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Overview
The Woods Hole Research Center is an international leader in identifying the causes and consequences of environmental change. When the WHRC needed a new administration building, its scientists and staff decided that the building should utilize “state-of-the-shelf” green building techniques and materials. However, the new office had to conform with the laws and building codes of the time, and with materials that were then available—no matter how frustrating these requirements were to the resident scientists and contractors.
The author, George M. Woodwell, founder of the WHRC, was intimately involved in the design and construction of the Gilman Ordway Campus, which was completed in 2003 in collaboration with McDonough + Partners. He details the challenges they faced, some of which are familiar to everyone who tries to “build green”: the vagaries of building codes, the whims of inspectors, the obstreperousness of subcontractors, the search for appropriate materials, and the surprises involved in turning an old house into a modern office building.
Woodwell puts the building in a larger context, not only within the work of the Center and the tradition of Woods Hole, but in the global need to minimize our carbon emissions and overall environmental impact. Building a world that works requires rethinking how we design, reuse, and live in the built environment while preserving the functional integrity of the landscape.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781610911375 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 06/22/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Nature of a House
Building a World that Works
By George M. Woodwell
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 2009 George M. WoodwellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-164-1
CHAPTER 1
BUILDING A WORLD THAT WORKS
She had a giant puffball, a fungus from the woods, fully ten inches in diameter, white with traces of brown, on a platter. She had opened the door of Hilltop House to our knock. It was midmorning, but she was in her nightgown, absorbed in admiration for her find, which she announced was on its way to The Café Budapest, her Boston restaurant. There was no question. Livia Hedda Rev-Kury had one of the world's wonders on a platter, a product of the forested eight-acre tract we had just arranged to buy as the new campus of the Woods Hole Research Center. I could not but admire her knowledge that there are no poisonous puffballs and her confidence that this monster was at that early, meaty, edible stage, well before the spores that are the puffball's real business had started to form. Spores make poor eating but a wonderful display as they emerge in an explosive cloud for a reproductive celebration that justifies the puffball name and spreads the fungus around the world. We admired the puffball, a saprophyte, slow growing, expanding toward the moment that is difficult to ignore when its millions of spores flood the world. It was an apt analogy as we set out in 1998 on a new phase in our mission of seeding the world with the new insights into the science of ecology and the political support for the massive transition from a fossil-fueled and failing world to a solar-powered and infinitely renewable world that can serve indefinitely as a human habitat.
The puffball had appeared at the right moment to add to the excitement surrounding our central purpose and the opportunity we saw in testing our own principles through the transformation of Hilltop House into a model for the new world. No matter how much we dream or wish it otherwise, we have but one habitat, and it is now eroding under the ever larger demands of an expanding human presence. Where are we headed in this complex but finite world? Is there but one direction, the continued erosion of the human future?
It need not be so. Does not an environment that is fully supportive of the public interest lie at the core purpose of both science and government? That was our vision, polished over years as we built research programs in ecology in the Woods Hole Research Center and before. Our vision took on new vigor as we contemplated reunification on a single campus. Here we might build anew using the principles of ecology that we develop and honor and set as an example for a world under siege from cumulative local failures. Changing the global course requires both top-down and bottom-up leadership, local revolutions, cumulative, contagious, local successes that silently enter the public realm and erupt into a new world.
The complexity of the global crises of environment is real enough, but the problems are far from impossible. Central among them is growth. Growth in human numbers, growth in demands on all resources—water, air, space, forests, food, shelter, and energy; growth, fed by an insatiable demand for more in every aspect of the human economy. The growth has been enabled by explosive industrial development built on cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy—coal, oil, and, most recently, gas. The combination of cheap energy and industrial genius has seemed capable of solving all problems and of allowing boundless expansion of the human undertaking. Growth has become the touchstone of success in business and in government throughout the capitalist, greed-driven, western world. As we have continued to honor growth in the present context, we have in effect denied the limits of the earth and set a course that changes the earth out from under this civilization. The future promises a progressively dysfunctional and impoverished world. That is the urgent message of the moment brought home by the details of the climatic disruption as they emerge as the final limit to the fossil fuel age from beneath the fraying canopy of industrial expansion and apparent successes. Suddenly, the world is again small and fragile and seriously threatened as biophysical limits—always real, but long ignored—become conspicuous.
Scientists and others have a big job now in leading this transition. We, the staff and trustees of the Woods Hole Research Center, found ourselves in a position to rebuild a small part of the world in a new context consistent with our own dreams of reality for the next century. Our experience was limited, of course. It always is in such ventures. But we were acutely aware of earlier fumbles, the speed of the erosion of the human circumstance, and the magnitude and importance of the challenge. Energy lay at the core, but we were trapped as a part of the fossil-fueled world at the moment. We could aspire to change, but could not march abruptly out of this world into another.
Most important is the realization that the world is the sum of its parts and a world in trouble is in trouble because its parts are not working properly. Correction begins with the parts, each of which must be rebuilt into working order. Our campus is but one of those parts. It must be a model, a contagious inspiration, a giant step in the direction of Ian McHarg's exhortation: design with nature.
