Gehry's Take Two on LEED Architecture

Frank Gehry asked me to call him. I thought it was to answer questions about how the Great Recession was affecting the next generation of architects. But before we could get to that, the founder of Gehry Partners and an instructor this term at the Yale School of Architecture said he wanted to clarify his comments about LEED building standards. (I posted this blog after Gehry spoke on that topic during a public appearance on April 6.)

Yes, he did say that efforts to win a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification can be a waste of time and money. But he told me on the phone that what he really meant to attack was the posturing around the LEED seal of approval. He’s all for energy-efficient buildings, he said, and has been since before there was an Earth Day, in the late 1960s.

Though he reiterated that he had never designed a building just to gain a LEED tag, he noted, in fact, that his Stata Center at MIT has been awarded a LEED silver from the U.S. Green Building Council.

“I’m not against LEEDs at all,” he said. “I think it’s wonderful. I think we’ve got to do this.” But then Gehry, who acknowledged that he is something of a cranky old man, got back on a soapbox to decry today’s automatic embrace of LEED certification. “It’s become ‘fetishized’ in my profession. It’s like if you wear the American flag on your lapel, you’re an American. That’s what I was trying to say. You get people who are holier than thou. I think architects can do a lot, but some of what gets done is marketing and doesn’t really serve to the extent that the PR says it does.”

With that off his chest, our conversation turned to other subjects including the job market for architects today, which is simply rotten. Gehry said he has 10 “superb” students in his graduate-school class. In previous years, he would have hired a few of them. But this year, with to little to do at his Los Angeles-based firm, he said he can’t. “Some of them will have trouble. And I don’t think they can all afford to have trouble.”

He said the students probably would work for less money, and some would be happy to be unpaid interns. But he said he insists on paying the prevailing salary for entry-level architects, and his partnership doesn’t have the work for more paid employees. For now, he said, the profession is in serious trouble, too. “You just hope it’s going to come back.”

Is LEEDing the Saudi Desert Really Green?

Just in time for Earth Day (natch) the American Institute of Architects announced its Top 10 examples of environmentally benign building designs. The 2010 honor roll includes office towers, schools, and even a prototype of a prefab single-family home designed for post-Katrina New Orleans. It also includes the world’s largest project to be awarded a LEED Platinum designation by the U.S. Green Building Council—the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

But after all the hullabaloo my recent blog posts on Frank Gehry generated, I have to ask: How green is it?

KAUST is the first to achieve a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design imprimatur in Saudi Arabia. (Interestingly, it’s also the kingdom’s first coed university campus.) The 6.5 million-sq.-ft. development, which encompasses 26 buildings on over 9,000 acres near Jeddah on the Red Sea, was designed by HOK, one of the world’s top architecture firms. It’s the eighth win for St. Louis-based HOK since the AIA’s Committee on the Environment began handing out awards in 1997.

HOK pats itself on the back for KAUST’s green touches, such as shading walkways and buildings from sunlight, installing wind turbines and 178,325 square feet of solar panels, sourcing 38% of materials within 500 miles of the Saudi port, and creating an infrastructure that reuses all waste water for onsite irrigation and other purposes. Contractors did two other things on the LEED checklist: They recycled 80% of waste materials and used wood that was sustainably harvested.

That’s all well and good, but the fact is that nearly two-thirds of the tens of thousands of tons of materials needed to construct this desert campus—paint, carpeting, furnishings, wood—had to be shipped in from more than 500 miles away. I don’t know how much greenhouse gas those vessels produced, but I do know that ocean freighters emit a lot. Back in 2007, I wrote in BusinessWeek that, based on a study, they produced more carbon dioxide than 10 of the 39 industrialized nations originally included in the Kyoto Protocol. A revised study finds that that’s still the case.

I asked one of the AIA committee members, Liz Ogbu of San Francisco-based Public Architecture, about how far judges should go in assessing environmental impact. She said the committee discussed whether it was right to award a LEED project in such a remote, resourceless, and inhospitable place. But she said it was precisely for that reason that the committee voted for HOK design. “Not every building can be built in California,” she noted. “There is going to be building going on in Saudi Arabia. For that reason, it’s important to have an example that green building is possible.”

