Architecture as Pedagogy [1].

David W. Orr [2]

Environmental Studies Center, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio 44074

"The worst thing we can do to our children is to convince them that ugliness is normal."--Rene Dubos

As commonly practiced, education has little to do with its specific setting or locality. The typical campus is regarded mostly as a place where learning occurs, but is, itself, believed to be the source of no useful learning. It is intended, rather, to be convenient, efficient, or esthetically pleasing, but not instructional. It neither requires nor facilitates competence or mindfulness. By that standard, the same education could happen as well in California or in Kazakhstan, or on Mars, for that matter. The same could be said of the buildings and landscape that make up a college campus (Orr, 1993). The design of buildings and landscape is thought to have little or nothing to do with the process of learning or the quality of scholarship that occurs in a particular place. In fact buildings and landscape reflect a hidden curriculum that powerfully influences the learning process.

The curriculum embedded in any building instructs as fully and as powerfully as any course taught in it. Most of my classes, for example, are taught in a building that I think Descartes would have liked. It is a building with lots of squareness and straight lines. There is nothing whatsoever that reflects its locality in northeast Ohio in what had once been a vast forested wetland (Sherman, 1996). How it is cooled, heated, and lighted and at what true cost to the world is a mystery to its occupants. It offers no clue about the origins of the materials used to build it. It tells no story. With only minor modifications it could be converted to use as a factory or prison. When classes are over, students seldom linger for long. The building resonates with no part of our biology, evolutionary experience, or esthetic sensibilities. It reflects no understanding of ecology or ecological processes. It is intended to be functional, efficient, minimally offensive and little more. What else does it do?

First, it tells its users that locality, knowing where they are, is unimportant. To be sure, this is not said in so many words anywhere in this or any other building. Rather, it is said tacitly throughout the entire building. Second, because it uses energy wastefully, the building tells its users that energy is cheap and abundant and can be squandered with no thought for the morrow. Third, nowhere in the building do students learn about the materials used in its construction or who was downwind or downstream from the wells, mines, forests, and manufacturing facilities where those materials originated or where they eventually will be discarded. And the lesson learned is mindlessness, which is to say it teaches that disconnectedness is normal. And try as one might to teach that we are implicated in the larger enterprise of life, standard architectural design mostly conveys other lessons. There is often a miscalibration between what is taught in classes and the way buildings actually work. Buildings are provisio ned with energy, materials, and water, and dispose of their waste in ways that say to students that the world is linear and that we are no part of the larger web of life. Finally, there is no apparent connection in this or any other building on campus to the larger set of issues having to do with climatic change, biotic impoverishment, and the unraveling of the fabric of life on earth. Students begin to suspect, I think, that those issues are unreal or that they are unsolvable in any practical way, or that they occur somewhere else.

Through the design buildings and entire campuses is it possible to teach our students that our ecological problems are solvable and that we are connected to the larger community of life (Lyle, 1994)? I think so. For the past three years (1995-1998) I have worked with a team of students, faculty, and designers to design such a building. As a first step, we hired two graduates from the Class of 1993 to help coordinate the design of the project and to engage students, faculty, and the wider community in the design process. We also engaged architect, John Lyle, to help conduct the major design charettes or planning sessions that began in the fall of 1995. Some 250 students, faculty, and community members participated in the thirteen charettes that set the goals for the 14,000 [ft.sub.2] building. The final program called for a building:

* Discharging no wastewater, i.e. drinking water in, drinking water out;

* Generating more electricity than it used;

* Using no materials known to be carcinogenic, mutagenic, or endocrine disrupters;

* Maximizing energy and materials efficiency;

* Made from products and materials grown or manufactured sustainably;

* Landscaped to promote biological diversity;

* Promoting analytical skill such as least-cost end-use analysis and life-cycle costing as well as practical competence in horticulture, gardening, ecological engineering, landscape management, restoration ecology, solar technologies; and

* That met rigorous requirements for full-cost accounting.

We intended, in other words, a building that did not impair human or ecological health somewhere else or at some later time and one that instructed passively through its design and actively through routine operations.

