. You’ll get aesthetic contextualism. The aesthetics will flow from what you’re doing, not drive what you’re doing. As you were saying, you don’t let aesthetics be the enemy.

Sedovic: I’d like to raise the question of where in the world sustainability does seem to have a hold. I would have to say that in many parts of Italy that’s probably true, and one of the things I’ve found that differentiates Italy from many other countries is that it’s still authentic in the sense that it has a continuum of linkage to its past. So people have a real sense of place, a sense of being there. There’s also this great interplay of buildings that, if you were there one year and returned 20 years later, you’d have the sense that most of those places are still going to be there. And I think that’s extremely important on the cultural side.

Carey: And antithetical to the U.S.

Sedovic: It is antithetical.

Mehaffy: I used to live in Los Angeles. I go back every five years or so, and each time it’s like going back to a new city.

Sedovic: Shanghai is part of my critical list of places to visit because I’m afraid that by the time I get there I will not have had any experience of what Shanghai had been. It just seems to be changing so quickly.

Mehaffy: I think the Scandinavian countries, for example, have done a really good job of integrating sustainable practices relative to other parts of the world. And it’s interesting that they’ve managed to integrate Modernism, including Minimalism and some of the Modernist principles, with a traditional pattern and with ecological principles and a strong natural aesthetic to make a very convivial, livable place. I think Stockholm is a good example of that.

Lykoudis: If you look at different parts of Europe, you get different pieces of the puzzle that need to be sort of rewoven together. Certainly France has minimized its dependency on fossil fuels to a large degree.

Sedovic: Germany as well.

Lykoudis: Maybe at the expense of other problems in the future, but nevertheless, at least for now that’s one thing that Germany has been engaged in very carefully and very rigorously. Flying over Germany you see very little sprawl. You see that the city cores are intact – well, as much as they were after the Second World War. You see the boundary of the city.

Mehaffy: The edges are very distinct.

Lykoudis: It can be done, even in the system that we have, which probably needs to change in terms of how we place value on things. The economic value has to change, because we have to go to a resource-based system.

Sedovic: Resource and conservation based. I think the Germans in particular are very good at that, as are the Scandinavians. I believe that something like 40 percent of Germany’s electricity is produced by wind.

Mehaffy: Yes, they’ve got a very aggressive program. They also have remarkably innovative programs for retrofitting old buildings. There’s a consortium of the city of Berlin, and they go to the building owner and say that not only will the retrofit not cost them anything, they’re also going to use part of the savings to pay back some of the construction loans, with the rest of the savings going to the owner. From day one the owner gets more money, guaranteed. So what building owner in the world wouldn’t say, “Yes absolutely, retrofit my building tomorrow”? They have a number of programs like that that we look at and think, well of course, why don’t we do this?

Sedovic: Well because we take a completely different tack. I went to a presentation about three or four years ago and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was ostensibly to promote alternative forms of fuel, but that’s not really what it was about. They were talking about wind energy and said, “It’s great that we can build a windmill hill, but we have a better idea and this is what we want to sell you on. We have a derivative where you purchase the sky in front of that windmill and any wind that comes across it is your property and therefore you deserve to be compensated for it.” Instead of looking at any of the fundamentals behind what the windmill was, they thought, “How can we extract a way to get more capitalism out of the process?”

Mehaffy: Well it’s this atomization of society into profit-making modules. Carbon trading is another example.

Sedovic: I’m not a huge fan of carbon trading.

Mehaffy: I think the market can play an important role in all this – it’s just that it is a role in a larger civic and public process – a political process. And that’s what I think is the success story in Germany and Scandinavia. When we were talking about Portland, I neglected to mention that the urban-growth boundary was an absolutely critical piece of that puzzle. It is now under assault there, especially by anti-government ideologues, because they did make some mistakes in how they handled it. But I think there’s a proper place for a political unit deciding, democratically, that we are not going to build on the farmland and that we are not going to sprawl. There must be, otherwise we are going to have a tragedy of the commons, where we’re gradually destroying our common resources in an unstoppable way. In Europe, where they are the worst is where they’ve copied us, I’m ashamed to say.

Carey: I think it gets back to what we were speaking about before, that you’re going to have a resistance: “We’re not European. You can’t turn me into a European, I’m an American.”

Mehaffy: On the other hand, you can overcome that. I mean, marketers do that sort of thing all the time. They change the perception of what is valuable and what is desirable. So far, the marketers themselves have been rewarded by creating the perception that large cars and big lots, freeways and the suburban lifestyle is the desirable lifestyle of the future. But that’s because right now, the rules of the game reward them for that. If we change the rules of that game, suddenly the marketers are going to start saying, “Hey isn’t it great to live in this delightful, convivial place, where you know your neighbor and you can take your child to the park?” It’s already happening, that’s why New Urbanist communities are selling so well. It’s because people actually will find that appealing.

Sedovic: What does each of you expect to get by continuing to promote sustainability, or sustainable lifestyles? What do you see as the end result of your love and efforts?

Lykoudis: We’re probably not going to see the fruits of what we do, but we have to make sure that we leave this place a little bit better for our kids. I have this image of my children 80 years from now, and what kind of life they will have, and that’s what drives me.

Sedovic: People who spend a lot of time outdoors have no problem with that concept – that you hike in and you hike out and hopefully it’s a better place than when you arrived.

Mehaffy: Take only pictures and leave only footprints, as they say.

Sedovic: Exactly. There’s a whole group of people who get that inherently.

Lykoudis: As a practitioner, as a citizen, as an educator, you have some marvelous opportunities, and you just have to do the best you can. You’re going to make some mistakes. We’re all going to make mistakes, but in the end, we can help the world with the big picture, participating in the discussion to further the ideas that will help bring the world closer together in understanding, in a civil manner. And if you can impact on your local and regional communities, you’ll find a marvelous life.

Sedovic: Well put. So are any of us running for office?

Mehaffy: I think if we can keep the people who are running for office aware of these issues, that might be better – teach the teachers kind of thing. And just to answer your question about what keeps me going, from my own point of view, it’s just to sleep at night, to know that we’re correcting some of our mistakes, learning from our mistakes, and getting back in some ways to the idealism of the early Modernists. I remember from my own youth when we saw the future as something hopeful, but we now realize we’ve made some horrendous mistakes and if we want to have a future that’s hopeful we’ve got to correct them. TB