What’s the “most despised” buzzword in the building industry, according to one survey? Green.

Little wonder, since the word can mean so many different things to different people. Before the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) launched the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system in 2000, there was little consensus in this country about what constitutes a “green building.” A decade and a half later, some three billion square feet of construction have been certified under the system, and, according to estimates, LEED has cut annual carbon emissions by nearly ten million tons.

Still, some feel LEED doesn’t go far enough, a conviction that led to the 2006 formation of the Living Building Challenge (LBC), which many hold up as architecture’s most ambitious sustainability standard. If LEED serves the middle of the green bell curve, LBC targets the leading edge, an admittedly small segment of the market. What about the lagging end—the least common denominator of green construction? Even the most generous estimates suggest that only half of all new construction is being certified as “green,” and LEED’s entire volume to date represents only about one percent of the total building stock (275 billion square feet in 2010). To speed up the pace and expand the volume of certification, the construction industry urgently needs a quick, easy, affordable way to go green.

Enter Jerry Yudelson. At the beginning of the year, Yudelson, widely known as an authority on sustainable design, was named president of the Green Building Initiative (GBI). The organization runs Green Globes, an alternative to LEED that came to the U.S. in 2004-2005. In January, he announced that the goal was to address the underserved largest portions of the market with a system that is “better, faster, cheaper” than LEED.

Founded by Ward Hubbell, a former PR executive in the timber industry, Green Globes reportedly was set up as a shelter for wood products that don’t readily comply to LEED, which the American Forest and Paper Association has said “disadvantages our companies,” while “Green Globes is much more wood-friendly.” In recent years, the chemical and plastics industries have jumped on the bandwagon, because the latest versions of LEED discourage the use of certain “chemicals of concern,” specifically those found in products such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC)—the so-called “poison plastic” that the EPA, NIH, Department of Health and Human Services, and the World Health Organization all suggest can cause significant health problems. Greenpeace calls PVC “one of the most toxic substances saturating our planet and its inhabitants,” and it has been banned by various organizations, such as Kaiser Permanente.

While the LBC does prohibit PVC, LEED in fact does not; a single optional credit rewards disclosure of chemical ingredients, and specifiers are left to draw their own conclusions. Nevertheless, vinyl lobbyists take a classic slippery-slope position by treating even modest measures as threats.

Reportedly, over two thirds of GBI’s members and nearly half its board represent the timber, chemicals, and plastics industries—industries seemingly spooked by more rigorous standards for human and ecological health. Evidence shows that they’re not just backing Green Globes—they’re actively trying to undermine LEED, and there’s a lot of dirty money at play. From 2007 to 2013, the annual lobbying budget of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a GBI member, grew by more than five times, and during that period this single organization invested a total of $62 million in influence-peddling.

Image: ArchDaily.com; Sources: US Green Building Council, International Living Future Institute, Green Building Initiative

It’s working: In 2012, a group of Congressmen, many of whom have received significant political contributions from the chemical industry and the ACC itself, urged the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages much of the federal government’s construction, to drop LEED: “We are deeply concerned that the LEED rating system is becoming a tool to punish chemical companies and plastics makers and spread misinformation.” They claimed that vinyl products “are universally considered the most durable, sustainable, and energy efficient by the construction industry” and that their restriction would “severely harm manufacturing in this country.”

Arguing that LEED (or the LBC, for that matter) seeks to “punish” chemical and plastics makers by discouraging the use of potentially harmful substances is like saying that energy efficiency is intended to punish fossil-fuel companies. Nevertheless, last fall the GSA, whose annual buildings budget can be in the tens of billions, endorsed Green Globes for the first time. Additionally, over the past year or two, multiple states, including Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Ohio, have adopted legislation banning LEED in publicly funded buildings.

Given all of this, I was surprised this week when the USGBC and ACC announced that the two organizations would be working together “to improve LEED”: “USGBC and ACC share the goal of advancing sustainability in the built environment,” USGBC President and CEO Rick Fedrizzi wrote in a press release, adding that both entities “will work together to take advantage of our collective strength and experience.” Time will tell exactly what this means. Will the chemical industry embrace smarter solutions? Will LEED become more accommodating to status-quo chemistry? Or is this just the USGBC’s politically astute way to give the ACC a more formal avenue for discussion, in order to defuse anti-LEED lobbying?

