Our migration to more sustainable buildings is an evolving process that requires a consistent combination of goals, results and critiques. Without any one of these components, we run the risk of stagnation and dampening our progress towards more ecological responsibility in our buildings. However, it is important that the level of effort and investigation put into criticism is commensurate with the amount contributed to the process of designing the results in the first place. When sustainability is critiqued (and it should be) it has to be weighed as a series of components and relationships rather than being boiled-down into one or two metrics to make its retention more palatable.
Sam Roudman’s recent New Republic article condemning Bank of America’s Tower at One Bryant Park that sped through the blogosphere is indicative of one of the largest hurdles that our culture faces for sustainability: the propensity we have to shrink its definition down to fit into sound bites and online rants at the expense of removing large portions of its meaning and resulting importance. Not only does this diminish the progress we have made, but it perpetuates an inaccurate idea of what we are striving for in the first place.