From 26 architectural firms that applied for the job, we selected William MeDonough & Partners in Charlottesville, Virginia. Part of their task was to coordinate a larger design team that would meet throughout the process. To fulfill the requirement that the building generate more electricity than it used, we engaged Amory Lovins and Bill Browning from the Rocky Mountain Institute as well as scientists from NASA, Lewis Space Center. In order to meet the standard of zero discharge we hired John Todd and Michael Shaw, the leading figures in the field of ecological engineering. For landscaping we brought in John Lyle and the firm of Andropogen, Inc. from Philadelphia. To this team we added structural and mechanical engineers (Lev Zetlin, Inc. New York City), and a contractor. In all, some 18 experts representing a dozen or more fields participated in the design phase. During programming and schematic design this team and representatives from the College met by conference call weekly and in regular working sessi ons.

The team approach to architectural design was new to the College. Typically, architects design a building, hire engineers to heat and cool it, and bring in landscapers to make it look pretty. By engaging the full design team from the beginning we intended to improve the integration of building systems and technologies and the relationship between the building and its landscape. Early on, we decided that the standard for technology in the building was to be state-of-the-shelf, but within state-of-the-art design. In other words, we did not want the risk of untried technologies, but we did want the entire building to be at the frontier of what it is now possible to do with ecologically smart design.

The building program called for major changes, not only in the design process but also in the selection of materials, relationship to manufacturers, and in the way we counted the costs of the project. We intended to use materials that did not compromise human or ecological health somewhere else or at some later time. We also wanted to use materials that had as little embodied fossil energy as possible, hence giving preference to those locally manufactured or grown. In the process we discovered how little is known about the ecological and human effects of the materials used in construction. Unsurprisingly, we also discovered that the present system of building codes does little to encourage innovation leading to greater resource efficiency and environmental quality.

Typical buildings give a kind of snapshot of the state of technology about one year before they open, which means that they are obsolete the day they open. But we intended for this building to remain technologically dynamic over a long period of time by making it possible to adapt easily to changing technology. The use of raised flooring, for example, will permit quick changes of wiring and air-handling systems. Similarly, we intend to lease a photovoltaic array from a manufacturer so that the system can be upgraded as technology improves.

The same strategy is being applied to some materials as well. Buildings represent a union of two different metabolisms, one technical and one ecological (McDonough and Braungart, 1998). Materials that might eventually decompose into soil are part of an ecological metabolism. Otherwise they are "technical nutrients" to be leased from the manufacturer and eventually returned as a feedstock to be remanufactured into new product. Carpet in the building, accordingly, will be leased from Interface Corporation as a "product of service." When worn out or changed, it will be returned to Interface to be made into new carpet, not sent to a landfill. This means that Interface designs carpet that it wants back and that landfills do not fill up with a bulky material impervious to decay for thousands of years.

The costs of new buildings are typically calculated narrowly to include only those of design and construction excluding life-cycle operating costs and those to environment and human health. The result is a gross underestimate of what buildings actually cost their owners over their useful lifetime and what price they exact from society. In contrast, we will assess life-cycle costs of this building including the amount of [CO.sub.2] released in the construction phase.

From computer simulation (DOE-2) we anticipate that the total electrical budget to heat, ventilate, aircondition, and light will be [sim]63,000 kwh/yr or 16,499 Btus/[ft.sup.2]/yr. This is approximately 22% of the average for comparable new construction in northern Ohio as shown in Figure 1.

The electrical system for the Center will consist of a 3700 [ft.sub.2] photovoltaic array which may be combined with a fuel cell. In a cloudy climate the technological problem is to level out energy production from sunlight and actual energy use. With help from NASA scientists and others our plan is to do so as shown in Figure 2.

The building is designed to purify wastewater on site using a living machine developed by John Todd. It will minimize or eliminate the use of toxic materials. It will be instrumented to display energy and significant ecological data in the atrium. The story of the building will be prominently displayed throughout the structure. The landscape will include a restored wetland and forest as well as gardens, orchards, and greenhouse, all maintained by students. The south entry is a plaza, named in honor of its designer, John Lyle, featuring a sundial marking winter and summer solstices. The landscape will be used as much as classrooms to teach horticulture, gardening, landscape management, and ecological design.

Groundbreaking on the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies occurred in September, 1998. We took occupancy in January of 2000. As important as the building and its landscape, the more important effects of the project have been the impact on those who participated in the project. Many of the students, who learned ecological design by working with some of the best practitioners in the world, now describe the Center as their "legacy" to the College. Faculty who participated perhaps are less pessimistic about the possibilities for institutional change. And the President, Nancy Dye, who initially authorized the project, has shown other administrators that risks for the right purposes can pay off.

