The FuturArc Interview BILL REED
Founding board member of US Green Building Council
Infrastructure of the Human
A founding board member of US Green Building Council and one of the co-founders of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system, renowned architect and planner Bill Reed believes society must move beyond the idea that sustainability is achievable with single, isolated 'green' buildings, stressing that we must learn to reengage with how life works. Reed, an AIA-certified speaker and consultant on deep 'green' design, spoke with FuturArc US Correspondent Jalel Sager in October.
The following is an excerpt from the interview.
JS: You were talking in a recent video (Playa Viva project) about building design as a leverage point to heal living systems we are in the process of destroying. I'm especially curious about your path to this systemic approach. Has it always been key to your thinking? Was there a transformation? An epiphany?
BR: Since I was a kid I knew I wanted to be an architect. When in high school, a teacher pointed out Lewis Mumford's work to me and I realised that the most beautiful building in the world is unsuccessful unless the community around it is successful and healthy. So I set my sights on becoming a planner. It took me until graduation from college to become aware that if the environment around the community is spoiled, then the community is not going to be a very good place to live. So from that process of my intellectual development, the idea of working in larger systems made a lot of sense. I've moved from being only an architect, towards planning, towards ecology.
But becoming aware of "whole systems" and working with them are two different things. Relatively recently I learned the difference between a unitive whole and a summative whole. We are comfortable thinking of technical systems as summative wholes—adding pieces together to build a machine, for example. A machine is a closed system. We draw connecting arrows, observing how this affects that, etc. But living or open systems are often too complex for that. A living system is a self-organising, evolving organism. Patterns are the only practical way to describe this level of complexity—you can't really do it with arrows; patterns describe repeating processes of interrelationships. Every system can be looked at as the working of relationships. Regenesis, Inc., a design practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico, helped develop the concept of Essence Patterns as applied to the land and communities.
It is actually easier to work with the patterns of life than it is to take hundreds of incomplete pieces (think of LEED criteria) and glue them together. We will never be able to sustain life if we are treating it as a machine that can be repaired. It is alive, complex, and requires a different way of working to address the damage we have caused with the machine-age mind.
JS: This leads into the story of place and the human relation to place. That seems to figure pretty prominently in your work.
BR: Stories are the way civilisations have held relationships with patterns and complex relationships.
JS: I see. So it's a non-quantitative way of handling the systems?
BR: Yep. Let's use an analogy. I can quantify you in terms of your weight and your height and colour of your eyes and colour of your hair and the kind of clothes you're wearing and your skin colour. But this data doesn't help me know who you are. To know who you are, I need to understand how you are dynamically in relationship with life. You are a living entity, an organism, not a machine, not static. And you are in relationships with other organisms, whether it's a job or a person or city. We can't quantify those relationships. You can identify patterns of those relationships but you can't put a number on them. Those are qualitative understandings. You can do this with a human, a city, and you can do this with a company.
JS: Great. And if you don't mind branching off some of the basic philosophy into how this might apply to a city, can you give some examples of leverage points and infrastructure or the way that you can use a story of place in planning for a larger-scale project?
BR: So, there's a small town in Colorado on the western slope, and we were invited up there to help the community understand itself—its land, its people. We looked at its patterns. It is an unusual ecosystem, with valleys and mesas and mountaintops and rivers and canyons, so there were multiple bioclimates in this place. As a result there were multiple crops being raised; grain crops and fruit crops and animal husbandry. So this place actually bred very interesting niches, whether it was social or geological. These people are a bunch of tribes, if you will, that have come together, who value each other but still have distinctiveness.
We actually vote with our feet. We live where our patterns of life are comfortable. When you actually help people see that, it's like holding a mirror up to them. You're helping them see the environment in a new and living way—whether in a city or in a rural area; you're helping people see how life is working in that place. This process gives people the opportunity to understand the beautiful workings of life. Once we understand a place, we have the chance to fall in love with it.
To read the complete interview, get a copy of the 1Q 2011 edition at our online shop or at newsstands/major bookstores; or subscribe to FuturArc.
Table of Contents |
