The mainstreaming of green architecture is reassuring in this age of extreme income inequality and political partisanship. It's nice to know people are trying to build environmentally-friendly homes so that Bangladesh won't disappear into the Bay of Bengal. Even large American corporations like GE (belatedly) and Ford (fitfully) are going green. So far the green architecture movement has been relatively free of the neurotic piety and high-dudgeon sanctimony you see in the foodie world. But now that green is mainstream, I fear it won't be long before the hemp shoe crowd will move in and hector us about not being green enough.
Once you start going green, suddenly you can't ever be green enough. I got rid of my beloved Audi to commute to work by CTA train, but which smokestack on the southern horizon is responsible for generating the electricity to power the El? Maybe I should be riding a bike to work. Is it enough to recycle wine bottles and the Sunday New York Times? Recently, after a company-sponsored lunch a woman collected all our plastic lunch trays--there must have been 300 of them--and dragged them to Berwyn for recycling. Should I be recycling the Styrofoam boxes from the Lai Lai Oriental Express? (Never mind the issue of patronizing a place that calls itself "oriental.") Can anything be made from recycled Styrofoam? I'll bet you can't even make more Styrofoam from it. And what am I supposed to do with the little wooden chopsticks?
Don't even ask about all the disposable diapers our kids use.
In the New York Times Magazine "Eco-tecture" issue Nicolai Ouroussoff attempts to discover why Europeans are greener than we are. He talks to green Euros such as Dutch architect Willem Jan Neutelings, who explains cryptically, "We experimented a lot with darkness." So we're supposed to start with darkness? No wonder we're so far behind. Michael Kimmelman profiles the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who is even more enigmatic, but his buildings are beautiful, all the more so because they seem to be built out of materials you can dig out from an ordinary suburban recycling bin--just glass and paper. Diller Scofidio + Renfro show off a "guilt-free, sustainable luxury house" (photo above) built in the desert outside some unnamed Southwestern city. We're told the house returns more resources to the grid than it takes out, but I thought we weren't supposed to be building in the desert any more because of wildlife habitant destruction.
Finally, a "green building consultant" gives us a tour of a greener-than-thou condo in Seattle. I learned to worry about formaldehyde in our kitchen cabinets and artificial latex in our couch. It used to be enough to worry about all the dog hair in our place. The green condo segment seems to be crossing another ominous line. Tonight I'm going to cook veal that I'd prefer not to ask too many questions about. What I don't need is to be prepared to defend my kitchen cabinets from charges of killing the earth.
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