Thoughts on Creative Destruction + Environmentalism

I'm about halfway through Alan Greenspan's book "The Age of Turbulence." It's quite the incredible read. Throughout the book, he's mentioned "creative destruction," which is the idea that the old will be destroyed to make way for the new. Not being an economist, I've thought of this process in my head as the ebb and flow of capitalism.

There's a fairly provocative quote on creative destruction that directly implicates the future of green building, and well, I'm curious as to what everyone thinks: "Although I am a strong advocate of 'in with the new, out with the old,' I am not an advocate of tearing down the U.S. Capitol and replacing it with a more modern, efficient office building. However no matter what one's depth of feeling is on such issues, to the extent that creative destruction is restrained to preserve icons, some improvement in material standards of living is forgone."

Treehugger advocates a complete ban on the demolition of buildings, citing the loss of embodied energy in demolished buildings. When I hear that, however, images of communist Russia pop up in my head ... it's hard not to think about the aging, dilapidated structures plaguing that country. We all watch TV, we've seen the images.

Similarly, why is it so easy to recycle away that huge trapezoidal Motorola car phone and replace it with the next new thing, whether it's the Blackberry, iPhone, or otherwise. Existing objects have embodied energy, and the thinking goes, why be so quick to throw that away? Is it easier to toss a small object because (a) it's smaller or (b) the benefits of the new technology outweigh the loss of embodied energy in the old (or (c) we want something new)?

Do we agree that people should give up the 1960s gas hog for a new Toyota Prius, or something similar? New cars use less fuel and emit less than cars of the past. We can, and probably should, think of emissions standards as a form of mandated creative destruction. Should we ban new cars, new hybrids, the new Volt, and start overhauling old cars?

So I guess I'm wondering: have we, as environmental advocates, thought through all the ramifications of our positions for the preservation of old buildings and construction of new?

Comments

A complete ban on demolition does not make any sense, especially when there are so many successful deconstruction businesses that can save materials for reuse.

As a counterpoint, Treehugger loves the Cradle to Cradle protocal, which says we can get rid of anything we want, as long as the nutrients are captured for composting or reuse, not landfilled.

I think the comments on demolishing the Capitol indicate where most of the opposition will come from, the field of heritage conservation. I have given a great deal of thought to this, and I think that something very important has been left out.

We fetishize old things, in part because they remind us of a better time. So what were the patterns or characteristics of that better time? What behaviour did the architecture enable that made those times better. The New Urbanists point to the front stoop, and the social interaction it created.
So, let's tear down what can't be retrofitted, reclaim the materials, and rebuild with better patterns enabled by the architecture. What is the front stoop of a high-rise residential tower? How can we facilitate social interaction in that context?

As a last note, one of the winners of CMHC's Net Zero Building Challenge was a WWII bungalow retrofit. So we can retrofit heritage structures to be very energy efficient. I would suggest that if we can't do that, we should tear them down except in VERY rare circumstances. Otherwise, we are entering a period of such energy constraint that they will be impossible to heat anyway.

Posted by: Ruben Anderson | December 03, 2007 at 11:44 AM

It would be great to see this type of ingenuity to be used in San Diego and Lake Tahoe when the rebuild begins following this summers devastating wild fires.

Posted by: Brian LeBars | December 03, 2007 at 09:39 PM