In the meantime, Green Globes continues to try to get more market share, and the GBI remains dominated by the timber and chemical industries. So when Yudelson took over in January, I got excited, since I have known and admired him for years. Could he turn Green Globes around?

Immediately upon joining, he announced that he views GBI’s role as that of a “‘friendly competitor,’ rather than a nemesis” to the USGBC: “I don’t really see us getting engaged in anti-LEED activity as an organization.” Privately, he maintains the same position: “GBI is not a lobbying organization,” he assured a group of my peers and me in July. “We do not coordinate with any groups that might lobby for or against other green building rating systems, nor do we participate in such political discussions.”

Yet, in late January—two weeks after Yudelson’s initial claim that his organization planned to stay above the fray—GBI board member Allen Blakey, a vice president with the Vinyl Institute, testified before the Ohio state legislature in support of a proposed ban on LEED, calling its new material standards a “discriminatory and disparaging treatment of vinyl.” This isn’t “friendly” competition. GBI is a charitable organization whose tax-exempt status is contingent on protecting the public good, not private interests, and at least one of its directors appears to be toeing a very fine line between the two.

Chart from BuildingGreen, LEED vs. Green Globes: The Definitive Analysis (2014)

Since taking his new role, Yudelson’s positions seem to have changed in favor of private interests, as well. Last year, before joining GBI, he told a reporter, “We know that a lot of these substances [in materials] have long-term effects [on health].” Since taking his new post, however, he declares, “I haven’t seen persuasive data on the health outcomes of common building materials.” This April, Yudelson called vinyl “benign in use,” possibly contradicting a 2009 report he co-authored (“Inside Going Green”): “PVC is inexpensive and routinely used, but it presents serious fire smoke hazards. Even before it ignites, it releases deadly gases such as hydrogen chloride….Dioxin, the world’s most potent carcinogen, is released when PVC burns.” Since most buildings don’t catch fire, is the phrase “benign in use” Yudelson’s way of sidestepping the “serious hazards” he once attributed to vinyl? Regardless, the EPA, however, classifies vinyl chloride as a carcinogen and maintains that exposure can occur in everyday uses.

Even if the facts about PVC and other materials weren’t “persuasive,” as Yudelson claimed this year, scientists and sustainability leaders long have subscribed to the precautionary principle, which holds that “when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.” Yudelson himself advocated for this approach in an interview last year: “[W]e may be creating long-term unhealthy environments even while we’re doing all of these green upgrades. The overarching principle is that we ought to err on the side of caution.”

Yudelson contends that Green Globes is “basically identical” to LEED. Last year, the Portland Tribune considered the merits of the two systems and concluded, “LEED is a more rigorous, broad-based, credible system that delivers more environmental benefits.” This June, the independent consultancy and publisher BuildingGreen released a 90-page “definitive analysis” and found that, in some cases—but only some—Green Globes can be “faster and cheaper” than LEED, as Yudelson insists. But “better”? No. The report specifically calls attention to Green Globes’ weaknesses around the health impact of materials.

In late May, a handful of green building experts and I met with Yudelson to discuss his plans for GBI. We specifically asked him about the board’s composition, anti-LEED lobbying, the health impact of materials, and other important subjects. While the conversation was pleasant, on these topics I found him to be evasive, but he said he would get back to us “within a couple of months.” On June 9, we followed up with a letter, signed by the sustainability leaders of thirty prominent architecture firms, imploring Yudelson to discourage lobbying and campaigning against LEED by stating publicly that GBI does not condone such activities: “We are deeply concerned that a continued campaign against LEED hurts the green building industry as a whole,” we wrote. “The real campaign should be one where all viable green building systems fight shoulder to shoulder to beat back the negative impacts of the built environment.”

Later that month, on June 25, Yudelson sent an email blast to hundreds of industry insiders, criticizing the BuildingGreen report: “Grow[ing] the overall green building market…should be our mutual goal, not engaging in attacks on the merits of one rating tool vs. another.”  On July 12, Yudelson finally replied to our letter from June 9: “I don’t think it’s my role or GBI’s to rise to the defense of a competitive product.” He also asked why we haven’t discouraged “relentless and unfair” attacks on GBI by other organizations (not knowing that some of us actually have spoken to others about raising the level of debate).

