Yet the mind-set the building itself expressed was, in the end, hierarchical: the worshippers stood in the nave, and the clergy presided from the high altar, at the top of the stairs that led into the choir and sanctuary. The building told the stories of the Christian faith, articulated in stained glass and statuary for those who could not read. The building was not merely a worship space but a teaching tool, that helped people to understand the world from a certain point of view.
Are there buildings that express today's world-views in similar fashion? In my more cynical moments, I choose as contenders an ugly Walmart big box store crammed with merchandise, or the financial maelstrom called the New York Stock Exchange. But these express only two aspects of our society: consumerism and the pursuit of wealth. Fortunately for the future of the planet, there are other options, both philosophically and architecturally!
Most notably, there is the building that has recently risen on the Oberlin College campus, the Lewis Center for Environmental Studies.
The building grew out of an idea which saw first light in an environmental architecture class taught by Oberlin professor David Orr, a well-known environmental scientist. A first-year student in the class described the project as an opportunity to "re-think the whole concept of buildings.... It is to be a learning experience as soon as you enter it." The ideal building began first in the imagination of David Orr and his students: "Upon entering this building," Orr wrote, "you will feel light and heat, hear the sounds of running water, breathe in the vital greenhouse air. As you experience this building, it will actively engage you in a dialogue of wonder."
Gradually, the idea took more solid shape. The environmental center was to serve the entire Oberlin community, not just the college, and was to be built of sustainable materials and utilize sustainable energy. Idea was added to idea, as students, faculty, and townspeople gathered in regular meetings to brainstorm about the project.
Ideas need funding, however, and David Orr's next months were spent carrying the gospel of architectural sustainability far and wide. He found an eager listener in the young philanthropist Adam Joseph Lewis, the prime contributor to the project, as well as in many others who responded to David's message.
The architect William McDonough, noted spokesperson for green architecture, was chosen to design the building. On Sept. 25, 1998, ground was broken for the new building. William McDonough wrote in the program: "The design for the building is both 'restorative' and 'regenerative'; it addresses how architectural design may reverse the environmental stresses brought on by the industrial revolution. To this end, we have considered how the building can be fecund, like a tree, accruing solar income to the benefit of living systems and absorbing water quickly and releasing it slowly in a healthy state.
"At its most fundamental level, the Center is a place of wonder and beauty which celebrates the interaction of human and natural environments. The design of the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies blurs the distinction between indoors and outdoors. Indoor spaces are filled with daylight, and are naturally ventilated. The light-filled, two-story atrium provides the campus with a winter garden--and interior meeting place, warmed by the sun...."
According to McDonough, this was the first time so many green technologies were integrated into a one public building. "Imagine buildings that produce their own oxygen, distill water, accrue solar energy, change with the seasons, and produce no waste." A net energy exporter, the Lewis Center would create more energy than would be needed for operation and would use advanced techniques to reduce the energy demands of the building to a fraction of normal levels.
The community watched with interest as the open space between two dormitories turned into a building project, and an elegantly simple building that could well have been claimed by the Shakers began to rise. Just one week short of two years after the ground-breaking, the building was dedicated, a green cathedral shaped by the philosophy of sustainability and made possible by some of the most skilled minds in the technological field, from NASA and Living Machines to a cadre of landscape architects, civil and structural engineers, and specialists in lighting, acoustics, energy, and solar design.
Like a tree, the Lewis Center relies upon current solar income and the natural energy flows created by the sun. Solar energy is harnessed both through photovoltaic cells on the building's south-facing roof and passive solar design elements which shade the summer sun while allowing winter heat gain.
Even sustainably produced electricity is not wasted, however: at night or on a dull day, lights are not activated until a sensor sends the message that someone needs them. The ventilation of each of the building's spaces is individually controlled, providing 100% fresh air. A raised floor system provides an underfloor space for air supply, and also gives long-term flexibility for electrical, data, and communication wiring.
One of the Center's advanced technologies is its biological wastewater treatment system, or "Living Machine." Located within the building beside the airy atrium, the Living Machine looks more and more every day like a miniature jungle. It replaces chemical treatment of waste water with a series of ponds in which diverse communities of living organisms, including both plants and microorganisms, remove harmful bacteria from the water by replicating the natural cleansing and filtering processes of wetlands. Eventually the Living Machine will be connected to the landscape outside, allowing water to flow from the purification tanks inside to a larger pond outdoors, and the "gray water" (although purer now than tap water!) will be recycled to the toilets for reuse.
Heating and cooling are accomplished through a geothermal system. Water circulates through twenty-four closed-loop geothermal wells to water-source heat pumps located throughout the building. All the materials in the Lewis Center are sustainable, durable, and low-maintenance: steel, aluminum, ceramic tiles, and certified forest products. When I was first shown the auditorium, I was told to get close to the wall and inhale. It smelled like a sunny summer day in the country. "Wheatstraw!" my guide told me. Oberlin College leases the auditorium carpeting and upholstery from the manufacturer, who has designed them for continuous disassembly and reuse.
