The Greenest Building in the World (at the time)

Some of you surely remember those heady days for the Green Building community, the early-to-mid 2000s. Each year at Greenbuild and other meetings there was tremendous excitement for new building materials & methods, and for new buildings. Greenbuild attracted tens of thousands of people! Who will be next year’s keynote speakers? we wondered. New magazines and websites cropped up like wildflowers. And new contenders for the title ‘Greenest Building in the World’ were eagerly scrutinized. The AIA COTE top ten list was a big deal. The graph below shows that the phrase “greenest building” entered the public dialogue in the late 1990s and soared around 2000.

Lately I’ve been recalling this period, somewhat nostalgically and somewhat critically (see disclaimers below). For the benefit of the historical record, I thought it would be useful and fun to record the buildings that were considered ‘The Greenest Building in the World’ during the past couple of decades. These aren’t meant to represent my own favorite or ‘best’ green buildings but rather those that were the consensus within that community at the time. (If you disagree please comment!) And I’m not defining ‘greenest’ because this was impressionistic, and because priorities changed over the years.

● ● ●

Prior to 1990, I believe the Greenest Building in the World was considered to be either the Bateson Building (Sim Van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe, 1978) or the Monterey Bay Aquarium (EHDD, 1984).

1990: Passivhaus housing in Darmstadt, Bott, Ridder and Westermeyer

1994: Heliotrope, Rolf Disch

1997: Commerzbank Tower, Norman Foster and Partners

2000: Lewis Center at Oberlin, William McDonough + Partners

2003: BedZED (Beddington Zero Energy Development), Bill Dunster, or
Solarsiedlung at Schlierberg, Rolf Disch

2004: Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford, EHDD.

2008: Aldo Leopold Center, The Kubala Washatko Architects

2010: Omega Center, BNIM Architects

2013: Bullitt Center, Miller Hull

Has the Bullitt Center been eclipsed? Maybe? I don’t know! I don’t know because the question doesn’t provoke the same excitement it used to. The Green Building community has evolved beyond its adolescence, surely for the better. As an adult, you come to realize that you can’t say whether Thriller was a better album than Sgt. Pepper’s—masterworks are incomparable.

● ● ●

Disclaimers:
Yes, Greenbuild was a fully corporate affair; it commodified ecological architecture and tolerated a ton of greenwashing. LEED was poor tool for measuring sustainability.