LONG LIFE, LOOSE FIT

As well as conserving nature and energy, green design is concerned with conserving old buildings, and with new buildings that lend themselves to being conserved. There are several reasons for this, including not wasting the embodied energy in the building fabric and increasing the financial returns on the initial investment. Designing such buildings forces architects to think long term about the legacy to future generations, and to transcend the utilitarian and the fashionable to consider how to make buildings that will always be valued, that people will identify with and wish to reuse and conserve. Many historic buildings are proving more adaptable to reuse than buildings from the recent past. This is because the older buildings were not built to minimal space standards and ceiling heights; and they avoided the debilitating extremes of either being tightly tailored to function and the mechanical equipment that serviced them, or of being without character so as to be totally flexible. In today's parlance, they are long life, loose fit. They were also built with materials that lasted and even improved visually and in tactility with age. Green buildings should be long life, loose fit: generously accommodating and generic in organization so as to adapt to, yet set a dignifying framework for, change over the generations; hospitable and socially convivial rather than merely utilitarian; pleasant in character and relatively timeless rather than saddled with gratuitous gestures that quickly become passe. And they would be made largely with robust materials that mellowed with age and weathering, as generally do those with low embodied energy and from replenishable sources, or those that are virtually inexhaustible.

Buildings: Cotton Tree Pilot Housing, Gotz Headquarters, Hall 26, Mont Cenis Training Center, Slateford Green, University of Nottingham Jubilee Campus