The building is surrounded by four "landscapes." An indigenous landscape creates a microcosm of the hardwood forests once common to Northern Ohio. The pond, an aquatic landscape surrounded by vegetation typical of a wetland, processes and cleanses stormwater and run-off from the sidewalks and grounds surrounding the Center. A food-growing landscape consisting of orchards and gardens will help students learn about growing food. And, because this is a college campus, the all-important social landscape--the Sun Plaza, North Plaza, paths, and walks--will provide places for the all-important "hanging out." Even hanging out on the Sun Plaza can educate: in the center, a tall pole or "gnomon" provides a contemporary version of Stonehenge, mapping the solar year as its shadow falls on the ground below.
Like the medieval cathedral, the Lewis Center is indeed a teaching tool, what David Orr calls a "building as a pedagogue." Its curriculum of cement, steel, aluminum, ceramic, and water teaches the themes of sustainability, self-sufficiency, and interrelationship.
Like the tree which inspired this architectural venture, the Lewis Center will change. The building will become more and more a product of what William McDonough, in an article in the October 1998 Atlantic Monthly, termed "The NEXT Industrial Revolution." To dramatize the difference between the first one and the "next" one, he imagines presenting the Industrial Revolution as a retroactive design assignment. What if one were to ask our nineteenth-century ancestors to design a system of production that does the following things?
* puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year
* measures prosperity by activity, not legacy
* requires thousands of complex regulations to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly
* produces materials so dangerous that they will require constant vigilance from future generations
* results in gigantic amounts of waste
* puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved
* erodes the diversity of biological species and cultural practices.
The image McDonough uses for the Next Industrial Revolution is not a mechanical one but an organic, poetic one:
"Consider the cherry tree. It makes thousands of blossoms just so that another tree might germinate, take root, and grow. Who would notice piles of cherry blossoms littering the ground in the spring and think, 'How inefficient and wasteful'? The tree's abundance is useful and safe. After falling to the ground, the blossoms return to the soil and become nutrients for the surrounding environment. Every last particle contributes in some way to the health of a thriving ecosystem. 'Waste equals food'--the first principle of the Next Industrial Revolution."
The technology of the Next Industrial Revolution respects the interdependence of all living systems. In McDonough's words, industrial design can create products "that work within cradle-to-cradle life cycles rather than cradle-to-grave ones...it is time for designs that are creative, abundant, prosperous, and intelligent from the start." Like a cherry tree.
We are a very small town to be graced with such a cathedral. Like the peasants and pilgrims who visited the medieval cathedral and came away inspired to live in a way that expressed that cathedral's theology, the Lewis Center has worked its magic on the surrounding community as well as the world at large. My husband and I, for example, needed a new furnace this year, and called our friend Tom Monroe of Monroe's Heating and Cooling for help. We sat at our dining room table with charts spread before us, considering how to purchase the most efficient furnace possible, and whether we could afford the cost--and the guilt--of including air-conditioning. In the midst of our conversation, Tom said very quietly, "Maybe you'd like to consider geo-thermal."
We knew the moment he said it what our decision would be. We knew what geothermal heat and cooling was, because of the Lewis Center. And our own world-views have come more and more to parallel the one expressed in that building.
So it wasn't long before two local farmers whose fields were still too muddy to plow, came with their equipment to dig four wells 150 feet deep in our front yard. Since this is a small town, we were an object of curiosity during the process. For six days, our yard looked like an oil field. The drills dug through heavy clay and, at about seventy-five feet, hit a vein of sand. Then they hit rock. What could have taken four days took six, but finally the farmers installed the pipes containing the solution which would bring the earth's 55 degrees up to the surface to be compressed until the temperature matches our thermostat setting. The connection was made to our shiny new furnace as well as to our water heater, the gas lines were capped, and Tom, who is also a bee-keeper, celebrated the occasion by giving us a gift of Monroe's honey.
Our home is now being heated (and, when we need it, cooled in the summer, as the process is reversed and the Ohio heat gets buried 150 feet deep) by Mother Earth, with only a small amount of electricity to run the heat pumps or to give the geothermal system a boost in the coldest weather. This totally confuses the gas company, which, even a year later, insists that our meter reading must be inaccurate since it indicates only the small amount of gas I use in cooking.
The muddy eyesore that was our front yard has been leveled, so passing motorists no longer stop to gape. But we get lots of questions, "How do you like your geothermal?" We like it. We like the murmur of the heat pumps, the "swoosh" when it changes from one cycle to another, the evenness of the heat it gives us. But most of all we like the fact that it lessens our ecological footprint on the planet, and expresses in a small way our philosophy of life, which is so well communicated on a grander scale in the Lewis Center a few blocks away.
Nancy Roth is a writer and clergywoman who is trying to do her part in contributing to our evolving ecological culture. She lives in Oberlin, Ohio.
©2001* Talking Leaves
Spring/Summer 2001
Volume 11, Number 1
Tools for Sustainability/Eco-Humor