There has been a major conflict brewing for quite some time between preservationists and the LEED rating system. LEED is being used as a tool by architects to justify the destruction of historic buildings because they aren't as energy-efficient as the new buildings designed to replace them... so the preservationists may emerge as the most vigorous opponent to LEED and the US Green Building Council that created it.
How could things have possibly gotten so convoluted? Preservation should be considered the foundation act of sustainability, because if you don't preserve something, it is not sustained. Using the plain-spoken meanings of the words, "preservation" and "sustainability" should be nearly synonymous. Yet the "preservation" camp and the "sustainability" camp are beginning to lob verbal hand grenades at each other. How can this be?
The main culprits are the architects using LEED rather than the USGBC, it seems... Here's a series of factors that show how each contributes to the problem:
LEED is style-neutral. It mandates neither Modernist-styled architecture nor traditionally-styled architecture. Most people don't realize this because almost all of the LEED buildings published are Modernist ones, but if you get under the hood of the rating system, you'll see that it's so. I designed Katrina Cottage VIII, which would have been either LEED Gold or LEED Platinum according to where it was installed in town, had I gone to the expense of rating it.
LEED credits are entirely additive, which means that you simply get points where you choose, add them up, and that's your rating. This means that each credit is fairly small, since they all add up to 100. So you only get a couple more points for preserving an entire historic building as you do for installing a bike rack.
The architects' incentive is to get the largest fee possible. Because it's almost always more expensive to demolish an historic building and build a new one than it is to restore and re-use the historic building, the architects are financially prejudiced against saving the historic building.
The following fact is swept under the rug by almost everyone, but it's essential to get it on the table if we want to understand the entire dynamic: Modernism is anti-historical and anti-traditional. It's not considered a subject for polite conversation in many circles, but Modernism at its core is about destroying old (and similar) buildings and replacing them with new (and unique) buildings. There are occasionally Modernist architects who are exceptions to this rule, but they are infrequent.
Here's how it all comes together: The architects have found LEED, because it is style-neutral, and because it is established on today's moral high ground of sustainability, to be the perfect vehicle for achieving their theoretical and financial aims. This is all so wrong... flying the flag of sustainability while destroying things that have been heretofore sustained for a very long time. But what can we do?
The LEED standard needs to be modified to recognize the full sustainability implications of preserving an historic building. It's not just the fact that there's tremendous embodied energy and resources already in place. It's also the fact that an historic building, by its continued existence until today, has proven something that new buildings cannot prove for a very long time, and which most of the new buildings will never last long enough to ever prove: that the building is lovable enough that people have preserved it until now. If a building cannot be loved, it will not last... and what's the carbon footprint of a building worth once its pieces are carted off to the landfill? Nothing at all. A building cannot be sustainable if it is not lovable.
A discipline of high-performance historic buildings needs to be developed very quickly. The current perception is that the "drafty old piles" could never be so efficient as the gleaming new things, so why bother? But that perception can be dispelled if there is a compelling body of evidence to refute it. Preservationists should be at the forefront of this effort. Some would say, and the Original Green seems to agree, that traditional buildings before the Thermostat Age were always green. This is so... but with the caveat that our ancestors had much wider comfort ranges and tolerances. True sustainability cannot be achieved without expanding the comfort range from its ridiculous 2-degree window today, which guarantees that a building must be conditioned all the time. But it's unlikely we can open the window of the comfort range as wide again as it was for all of human history until the Thermostat Age, so that means that the historic buildings must perform at a higher level than they have ever done before, even if they were built before the Thermostat Age. Solving this problem is of utmost importance.