I also asked HOK’s Colin Rohlfing the same question. Rohlfing is sustainable design leader in HOK’s Chicago office and was one of the hundreds of HOK employees on the project. “We had a lot of things working against us from the get-go,” he told me. In an ideal world, developers would build in temperate climates. Here, however, designers confronted a climate like Houston’s, except set in a desert, and coral reefs and mangroves that had to be protected.

“It’s always a dilemma,” he said. “Should we develop in those areas? Should we be going after greenfield developments in such a harsh environment? But if we don’t go after them and win them and try to make them as efficient as possible, some other firm will come in. The king was going to build in that location regardless. We had to make the best of it.”

I have to agree. If Saudi Arabia is going to develop as a nation, it does the world a favor by building to LEED standards. Still, I wonder what Frank Gehry would have to say.

Architect Gehry on LEED Buildings: Humbug

Frank Gehry has never designed a structure that’s achieved LEED certification, and I’d wager that he never will, based on his gruff remarks during a public Q&A on April 6 in Chicago. The 81-year-old also jabbed a thumb, somewhat in jest, in the eye of fellow architect Renzo Piano and museum directors in general, and he described the early stages of creating a design.

Gehry, whose most famous work is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, was interviewed in the Harold Washington Library by Thomas Pritzker, chairman of the Pritzker Foundation, which awards the annual Pritzker Architecture Prize, and Hyatt Hotels Corp. His family also wrote the check for the Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park. (Hyatt itself recently won a LEED silver designation for a new hotel in Seattle.)

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and was created by the U.S. Green Building Council to promote the construction of buildings that are healthier for the earth as well as occupants inside. Developers seems to be tripping over one another to win LEED status these days.

What would you think, Pritzker asked him as they sat in hard-backed chairs on an auditorium stage, if a client said he wanted a LEED-certified building? “Oh, great,” Gehry answered in a high, mock-excited voice, as the audience laughed. Then, back in his regular voice, he dismissed environmental concerns as largely political concerns. “A lot of LEEDs are given for bogus stuff. A lot of the things they do really don’t save energy.”

He also said the expense of building to LEED standards often outweighs the benefits. On smaller projects, he said, “the costs of incorporating those kind of things don’t pay back in your lifetime.”

He seemed eager to resume another fight when the conversation turned to Millennium Park, whose new neighbors include the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing, designed by Piano and opened last year largely to acclaim.

Gehry recalled daring Piano to relocate the addition so it would directly face Millennium Park and the Pritzker Pavilion. “Renzo, come get me, baby,” Gehry said he told him. Piano did move the annex, which is now linked by a pedestrian bridge to the park. So how do you think it turned out? Pritzker asked.

Gehry replied that from inside the Modern Wing galleries, visitors can’t help but see the stainless-steel ribbons that adorn his pavilion. “He’s gotten better,” he faint-praised Piano, again to laughter. “You know the sibling rivalry between architects. We love each other, but we’re insanely competitive. Even at 81, I still do it. I can’t help myself.”

He suggested that something bold, like his Bilbao museum, would have been a better. But he said right after that building opened, the world’s top museum directors got together in London and, according to a friend who was there, voted never to commission another like it. “I think museum curators and directors like the predictable, so it’s all easy,” Gehry said. “A little bit of laziness, maybe.”

Pritzker recalled being a family vacation with Gehry in India and watched him sketch plans for a new building. Pritzker said the drawings looked like “scribbling.” Gehry said there’s more to building design than that, though he confessed: “I’ve always wanted to figure out to just do the sketch, get paid, and get out of there.”

He said his first step is to build a site model of roughly 10 blocks around the site, to see how his new building night fit in. Then he does a bigger-scale model of two or three blocks. He also walks around the area to understand the community. “It’s a pretty well-informed mind that starts to sketch,” he said. “I maybe do 20 or 30 of these drawings that look like scribbles. But when the buildings are finished and you look at the drawings, a lot of them look like the buildings.”

Gehry said he’s kept these sketches over his career and now has a file cabinet with perhaps 4,000 drawings. I’m sure even one of those stick-in-the-mud museum curators would love to put them on display.