This book chronicles, through my own eyes and experience, what we saw and learned in the reconstruction and expansion of Hilltop House (figure 1.1) and its eight-acre campus (soon expanded to nine acres by a gift) as an example of the world we need to produce over the next decades.
The immediate objective of course was the consolidation of the activities of staff then scattered among five different sites in Woods Hole into one place that offered not only propinquity and efficiency but also joy and convenience and even beauty and pride of place and purpose. The joy and convenience and beauty and pride and purpose were major issues, for our business is global biophysics—defining and challenging, if possible, the environmental problems of an eroding global environment. And we are closely bound, individually and institutionally, to the industrial society that is the cause of the erosion. Although there are many causes of the environmental decline, the overwhelmingly important issue is the climatic disruption, a direct product of reliance on fossil fuels. Is it possible for the institution to have a campus that moves into the next age, the postcarbon world, and survives? We thought so, but could we afford it? How far could we go? How would we determine whether to raze and rebuild or to remodel the existing structure? Would there be interest from supporters, architects, builders, and donors? And would we be able to live with the outcome? The need we saw was for an example for the world.
Hilltop House, attractive as it was as a spacious home, presented an immediate dilemma. It was an 1877 relic of an earlier era, the wood-fired, locally self-sufficient era, with a fireplace in every room and a large wood-range in the kitchen. The central oil-fired steam heating system was an afterthought with a boiler built into a pit dug into the basement floor. It was a wooden building, neglected, somewhat shabby. There was a serious question as to whether the original Victorian summer mansion of 1877 vintage should be razed or might easily be modified and expanded to accommodate the new purposes and the innovations in construction and architecture that we saw as part of the transformation. There were several issues, including the question of structural integrity, our own fundamentally conservative interests in reusing an existing structure, and the local political interest in preserving a spectacular and widely known mansion with an interesting history. The building was not, however, an architectural gem. It was not especially well built, contained no special woodwork worthy of note or preservation. Although it was not in the designated historic district of Woods Hole, local interest in preserving ancient buildings favored preserving this conspicuous part of a trio of mansions on Quissett Ridge, two miles north of the village of Woods Hole. Our own New England roots also favored preservation and reuse over demolition, and several surveys of the structure were carried out to determine whether it was sufficiently sound to be preserved and modified for the needs of the Center.
The conclusion of experts was that the building was sound enough to be preserved, which was the more desirable choice from an environmental standpoint, and that it would establish the place and form and style of the segment of the new building that was visible from the road. The decision brought relief in many quarters and general approbation from friends and donors locally.
Excited at the prospect of turning our scientific principles into a practical demonstration appropriate to our history in science, our current work, and our dreams, we marched on with confidence that we could restore the building without great difficulty. If we did our work properly, lived up to our chance, we could use our building not only to explore the frontiers of architecture but also to define what is possible now in turning principles of ecology, and dreams of the essential transitions that the world must make, into reality.
A short time after the purchase in October 1998 I sat with our staff in second- (or fourth-) hand folding chairs in the large front room of Hilltop House and heard the distinguished architect Bill McDonough expound on how he would help us build "with silica and cellulose" a beautifully comfortable institutional Center that, when it decayed finally after a century or two, would leave no noxious residue at all. The new building would be as a "leaf, reaching out into the forest nearby." Not at all taken in by this hyperbole we could not be anything but impressed with the imagination and flair of Bill McDonough. We talked with other excellent architects, but none had carried the environmental challenges as far, reflected our needs in science as faithfully, or captured us with imaginative pictures and figures of speech and phrases as Bill. And he was well known, brilliantly articulate, and could help us with the fund-raising, which would be critical as the cost of the building rose with every new principle and each new idea.
Despite the excitement of setting forth to design a new headquarters, we could not set aside our core business of research and analysis of the global environment as we sorted through our potential for bringing what we think we know about the world to bear on this new building that we shall live with for the next decades. We were acutely aware that we lived, then and now, in a world that is not working properly as a result of the cumulative effects of earlier failures in design and is in fact in crisis as it becomes less stable daily. The obvious, immediate, acute global failure is the climatic disruption, the quite predictable, and predicted, product of changes in the atmosphere from the massive ongoing combustion of fossil fuels and from reductions in the area of forests globally. The climatic change is already disruptive of civilization through destabilization of agriculture and water supplies, through a rising sea level, intensified storms, and other inconveniences. But the most serious disruption is indirect through a major contribution to the biotic impoverishment of the earth and the normal functions of the environment. That issue is complicated and confounded with other causes of impoverishment, including the toxification of air, water, and land with industrial and other noxious substances, some of which are distributed deliberately, such as poisons to control pests. These are Great Issues and we were privileged to work on them, first in their definition, then in their resolution. Our objective in science and our institutional purpose is to keep the living world safe from further environmental impoverishment. Do we have any potential at all for dealing with this heavy burden in this new project? We do, of course, for our segment is a part of the global sum. And our interest is in the full range of cause and effect and cure.