In response to this week’s USGBC/ACC press release, Yudelson emailed the group that met in May: “I hope [this will] cause your group to reassess where GBI is coming from in our preference that materials credits (and choices) be based on sound science and proven risk-assessment methods.” Again, this appears to be quite a different attitude from his past recommendations to embrace the precautionary principle.

Six years ago, in The Green Building Revolution (2008), Yudelson defined a “green building” as “a high-performance property that considers and reduces its impact on the environment and human health” [emphasis added]. The building industry urgently needs new solutions that drive wider adoption of green practices, but no sustainability standard can be considered credible today if it does not reflect the latest thinking about the health impact of materials.

Lance Hosey, FAIA, LEED AP, is Chief Sustainability Officer with the global design leader RTKL. His latest book, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (2012), has been Amazon’s #1 bestseller for sustainable design. Follow him on Twitter: @lancehosey

Citation: Hosey, Lance. "The Green Building Wars" 17 Sep 2014. ArchDaily. Accessed 22 Oct 2014. <http://www.archdaily.com/?p=549176>

As featured via The Permaculture Research Institute, including all photos and text.
Posted May 13, 2014 by Marcin Gerwin & filed under Building, Society, Village Development.

Marcin Gerwin: It happens quite often that when a new building is completed many people see it as unpleasant or even hostile, while at the same time the architects claim that it is a great work of art. This difference in opinion is quite striking. Why do you think it happens?

Mark Lakeman: It’s a question that every community is asking. It’s a conundrum. People have historically perceived architects as being cultural advocates — they trusted them — so it’s traumatizing for communities to feel betrayed. People even ask what is the role of the architect; why there seems to be such a divorce between our expectation of the architect, and the actual reality that the architect has become a commercial maker of building designs. I think that the answer is contextual — it’s a historical issue. You will find the answer to this divorce in the series of disruptions of history, to design and community. For instance you have a historical continuity for a long period of time and then it’s disrupted and power is reconcentrated into an elite class. In that context, the idea that the society designs itself has been aggressively obscured, and it has apparently been lost.

On the other hand, I think we should cultivate a broader understanding of the role of design in society. That’s what I intend to do for the rest of my life. I want everyone to not merely understand design, and therefore value designers, but rather I want them all to be designers in their own lives, so that we strengthen democracy. We don’t want people to be voters, we want them to be problem-solvers. The benefit that I also personally see in people broadly understanding design, is that my own office is flooded with work because people appreciate it, and me as well.

MG: I have a feeling that some architects believe this education should mean convincing people that the modernist buildings are fantastic. They believe people don’t value them only because they are ignorant. It seems to me, however, that the problem is not with people lacking education, but with the modernist architecture itself. The principles upon which it is based are mistaken.

ML: The essential philosophy that is taught to students of architecture is quite a frustrating thing. As someone who builds things, I work with people, I use my hands — like today there is a work party in my community where we are building things. I know how to build because of that. Most architects only understand buildings abstractly. They are taught incomplete theories, they draw pictures, but they usually don’t actually engage in the process of building or maintaining the things that they design. So this void of understanding is a problem, and it also plays out in other expressions of disconnection. You also notice that design students almost never draw pictures of people in their projects. They put them in at the last minute maybe to give a sense of human scale to the presentation drawing. I think that’s fascinating because in all cases we are designing environments that people live in, but architects tend instead to think perfunctorily, merely in terms of basic commercial functions. They don’t really think about people, don’t think of their actual experience. How strange, because the great identity that underpins the whole culture of design and architecture is that it is the Mother Of All Arts, made to uplift the human being.

Industrial modernism on the other hand is focused on objects — architects now want to create beautiful things to look at, and it is a huge unfortunate oversimplification but it applies. The models that they’ve been given include Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier or in some ways even Frank Lloyd Wright, and all were considered great artists who would tend to design things but not places. In contrast, that’s why this term placemaking has arisen. It’s because architects have nearly utterly failed to provide a sense of place. We’ve learned at best that the architect is a facilitator of cultural engagement and at worst just merely a designer of objects.

MG: What would be beneficial for the community then? What should be the priorities for the architects?

