The Greening of America's Building Codes: Promises and Paradoxes

By Aleksandra Jaeschke

Environmental disasters and severe weather due to climate change, both triggered by human actions, have had an increasingly direct impact on our homes. But the way in which America builds its homes is part of the problem. This deeply researched history of sustainable design standards in building codes explores how public policy, standard-setting trade associations, and financial incentives influence the ways in which the construction of our homes impacts the environment.

The Greening of America's Building Codes investigates the regulations and economic incentives meant to control the environmental impact of contemporary construction practices as it analyzes the history of residential building codes. The book exposes how the socioeconomic and political forces that influenced early building code development continue to define the character of current building codes and, by extension, determine how we regulate environmental impact and define sustainability today.

More relevant than ever, The Greening of America's Building Codes is a valuable tool for architects, architecture students, builders, real estate developers, and homeowners who want to understand how public policy and their own day-to-day decisions impact the environment.
 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781648962103

Aleksandra Jaeschke

Aleksandra Jaeschke is an architect and assistant professor of architecture and sustainable design at The University of Texas at Austin. Born in Poland, she earned a doctoral degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) and an AA Diploma from the Architectural Association in London. Jaeschke is the GSD's 2019 Wheelwright Prize winner.

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Cover: The Greening of America’s Building Codes, Promises and Paradoxes by Aleksandra JaeschkeLogo: Princeton Architectcural Press LLC

CONTENTS

A Timeline of Legislation with Related Events

Preface

Introduction

1. The Greening of America’s House: Competing Agendas

2. Green Building Standards: Promises and Paradoxes

3. Beneath the Green Surface: Means and Methods

4. Predesign: Rethinking the Boundaries of Spatial Practice

PART ONE – AGENDAS

Chapter 1. From Welfare and Safety to Ecology: Before the 1970s

1.1. Standardizing Human Welfare: Before the 1920s

1.2. Building the Real-Estate Market: 1920s

1.3. Growing out of the Depression: 1930s–1945

1.4. Prospering by Expansion: 1945–1950s

1.5. Normalizing Environmental Welfare: 1960s

Chapter 2. Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development: 1970s–1980s

2.1. Regulating Environmental Degradation: 1970s

2.2. Aligning Sustainability with Global Economic Expansion: 1980s

Chapter 3. Green Economy and Green Building Standards: 1990s–Present

3.1. Greening the Markets: 1990s–mid-2000s

3.2. Offsetting Speculation with Green Standards: Mid-2000s–2010s

PART TWO – MEANS AND METHODS

Chapter 4. The Logics behind Green Technologies and Financial Incentives

4.1. Why These Artifacts and Techniques? Critiques

4.2. Persuade or Coerce? Questions

4.3. Incentivizing the Green Market. Solutions

4.4. Artifacts Versus Plants. Paradoxes

Chapter 5. The Structure and Form of Regulations

5.1. Who Protects the Environment? Focus: Materials

5.2. Where Are the Rule Makers? Focus: Water

5.3. Why Continue Stacking? Focus: Air

5.4. What About Agency? Focus: Vegetation

Chapter 6. The Power of Predesign in Four Conversations

6.1. Standardizing the Nonstandard Focus: Straw-bale Construction In Conversation with Martin Hammer

6.2. Normalizing the Alternatives Focus: Waterless Toilet In Conversation with Mathew Lippincott

6.3. Coding the Uncertain Focus: Environmental Simulation Software In Conversation with Michael Bruse

6.4. Certifying the Living Focus: Live Moss Panel In Conversation with Al Benner

Conclusion

1. Plotting the Regulatory Circuits: From Ideas to Standards

2. Recircuiting the Code Landscape: Topics for Predesign Research

3. Breaking the Green Circuit Open: Sustainable Morality versus Ecological Consciousness

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

To my parents, who taught me how to live well without calling it wellness, how to stay fit without calling it fitness, how to sustain life without calling it sustainability.

PREFACE

This book is an attempt to think through a problem commonly ignored by architects advancing design from within academia. When I rejoined these circles after several years of running a small architectural practice to embark on a doctoral research project at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I was struck by the fact that most design-driven conversations that addressed the ecological question focused on either developing new technologies or improving parametrically driven computational design techniques. Yet while we talked about constraint-driven design techniques, almost no attention was being paid to a constraint that—next to finance—imposes a major limitation on professional practice and, by consequence, environmentally driven design. There was an elephant in the room; no one was interested in building regulations and construction standards that constitute an integral part of what I refer to as the predesign phase of construction.

