Has 'Sustainability Taken the Moral High Ground From Preservation'?

At a wonderful Boston Preservation Alliance symposium on campus heritage preservation in an urban environment on October 18, that was the perspective of one of the presenters, Henry Moss, as reported on The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Buildings & Grounds" blog:

Mr. Moss said the influential LEED standards for sustainability are “weak on historic structures,” in part because they don’t do a good job of accounting for what’s known as “embodied energy” — energy expended in the past to construct existing buildings. “In fact nobody knows anything about embodied energy,” said Mr. Moss, adding that it was amazing how little research had been done to figure out how much embodied energy is squandered when an existing building is demolished so a new one can be built in its place. LEED is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program of the United States Green Building Council.

It’s also difficult to weigh energy savings against the value of retaining a building’s historic appearance, he said. That’s one of the “second-generation questions” about sustainability that a college faces as it progresses from building a single “trophy” green building toward making its entire campus more sustainable.

He also warned that as buildings’ sustainable systems become more complex, they will present additional challenges.

Several SCUP staff and many SCUP members were in attendance at this one-day event. Pictured at left are SCUP charter members and award winners, Cal Audrain and Richard P. Dober. Audrain and Dober, among the many SCUP leaders who have been prominent in campus heritage preservation, played important roles in SCUP having been recently awarded a campus heritage preservation grant from The Getty.