The real test, however, lies ahead. It will be tempting for some, no doubt, to regard this as an interesting, but isolated experiment having no relation to other buildings now in the planning stage or for campus landscaping or resource management. The pedagogically challenged will see no further possibilities for rethinking the process, substance, and goals of education. If so, the Center will exist as an island on a campus that mirrors the larger culture. On the other hand, the project offers a model that might inform:

* Architectural standards for all new construction and renovation;

* Landscape management;

* Financial criteria for payback times and full-cost accounting;

* Courses and projects organized around real problems;

* How we involve the wider community; and

* Campus-wide planning.

Colleges like many other organizations are often risk averse, slow to innovate, administratively fragmented, and focused on the short-term. To succeed, however, this project required: a willingness to risk failure, the capacity to make timely decisions, integrated planning, and a long-term planning horizon. New wine should not be put in old wineskins. We set out to change the ecology of a single building only to discover that to do so it was necessary to change the ecology of the planning process.

By some estimates, humankind is preparing to build more in the next half century than it has built throughout all of recorded history. If we do this inefficiently and carelessly, we will cast a long ecological shadow on the human future. If we fail to pay the full environmental costs of development, the resulting ecological and human damage will be irreparable. To the extent that we do not aim for efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources, the energy and maintenance costs will unnecessarily divert capital from other and far better purposes. The dream of sustainability, however defined, would then prove to be only a fantasy. Ideas and ideals need to be rendered into models and examples that make them visible, comprehensible, and compelling. Who will do this?

More than any other institution in modem society, colleges and universities have a moral stake in the health, beauty, and integrity of the world our students will inherit. We have an obligation to provide our students with tangible models that calibrate our values and capabilities, models that they can see, touch, and experience. We have an obligation to create grounds for hope in our students who sometimes define themselves as the "X generation." But hope is different than wishful thinking so we have a corollary obligation to equip our students with the analytical skills and practical competence necessary to act on high expectations. When the pedagogical abstractions, words, and whole courses do not fit the way the buildings and landscape constituting the academic campus in fact work, they learn that hope is just wishful thinking or worse, rank hypocrisy In short, we have an obligation to equip our students to do the hard work ahead of:

* learning to power civilization by current sunlight;

* reducing the amount of materials, water, and land use per capita;

* growing their food and fiber sustainably;

* disinventing the concept of waste;

* preserving biological diversity;

* restoring ecologies ruined in the past century;

* rethinking the political basis of modem society;

* developing economies that can be sustained within the limits of nature;

* distributing wealth fairly within and between generations.

No generation ever faced a more daunting agenda. True. But none ever faced more exciting possibilities either. Do we now have or could we acquire the know-how to power civilization by current sunlight or to reduce the size of the "human footprint" (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996) or grow our food sustainably or prevent pollution or preserve biological diversity or restore degraded ecologies? In each case I believe that the answer is "yes." Whether we possess the political will and moral energy to do so remains to be seen.

Finally, the potential for ecologically smarter design in all of its manifestations in architecture, landscape design, community design, the management of agricultural and forest lands, manufacturing, and technology does not amount to a fix for all that ails us. Reducing the amount of damage we do to the world per capita will only buy us a few decades, perhaps a century if we are lucky. If we squander that reprieve, we will have succeeded only in delaying the eventual collision between unfettered human desires and the limits of the earth. The default setting of our civilization needs to be reset to ensure that we build a sustainable world that is also humanly sustaining. This is not a battle between left and right or haves and have-nots as it is often described. At a deeper level the issue has to do with art and beauty. In the largest sense, what we must do to ensure human tenure on the earth is to cultivate a new standard that defines beauty as that which causes no ugliness somewhere else or at some later time.

(1.) Adapted from Conservation Biology (June, 1997).

(2.) Text based on the 2000 Dodgen Lecture delivered at the annual meeting of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences, February 24.

LITERATURE CITED

Lyle, John. 1994. Regenerative Design For Sustainable Development. New York: John Wiley.

McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. 1998. The Next Industrial Revolution. The Atlantic Monthly 282 (4):82-92.

Orr, D. 1993. Architecture as Pedagogy Conservation Biology.

Rocky Mountain Institute. 1998. Green Development. John Wiley, New York.

Sherman, T. 1996. A Place on the Glacial Till. Oxford University Press, New YORK.

Wackernagel, M., and W. Rees. 1996. Our Ecological Footprint. New Society Publishers, Philadelphia.