As I started to analyze how building codes responded to environmental concerns, I became more and more aware of the fact that recent green-building-code overlays were only the tip of an iceberg that would prove much harder to green. Rather than assessing how well new parts of the code were regulating the environmental impact of construction (or figuring out how to bring the existence of the predesign phase to the attention of environmentally minded researcher-designers), I became concerned with understanding why building codes could not do what was promised by the green overlays. I focused on the forces that shaped the regulatory circuit and on its inner logics—the internal architecture and verbiage—forces that I intuitively sensed still inform the regulatory landscape and logics that continue to determine architecture’s relationship with the environment to this day.

I am neither a historian nor a building-code expert, so the task was intimidating and risky. Nonetheless, I decided to embrace the beginner’s mindset, hoping that the fresh eye would help me make meaningful observations that would compensate for possible errors due to lack of expertise. I obviously strived for accuracy, but this book is not an objective account. It is a story meant to trigger thinking rather than provide answers. While the analyzed facts—all listed in the included timeline—span a period from the mid-nineteenth century when the first building codes appeared in the US to, approximately, the end of the Obama presidency, the analysis gets deeper as construction standards and environmental concerns start to proliferate in the late 1960s. I focused on residential construction and used the California Building Code since, in single-family construction, building regulations are a binding constraint due to mortgage loan requirements and California is the forerunner in environmental regulation. Still, the issues I am concerned with transcend typological and state boundaries. Although I updated the references to the originally analyzed 2016 edition of the code with those from the 2019 edition, unfortunately, this version will also become obsolete once this book has been published. Nonetheless, the issues that I raise are bigger than what is normally addressed during the regular, triennial building-code update. A significant change, if possible, at all, could only be triggered by a comprehensive—structural and linguistic—reform that would require a new political mindset.

In 1970, Charles A. Reich published a volume whose title inspired the title of this book: The Greening of America. Encouraged by the transformative events of 1968, Reich abandoned the original title, The Coming of the Closed Society, to focus on the positive change—reflected in the final title—that he joyfully observed in America’s social landscape.¹ Fifty years later, what we might be witnessing is, unfortunately, a technocratic attempt to green the closed society that came. And yet, to reopen our society, green Band-Aids won’t do it. We need a total recircuiting of mindsets. Obviously, the story I tell in this book—one of the interactions of agendas and programs that inform the regulatory circuits and by consequence shape the built environment—is only a small subregion of a larger closed-minded circuit that determines how we think about and act upon the environment. I almost archived this research, fearful that it would be perceived as a superficial way to think about the ecological question, one that does not get to the very core of the problem, the modern mindset. What made me change my mind was the eye-opening effect that the content of this book had on the students who took the seminar entitled Sustainability: Why This Way, which I teach at the University of Texas at Austin. And so my hope is that it will help others move away from the reductionist approach embedded in the green building standards and codes toward a more holistic ecological posture.

This book is based on the dissertation for which I was awarded the Doctor of Design degree by the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 2018. I started the research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote the dissertation in Los Angeles, and turned it into this book in Austin, Texas, between 2020 and 2021.

My gratitude goes to my doctoral advisors. Iñaki Ábalos, former chair of the Department of Architecture at the GSD, for the freedom he granted me in this research and for his beautiful book The Good Life (2001), which reminded me of why we practice architecture when reading building codes and standards made me doubt it. Antoine Picon, for drawing my attention to crucial arguments at key moments and teaching me how to keep my work up to standard. Jane Hutton, whose then forthcoming book Reciprocal Landscapes (2019) was an inspiration in the early stages of this exploration. Our conversations, which gradually evolved into a friendship, helped me persist in this project.

A special thanks goes to Mohsen Mostafavi, former dean of the GSD, for his continuous support during my education, both at the Architectural Association and at the GSD. I also want to thank other GSD faculty members, among them: Martin Bechthold, former director of the Doctor of Design program, for his guidance during the initial phase of this project; Richard Peiser for helping me understand some of the inner workings of real estate; Pierre Bélanger for having helped me think telescopically and politically about the environment; Kiel Moe for his eye-opening lessons on energy; and Richard T. T. Forman for introducing me to the science of ecology. My immense gratitude goes to Sanford Kwinter for his astounding science of the environment, intellectual generosity, and friendship that continue to inspire my thinking.

In Los Angeles, I wish to thank my colleagues at the Woodbury School of Architecture, where I taught while writing my dissertation, and my friend Liz Falletta, whose appreciation for the real-world dynamics on which architecture depends has been an important inspiration.

