Beauty, Style, Status, Comfort and Green Building
Green building is independent of style, yet it places very significant design constraints on things like window placement, building orientation, building size and material use.1 The conflict further arises when the desire for beauty and status encourage the excess consumption of both materials and energy. The problem, of course, is that there is all too often a large gap between what is wanted, and what is needed; between what one thinks they want and what they actually use.
The challenge for green architects and their clients alike2 is to find the happy medium, which is what the sensible house is all about.
Status: Understanding Desire
Given a choice, no one wants to live in an ugly building. They also don't want to live in a building whose style isn't suitable to their personality: you won't often find a happy cowboy in a pin-strip suit. With access to enough resources, many people will go one step further, and make their dwelling an announcement of who they are, what socio-economic strata they belong to, and what status they've attained.
Historically, architecture was always about beauty and status, and the notion of comfort was not even in anyone's vocabulary.3 Humans have an immense ability to suffer if it gains them a positive emotional sense that they are "somebody" or that they belong. It's what will make women wear four inch heels, men drive expensive cars, and people in general to buy mini-mansion homes.
These are genuine human emotions that cannot be ignored, but neither should comfort and anxiety reduction, which are the oft-neglected negative aspects of fulfilling desire. The popularity of the "not so big" concept shows that this there is movement in this direction.
Anecdotally, the obsession that many have with "dream homes" does not appear to translate into them living there for any particular length of time. While they are impressive, at least in some people's eyes, they typically violate many green building principles.
Beauty
What makes a building beautiful? If there were any answer that people could agree on, it would be that no one agrees on what it beautiful, and also that being beautiful is important. Artists have notions about relationship of shapes and colors, and although violating them does tend to produce unattractive buildings, style is likely the bigger driver of one's sense of beauty. Its about what the building says about you, as much as clothes, cars or any other stylist object.
Environmentally, our disagreement over beauty is the cause of some sizable chunk of the remodeling that happens when people buy houses they inevitably don't find beautiful, but the problem here goes quite a bit deeper. At one extreme is when a person's sense of beauty is leans toward the fringe ideas of beauty, or for that matter, the trendy, but reviled by many. The land fills have more than their share of brown shag carpet, avocado toilets, gaudy light fixtures, pink tile and so on4. At the other extreme are building with no sense of style at all, often done on the cheap. What is more likely is that style that is well executed and not especially flamboyant will likely have a wider appeal, and hence avoid the fate of the landfill. This is not to say that architecture can't also be art, but unless it is extremely well executed it will likely end up in the landfill5, so as a general rule the "art" is best done avoiding the flamboyant.
Green building also hints at some alternative notions of beauty that can either complement or replace the more traditional ones. Some examples would be that comfort and simplicity of function are an aspect of beauty; that local, natural materials are equal or better to exotic ones; that an "organic" feel is as good as an elaborately machined one, that older materials bring their history with them, that a small building that fits precisely together is at least a good as a big grand one.
By taking these ideas into account, one can still build a craftsman, modernist, colonial or any other style by keeping the original senses of proportion and material selection, but modifying the design to be greener. Its a matter of reinterpreting the original ideas in a new context.
Comfort
Designing for comfort is an aspect that is often overlooked, partially because no one exactly knows how to do it, and partly because humans are so variable. The discussion of green building is often limited to environmental impact on a planet wide scale, but it is also concerned with building a good environment both inside and directly outside the building. It is a difficult sell to save the planet if the result is that everyone has to live in unpleasant surroundings.
People studying human behavior have found some principles having nothing to do with architectural style or beauty of what kinds of spaces people like to inhabit. These principles are based on both observation and human psychology, and are covered in the section on pattern principles.
In many cases, green building has focused only on engineering: energy, use material use, and even toxicity levels are all quantifiable, but comfort and beauty are not.
Alternative Notions from Green Building
Without doubt, green building requires more design work. Its not that traditional buildings didn't also require some of this work, its that people were just willing to live with whatever result they happened to get. There is no shortage of buildings that are sometimes too hot, sometime too cold, have bathrooms in awkward places, doors that won't open fully because something is in the way, rooms that are too bright, others that are too dark, bedrooms awkwardly placed next to living rooms and so on. You do more work; you also get a better building.
At its heart, green building is about cultural change that is redefining what is good and desirable, even though many are adopting some of the ideas with only minimum thought about the cultural aspects. Deep at the root of green building is the belief that people need nature; that smaller, intricately thought out buildings are nicer than big ones, that an organic, hand made feel is closer to our hearts than a mass-produced industrial one, that creativity and inventiveness can coexist perfectly with function, and that a building needs to charm the soul as well as the eye.
The notion of "home". It's where you sleep, where you eat (even if less so than it used to be), and where you spend a lot of time. For some home is just that and an address to send bills, but for many its a very special place. A person's notion of home is a significant factor in determining what kind of house they want to live in. In the culture of green building, home is primarily a place of refuge, rather than a place of art or status.
Ideas from other cultures: The ancient Chinese practice of Feng Shui has been somewhat popular in Green Building circles and recently the Ayurvedic and Vastu principles as well. These practices tend to have similar ideas behind them (the notion of harmony with nature), but are stated in ways that can be difficult for westerners6 . If they work for you, you can use the patterns here as an alternative source, although you will probably find some areas of conflict. Someday, someone will probably find a way to integrate all these ideas into one, and the average westerner can adopt some of the principles without having to know about Chi or Jyotish.
Final Thoughts
Green building can be done with any concept of beauty and style, but its certainly at it best when those concepts are made greener themselves. It also brings the long ignored concept of comfort to the forefront of design, increasing the odds that the green building is a source of joy in people's lives.
Resources
Home, Witold Rybczynski, Viking, 1986
The Not so Big House, Sarah Susanka, Taunton, 1998
Creating the Not so Big House, Sarah Susanka, 2000
Not so Big Solutions for Your Home, Sarah Susanka, 2002
How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand
Notes
1: as currently practiced green building means a lot of different things to different people, but since the purpose of this site it to promote "as green as possible", all of these things should be taken into account.
2: there is all too often a terrible mismatch between client and architect where either the client or the architect leans much greener ideas than the other. The education process (or permanent lack of communication) can be a great source of stress in a project.
3: the book "home" (see resource list) is an entertaining look at status & comfort.
4: of course they could end up at the neighborhood re-use store (if there is one), and they often do. Alas, there is little market for those avocado sinks and toilets.
5: see "how buildings learn" for a great analysis on style and building reuse.
6: My knowledge is limited to listening to how people have used these ideas in shaping their homes.