ML: I gave two presentations about this subject at Harvard last month. And I was asked there the same question — what do we do now? How in the world do we reorient our entire educational curriculum? But unfortunately we cannot wait for the architecture schools to generate an entirely new wave of designers that suddenly will take the reins of the profession. Nor will we change the hearts of developers all at once. It’s a long term project. But what we can do right away is to get off the couch where we live and start to design in our own realities. That’s what we’ve been doing so successfully especially on the West coast of the USA. We’ve gotten people to come out of their house and look at their neighborhood. We’ve convinced them that they have their own power. It’s an illusion that someone else can tell you that you are powerless. And we’ve asked some really good questions like: “Are you satisfied to just pay a ticket to someone else’s reality, to always be merely a consumer? Or will you in your own lifetime become a cultural generator? Because this is all the time you have. Will you create your own reality or not?”

For us in the USA it is an easy question because we can just stand in the neighborhood grid, have people look around and ask : “Where is your public square? Don’t your ancestors come from a village where there was a place where people learned how to sing and create all forms of culture?” You could point out to them that they have no village square anywhere where they live, but you don’t have to tell them what’s missing, you just ask them: “What would you like to see?” And people say: “Well, gosh, it would be nice to have a place to sit around here. There is nowhere to sit. There is no playground, and without that our children have to cross the busy streets”. Then people say: “How about a place for information? How about a place where we can have food together?” Pretty soon they put the entire village square back together, because it just comes out of their sense of need.

MG: What are the reactions that you meet with?

ML: The architects are upset. They say: “My God, what are you doing? It’s nice that you have children involved, OK, so there is no vandalism anymore. Maybe that’s good, but it looks terrible. Curves? Color? Metaphor? Are you serious?” But the architects are people too. Before they went into architecture school they were fully capable of creating beauty. But once they went through architecture school they were made to be utterly serious and they were intensely criticized. They were constricted, contained and reduced to eventually become self-serious elitists. Afterwards, they are so fundamentally worried about what everyone thinks of them that they design boxes that are gray, brown or black and have no connections to the needs of other people. They wanted to do so much more with their creative lives before they arrived in school, but their teachers were confused as well.

So what we are doing in Portland, and all over the country now, is that people are taking matters into their own hands. They are saying: “We seem to be able to do a better job”. Because when people don’t go to the architecture school they are still able to look at where they are and fuse their sense of history and local stories and address their needs like slowing traffic, engaging youth, getting people to get outside and walk, building neighborhood identity and pride. They can fuse it into a metaphor that is functional, symbolical and physical and create it. All architects used to be able to do this, but now they are contained within a set of precedence of what they think is possible. That’s what design education has done to them. Everybody else is more facile at being able to utilize their creativity then the architect commonly. I hate to say this, but it’s true, and I can say this as a second generation architect — I’ve watched this, I grew up in it, I was taught about it as a child and now I see it in my profession everywhere.

MG: Many architects claim that modern buildings cannot resemble buildings of the past. In a consequence they design boxes out of glass and concrete in the places with historical architecture. What are your thoughts about this?

ML: There is a mantra that is pervasive in the design culture: it is to make something of its time. To make something that expresses the technology of the time. It’s actually an intense, conscious emphasis on celebrating the current state of technology, because technology is taken to be the highest expression of who we are. I wish that people would gather in their communities and entertain the question — is this really the highest value that should direct how our habitat is created? Is the state of technology what we worship? Does the architecture of our places need to express what some chemist or engineer has created? We have a philosophical emphasis on technology and there can often be a near total disregard for the essence of community.

What is new and what is old can speak to each other in terms of scale, texture and practical considerations that make it so that the buildings we live in are easy to maintain. These things need to be designed in a practical way. At the same time there is a huge gap between the things that are old and are somewhat symbolic and the things that are new and which have abandoned symbolism. But if you listen to architects, they talk about their work symbolically, that it must express the technology of their time. Then the building is a technological statement and is expressing some philosophy like deconstructivism, postmodernism or modernism. The building is supposed to be a symbolic statement, but the people are going: “What? I don’t understand how you made this building”. And people look at the old style and say: “Hey, that’s comprehensible. There is a logic and there is a story of the people I should be able to read in how it was created. We can see that it was crafted by human beings, but this other stuff?” The architect is not helping society to know the story. The language that architects use can often be incomprehensible, even to themselves.

