"Greenwashing": Eco-Fraud

By Cathy Lang Ho for Architecture Magazine



"Green buildings" might not be all they're made out to be.

The term "greenwashing" is not yet as common in architecture as it is in the corporate and political worlds, though it soon will be. Defined as the deliberate dissemination of disinformation aimed at presenting an environmentally responsible public image, greenwashing is one of the more pernicious by-products of the growing and otherwise heartening general interest in sustainability. Companies, from Shell to Nike to Home Depot, are among the high-profile alleged greenwashers—skewered by watchdog groups, the press, and in lawsuits for promoting eco-friendly images that are at odds with their actual practices. Equally guilty are politicians prone to generating innocuous platitudes or underachieving legislation in the name of the environment.

Environmental responsibility is fashionable. These days, it's rare to find a new building or product that doesn't make claim to eco- friendliness. Lacking clear definitions, "green building" or "sustainable architecture" are easily manipulated by architects, whose success hinges on publicity. The media, meanwhile, are complicit in the greenwashing problem. Looking for fresh stories, journalists give attention to projects without verifying their green claims.

Despite its complexity, sustainable architecture is routinely reduced to a few buzzwords or ideas (efficient, solar, healthy, passive, reuse, recycled), and here the problem begins. "It's easy for architects to select a few products through GreenSpec and then call what they do 'green,'" remarks Greg Kiss of Brooklyn, New York-based Kiss + Cathcart, referring to the online products directory. The checklist mentality is greenwashing's prime instrument—and good design's main obstacle. "Though many supposed green buildings might be well-intentioned, they often miss the larger point," says Kiss, who has been exploring sustainable design strategies for almost 20 years. "Sustainability is just one input, along with program, client needs, site, budget, experience, beauty, and so on. For example, if green features don't make good economic sense, the design is a failure." In short, we are far from the point where good architecture is green architecture.

"We see lots of projects that make environmental claims, but in most cases, there's not enough information to judge their validity," says Nadav Malin, senior editor of the journal Environmental Business News, which is published by the creator of GreenSpec. He cites the highly publicized Commerzbank in Frankfurt by Foster and Partners. "I tried to figure out the building's energy use per square meter, but the owners didn't want to share that information. In fact, I've never seen any data about the building published anywhere."

Taking the LEED

To help standardize what qualifies as green architecture, the Washington, D.C.-based industry group U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) created the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green-Building Rating System, a voluntary, point-driven certification program that assesses building performance. Both architects and clients recognize the public- relations value of a high LEED rating.

LEED is a positive starting place, but the system is far from perfect. "We're still learning about what it is we're measuring," says Malin. Furthermore, while accordance to USGBC's standards is desirable, many LEED-rated buildings can hardly be considered exemplars of sustainable architecture. Colin Cathcart of Kiss + Cathcart remarks about a coastal California building recently awarded the group's highest rating, Platinum: "It met all the LEED requirements, but it had no connection with the ocean, and just looked like a regular building that could have been anywhere." He adds, "It was also expensive because almost all the environmental aspects were change orders." The architects went back and slapped on green features to earn LEED points.

The simplification of green tools, from product catalogs to building ratings, may actually exacerbate the greenwashing problem. "LEED seems geared at generalizing standards and making them universally applicable, but it's wrong to recommend certain so-called green materials or techniques to any situation," says James Wines, of New York City-based architecture firm SITE and a pioneer of green architecture. "Unless a building is designed with the regional context in mind, it cannot be sustainable." So, for example, photovoltaics should be used where there is a lot of sun and windmills where there is wind, but not necessarily vice-versa, despite the fact that each technology earns LEED points for exploiting renewable energy. Though LEED does reward contextual responses, its blanket approval of other features (materials with recycled content or certified wood, for example) elides the fact that these might not be the best choices under all circumstances.

Regional significance was one of the criteria that curator David Gissen employed in evaluating projects for the Big and Green exhibition, a review of large commercial projects at the National Building Museum. He also considered expressiveness and historical meaning, in addition to operating performance. The regional and historical filters allowed Gissen to include buildings boasting accomplishments that might be seem piddling against current standards, but remain notable as "firsts." New York City's Four Times Square, for example, was groundbreaking as a large-scale, speculative urban office building using fuel cells in the 1990s (although the project has been accused of greenwashing). In one sense, Gissen's relativist standards emphasize an important aspect of green architecture: It is in constant flux. Acknowledging this, USGBC is working to launch a post-occupancy recertification program for previously LEED-rated buildings, as well as a program to certify existing buildings.

A theoretical project designed by Kiss + Cathcart and included in Big and Green, is an example of how unstable presumptions about sustainability can be. In light of the growing malleability and affordability of photovoltaics, a building's skin can be a valuable energy-producing system, suggesting that it may be wise to maximize a building's skin-to-floor ratio. This could overturn the notion that minimizing the skin-to-floor ratio is environmentally kinder because it conserves resources. Any strategy that has been regarded as eco-friendly must be continually revised. "Architects must constantly update their awareness of not only what technologies are out there, but how to use them," says Cathcart.

Modern ideal

Greenwashing is keeping the bar low—not just for sustainable architecture but for architecture in general. "It becomes harder to recognize where the real green developments are happening," says Malin. "Those who claim to do green things without having proven it create unrealistic expectations about what actually can be done within a certain time frame and budget."

Interestingly, the checklist approach that characterizes most sustainable architecture today echoes the beginnings of modernist architecture, which was codified to a set of industrial materials and systems—and an "efficient" imagery to match. Observes Wines, "At the end of the 1800s, everyone was claiming to be a modernist, but a lot of the work was still stuck in nineteenth- century practice. It wasn't until the 1930s when you saw a bursting out, a real expression and understanding of what modernism was about. That's happening now with sustainable architecture."