The core of the public purpose must lie, at least as we saw the world, in preservation of the integrity of function of the biosphere, including the whole of the human environment. That objective requires preserving the physical and chemical, and therefore the biological, integrity of the earth, locally and globally. It is a demanding objective at this stage in civilization, for it requires restoration as opposed to mere restraint. How are we to build within new limits that proscribe the use of fossil fuels and demand materials that do not further poison the earth in either their use or their ultimate decay? The era of explosive "growth" was clearly over, at least as we saw the world, although politicians and economists did not then, and do not now, share the perspective. The cost of that persistence promises to be very great.
The wages of "growth" as pursued in the contemporary context are with us now as the human population, which has doubled in the last forty years and quadrupled in the lifetimes of many now living, continues to expand. The world is afflicted with an accelerating global climatic disruption, rampant biotic impoverishment to the point where fisheries have disappeared and virtually all are threatened, forests over vast areas are threatened by fire and disease as the climate migrates out from under them, and persistent drought affects sections of all continents. People in those troubled lands look elsewhere for succor, leading to pressure on all frontiers, including the United States–Mexico border and the southern frontier of Europe.
The rate of climatic disruption is clearly set to rise abruptly over the next years and well into the next century. And the climatic disruption is but one of the trends triggered by growth. The trends, followed to the extreme, define a global environmental disaster that is economic and political as well, for a barren land has no economic base and nothing on which to build and sustain a government.
If the chaos of the post-Katrina New Orleans is not enough of a lesson, the island nation of Haiti on the western end of Hispaniola has all the elements of a model of the depths to which biotic impoverishment proceeds. Haiti is severely overpopulated and virtually totally deforested. Fisheries have yielded to overharvest and continued siltation from an eroding landscape. Agriculture has been driven to tiny plots on slopes as steep as thirty degrees that wash out in a year or so. Rivers flood regularly as rain in the mountains runs off immediately and follows new channels because older channels are filled with debris from the slopes. Settlements are flooded and people drown regularly in minor storms. No stable government has existed in Haiti for decades. Thuggery prevails. No stable government is possible until a stable and functional landscape can be restored to provide an economic base, a place to live, such essentials as a reliable supply of potable water and a sewage system. Government, economic vitality, and a functionally intact landscape depend on each other. Haiti is in an environmental, biophysical hole, an abyss, in fact. Outside financing will be required in the range of tens of billions of dollars to establish and execute a comprehensive plan for the restoration of a functional landscape, to relocate people, and to provide them with a way to make a living while the restoration proceeds, if restoration is to occur at all. An effective government, no matter the efforts, will await that restoration for its own emergence and success. Haiti is the victim of a progressively impoverished landscape to the point of environmental collapse. It matters not at all that the collapse was not specifically due to climatic disruption, which is but one factor among several that have the same effect—systematic, cumulative, biotic impoverishment, a cloud overhanging all of this civilization.
The costs of biotic impoverishment are with us now, but there is no one standing by on the moon, waiting to finance the restoration of Earth. Restoration is up to us. The world is travelling rapidly on a one-way street. The capitalist system, built to celebrate greed and a political system that feeds it, seems incompetent to respond by accepting the limits of growth and biophysical laws as global reality. Solutions, if they exist at all, will bubble up from below, be discovered by the public, and put into action, quite possibly without central governmental leadership. The problem is global, but "global" is the sum of local actions. Suddenly local and global biophysics touches us all, whether we recognize it or not. We are, each of us, and each place we occupy, an example for the world, a contributor to progressive impoverishment, or an increment of reform toward stability.
Science has a lot to say about "what works" in maintaining the human habitat. The ecologists' model of a functional world, an enduring human habitat, is well defined. It is the world that runs itself using the information contained in the genetic complement of the biota—all of it—for that is the only pool of information available and it cannot be replaced by any human hand. It is the product of millions of years of experiment in which the failures have fallen away and the successes are our inheritance. Our self-interest lies in respecting that inheritance, preserving it, and enabling it to function in maintaining the thin layer of the earth that we inhabit: the biosphere. And that is our business in science, not merely conservation, but the definition and redefinition of details of function as they apply to human activities. And, as the challenges to environmental stability grow, as they will in an ever tighter world, they become the core governmental purpose: keeping a habitat suitable for life, all life. Our job in science defines itself in this transition: what will work in the public interest and what will not?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Nature of a House by George M. Woodwell. Copyright © 2009 George M. Woodwell. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsForeword\William McDonough
Preface: A Small Matter of Habitat and Housing
Chapter 1. Building a World That Works
Chapter 2. Back to the Beginning: The Woods Hole Research Center
Chapter 3. Re-Designing Hilltop House: Triumphs and Compromises
Chapter 4. Energy in a New World
Chapter 5. Materials, Sewage and Costs: Adjusting Our Vision
Chapter 6. The Product: A Campus That Works and a World that Might
Index