From the community point of view, the community never authorized the profession of architecture to abandon symbols and metaphors that were meaningful to the community. In commerce they say that the customer is always right. In the case of culture-making the community is the customer. I hate to even think in these terms but the people who are creating the products — the architects and developers — are absolutely arrogant about these issues. You know what Frank Lloyd Wright said? He said: “Madam, you will take what we give you”. This is another thing that they teach in architecture schools everywhere. The architect is the expert. They must always be “educating” other people. That’s taught to students coming out of school like: “You’re just a student, but you’ll come out into the reality. Start designing things and you will know more than everybody around you including 85 year old grandmothers. You’ll know more than them, so you’ll have to educate them”.

MG: So what you are saying is that it should be the other way around — architects should consult the community first. They should ask what are the values of people, what are their aesthetic preferences, so that the final outcome will be satisfying for them.

ML: Absolutely.

MG: But then architects might argue that ordinary people have a bad taste, so it would be better if the experts impose the aesthetics. I actually once heard applause after someone said that the style of architecture must be imposed. Do you think it’s possible to overcome this?

ML: There must be architects who are already struggling with this question. They should be part of the conversation. There must be people who are trying to bridge this gap already and their experience and their ideas should come forth. But it’s the community ultimately that needs to make it happen. Their voice, their insistence and activism has to become the strongest force in this whole equation.

The architects are not going to change voluntarily, nor will the developers who are driving this. The architects are so often just doing what they are told by developers. And developers have lots of money and they are isolated by it. They are isolated from the communities that they are exploiting. This is the biggest problem. Right now they are the driving force and their primary motive is simply to have more money or more stuff. And the more isolated they are the more stuff they think they need, because the main thing that they talk about with their developer friends is how much more stuff they will soon have. It’s like a bunch of simpletons are driving the destruction of our society. So the community needs to speak loudly. If the only people who are making proposals and doing designs are developers and architects, it’s just going to stay this way. Ultimately the people need to drive what is happening.

MG: What should be the role of architect then?

ML: The main thing is for the architect to engage deeply with the community in a conversation to elicit their intelligence. If the architect doesn’t do this, it’s such a foolishness, it’s such a lost opportunity, because the community is the mind, the heart and the memory of that place. The community is holding this gigantic repository of intelligence that the architect should tap into and support.

The architect should come in a humble way and say: “How can I support the life that is happening here?” This is the only way to be sustainable. If the architect is only coming in saying: “I want to create a monument to myself!”, then the monument that he or she creates will remind everyone of how much they don’t like that architect. That’s what usually happens. If they want to be remembered and have stories told about them, let it be a story of how they were a hero in the community by facilitating their vision. This is the thing that the architect can help with.

A lot of the time communities are just sitting there and they are not engaged, because they don’t have a creative facilitator. So, they don’t even know what their vision is, even though they all have the parts of that vision. The architect can actually come in and help them to crystallize a vision so they can say: “Aha! That is who we are”. That’s the role the architect can play. This is the way for the architect to find an entirely different depth of satisfaction, meaning and connection in their community.

~~~~~

Mark Lakeman is an architect and Permaculture designer. He is a co-founder of City Repair and a principal of Communitecture. He lives in Portland, USA.

This is an extended version of the interview which first appeared in Dziennik Opinii in Poland.

By Mark Lakeman
Published in Communities Magazine, Summer 2014 issue

In the first year of our design collaboration, we were already looking at world peace. Families were out walking in their own community, tending gardens bursting with food and flowers, gathering in the streets, and no cars were driving anywhere. The ink had just dried, and though it was only a lovely drawing, it was what our ordinary, grid-based neighborhood had imagined as their shared destiny with everyone else in the world.

We had taken half a day to dialogue, share a meal and spend some time to explore longest-range possibilities. It was all so simple, but then all we did was talk about the life that we were already living in our own Portland, Oregon neighborhood. The question had really become, “How do we inspire people everywhere else?” At the end of our half-day workshop called “What Would World Peace Look Like?” someone had said: “The revolution we seek is one where people will act with what they have, where they are, right now!” Another person said: “And everyone everywhere can do this!” Then we all went outside, as if into our own drawing.

For our young design-activist group, known from the start as communitecture (community + architecture), growing up in the cradle of design-activism that is Portland, Oregon, it had become ridiculous not to intend to create a better world. We were already standing upon the work of giants, in some cases our own parents. With urban growth boundaries protecting perimeter farmland all around Portland, the spectacular new public square energizing our city, multi-modal transit expanding across the region, vast wildlife sanctuaries established to provide open space for all species, and citizen power at a zenith, we had to ask ourselves, “What more is possible, and how can we inspire more to happen in the world?” We began to answer our own questions, the more we worked with communities across the city, and the answers began to multiply.

The first year of our activity was indeed ridiculous and joyously successful. We had no fear and we couldn’t stop ourselves. Though we didn’t yet have a name, we were well underway with a strategic knowledge of indigenous village design principles, modern development practices, planning codes, and regulations. With this knowledge, we designed and built a spectacular series of gathering place interventions that broke and changed laws left and right.

Our first community Tea House project, installed without permission in a neighborhood zone, brought thousands of people together in the summer of 1996. Then we empowered our neighborhood to transform a street intersection into a public square, and made it legal for everyone else in the city to do it too. After that, we created an ephemeral community gathering place that went across the city, facilitating relational networks everywhere until on June 21st, World Peace Day of 1997, when we created a human linkage of people holding hands around our city. Lots of people wanted to know what we called ourselves.

When we finally chose two names, we used them to describe two modes of action in our group. One was City Repair, the place-making activators who in a few years would create a nonprofit organizational structure for itself. The other name was communitecture, which even more quickly became an economically self-supporting model of collaborative design activation.

Though the two parts of one activist culture have remained involved and mutually supportive over the years since, communitecture has gone on to support larger-scale initiatives and projects that cover a much wider spectrum of communities and ideas. Many diverse communities have been attracted to work with us because we use design as a means to build community.

Our creative public advocacy for important principles and goals that communities identify with include challenging existing civic structures that have historically ensured inequity and the absence of gathering places where people live. So, for instance, by supporting the emergence of new collaborative places that provide forums for gathering and sharing ideas, we work successfully to narrow the terrible gap between what we know and how we live. In fact, each project really ends up speaking such important sustainable values in social and physical forms, and then more communities become inspired by example.

The kinds of projects that we are fortunate to help create can include radical buildings made entirely of natural and recycled materials. Most of these are urban, and they are always ideas that spring from people who are creating a setting for some new form of community. For instance, The ReBuilding Center, an 80,000 square foot facility that makes recycled materials available for low cost, is a project of and for the community of people who work in it. Each person who works there has power in their shared-power culture, they all earn a living wage, and each person has full health and dental benefits, as do their families. As design-activists, our interests shouldn’t stop with the shape of a building. It should matter most to us that people are empowered where they live and work, and that they are able to shape their own future while they benefit from what they do with their time.

Other kinds of projects that communities bring us to help with include many scales of urban infill-based cohousing models that so far range from four to 16 living units in scale, each of them informed by an enthusiasm for urban permaculture, natural building, urban agriculture, and community self-reliance principles. Because we are also deeply committed to historical preservation and revitalization, we also work to modify and update existing buildings with new roles and spaces, more open and accessible public places, as well as updated energy systems. 

Our main driving choice, though, is to work with people who want to be involved in designing and also building their own community places. In this way these places become a reflection of their living culture. Our recent work with the CAPACES Leadership Institute, a youth leadership development project founded by Cesar Chavez, has resulted in an exuberant building made by that community that is now the most energy efficient and artistically expressive office building in the US.

The way that we work is first to see that as citizens our task is to be part of a shared cultural fabric with other people, businesses, nonprofits and institutions. We must not merely be a business looking out for our own interest; in fact it’s vital that we act from a place of seeing that we are already a connected ecology. Another huge responsibility we see that we share is to restore and strengthen ecological feedback loops in our local community ecology. So communitecture intends local restorative effects as an outcome. This means cleaning up brownfield sites, developing stronger communication networks and relationships, engaging youth in projects, and creating urban agriculture networks. 

If we are asked to help with a project, it’s not merely a job for us; it must also be a long term commitment to our community with the expectation that at the culmination of a process we will all have more friends than before. So, when we help facilitate design dialogues for local cohousing communities, we are in it to help create the kinds of places that we also want to inhabit, for the communities that we intend will surround our own lives. 

In terms of our business model, it is a creative hybrid that grew out of loving our work and trusting each other. When it came time to develop official systems for payroll and accounting, we kept it simple, based on trust. As the most experienced member of the team, I was happy to be the one to who registered our name and established business accounts. At that time, our team was young and mobile, and since I was most stable, the ownership roles were established as my responsibility, to hold the systems in place while other people could come and go. 

So what has emerged today is a trust-based model where the present team makes choices together, collaboratively runs itself, maintains a very strong and attractive ethic of community service, and pays itself. In fact, though the official ownership is held in my name, the team decides what I am paid. Since we are a kind of benefactor-co-op, a great depends upon my sharing of power, and the value of this aspect of our model can’t be overstated. The fact that I utterly believe in and rely on my team, and they see that I trust them, is what transcends our legal configuration. Perhaps it is a transitional form of some sort. 

With this kind of trust-based approach and cultural mission, it’s possible that we could use almost any kind of official structure and still thrive.  This attitude helps us stand for what we are committed to, and because of this our larger community has always embraced us with positive story-telling and advocacy for our services, donated space, recycled computer systems, all needed materials for our desks and office environment, and quite a lot more. 

We do not like to compete against other designers for jobs, largely because it harms our intention to build common cause across the larger community. We do almost no marketing because our work has the result that many people spread positive stories of our work on our behalf. When other active people, political figures, owner-builders, homeless people, and other firms are affected by our ideas and initiatives, then we are supported by the culture that we support. Also, very importantly we reserve the right to be creative initiators in our community. 

While most architects are passive, waiting for someone to pay them to use their creativity, we will often creatively engage a situation whether we are paid or not. Therefore we can also initiate strategic projects that are socially based, politically charged, ecological, celebratory, with all manner of innovations, and continue to be off the leash creative agents for a better world. This ethic is expressed in our active design support for numerous homeless village initiatives up and down the Pacific Coast. In these kinds of projects there is never a cost for design support, which creates more goodwill in the world than can be known.

It’s also important to acknowledge that our cooperative ethics and goals can come into conflict with long standing competitive structures and behaviors. The conflicts can come in various forms, both internal and external. Internally, since architecture training is usually set in a competitive context, it can be challenging for interns to learn how to collaborate without needing to have their own way, just as it can be difficult for a mentor not to be dominant. Building confidence can be a challenge in any situation, but people find it much easier to help each other, as they develop strong communication skills in a cooperative environment. 

What we end up designing reflects our strong emphasis on a shared decision-making process. The kind of singular mentality that results in normally masculine aesthetics (common in the mainstream threads of our profession) doesn’t really get to happen in our work. Our aesthetics of inclusivity and wider emotional expression sometimes become a target for people who expect the more square forms and grayer colors of the architecture of commodity. Others may find it a problem that we overtly celebrate the interconnection of humanity with nature, which can be expressed in terms of living walls or roofs, vines growing above windows in order to shade windows, and edibles all around the site. 

What can you do about such polarities except to try to learn together? In fact, our commitment to cooperate does sit strangely for a profession that has been deeply educated to compete against itself. 

Our attitude towards our community is essentially this: we interact with our city as if we are villagers that share the same place. The initiatives that we support can come from anywhere in the community. As villagers our responsibility is to give each community and their ideas the support and momentum that they deserve. With all that we give to our community, our relationship with our community only deepens. In fact, as we continue to see our community as a living ecology, and as we heal broken feedback loops, we build upon the stories of sharing and constructive action. Over and over, we see the power of story bringing benefit back around to us when we release our grip on the “return” on our efforts. Some have called this being “in alignment with the economy of the universe,” the way that nature showers us with gifts. 

With all of the personal and community-scale benefits that we have witnessed, with communities in Portland stabilizing, and the increasing levels of excitement and creativity all around us, it does feel as if we are in alignment with great principals and a more worthy form of economy. Something wonderful has already been happening for a long time, and now we can design in accord with it while our way of living and livelihood become the same.