In Austin, I wish to thank Dean Michelle Addington at the University of Texas School of Architecture (UTSOA) for her continuous support and Anthony Alofsin for his guidance in the book-proposal-development phase. I am also very grateful to the UTSOA students who participated in my seminar. Their enthusiasm toward the material contained in this book made me persist in this project when new ideas started to occupy my mind.

I also wish to thank Jan Hartman, former senior editor at Princeton Architectural Press, without whom this book would not have been born. Lucas Friedman for offering initial editorial remarks on my dissertation, which provided precious guidance as I embarked on the journey of transforming it into a book. And, of course, Abby Bussel, Holly La Due, and Kristen Hewitt, editors at Princeton Architectural Press, as well as project editor Linda Lee for their patience and editorial support.

My gratitude also goes to those who made the financial burden of this project more bearable: the GSD; the Kosciuszko Foundation, whose fellowship I received in 2014; Fundacja Ivy Poland, together with Inglot Poland, which gave me support in 2016; and the UTSOA for support during the final stages of this venture. This project would not be financially possible without the support from my parents and friends and the hospitality of the Baglioni family. It was in their Los Angeles home that the initial dissertation was written.

Last but not least, I thank my husband, Marcello Baglioni, for his unconditional support and contagious joy for life, which fed me throughout this journey, and my parents and sister for always standing by my side, even when it is unclear where I am heading.

INTRODUCTION

1. The Greening of America’s House: Competing Agendas

Two basic threads inform this story of the greening of America’s building codes. The first one focuses on the regulation of single-family construction; the second is an account of the rise of environmental awareness. Each is told from a number of perspectives: the former explores the agendas of domestic engineers, merchant builders, and realtors; the latter recounts the initiatives inspired by naturalists, informed by scientists, and put into action by environmental activists. My ambition in this book is to understand how these two threads got entangled throughout the twentieth century and how this entanglement was normalized by politicians, optimized by economists, and standardized in the circuits of code makers. Ultimately, the aim is to evaluate the outcome of this entanglement: the green building standards.

To better understand how America’s houses—due to various policies, codes, and standards—assimilated the emerging ecological imperative, it is necessary to answer a chain of questions: 1) which interests informed building standards before they were subjected to the greening process; 2) what kinds of agendas shaped the ecological imperative itself; and 3) what forces captured the ecological imperative to transform them into green building standards? These are addressed in Part One – Agendas. The answer to these questions would remain incomplete if this study was only concerned with the development of ideas, programs, and the directives born from them. Inevitably, it has to pay attention to the geography of rule-making circuits, the structure of the building code, and the regulatory language itself, as, together, they are responsible for how knowledge is articulated, framed, and applied. It must also involve an investigation of economic forces, especially market instruments used to prop up the diffusion of new products. These issues are addressed in Part Two – Means and Methods, where I explore a heterogeneous set of codependent power strategies—an apparatus, in philosopher Michel Foucault’s words—that, among other mechanisms, relies on standards propagated across the circuits of code makers and on financial incentives that support market-preferred technologies to propel the growth of economy.¹ This book is a story of an old apparatus—capitalism’s wicked success depends on its workings—but this time around, due to the urgent need to address the environmental emergency, there is a green twist to it.

The American house has served this apparatus well, and the opportunities to put it to work in favor of economic growth have been many. Today, the reason is to make the house resilient; the palpable consequences of climate change put personal safety and the protection of property again at the center of the general public’s attention.² Mitigation of risk to humans rather than prevention of environmental disaster is again the main concern of code makers. In 2016, the Obama administration launched the first public-private initiative meant to improve community resilience by addressing building codes and standards. Undoubtedly, the term resilience will serve the market as well as the green building standards did when they were first launched. In 2008, when California became the first state in the US to adopt the Green Building Standards Code meant to reduce the environmental impact of construction, the market for green building products was experiencing a boom. When the housing bubble burst in the late 2000s, architects responded to the unsustainability of the housing market by symptomatically embracing technological innovation rather than simple restraint; they endorsed the green prefab.

This reflected the fact that, while in part the effect of a genuine concern for the environment, green construction standards evolved in the 1990s as part of the green economy. They expressed the pragmatic idea of sustainable development and reflected the belief that it is possible to decouple economic productivity from environmental degradation. They did not attempt to correct the increasingly deregulated real-estate market, which considered financial rather than material obsolescence a reason for building more and bigger houses. This tendency was already visible in the 1980s when the need to renew the aging housing stock provided an excuse to build bigger rather than less impactful or more affordable houses.

Similarly, in the previous decade, the passive-solar-design methods failed to compete with off-the-shelf energy-conserving mechanical appliances promoted as a means to improve energy security after the 1973 oil crisis. This was inevitable considering that already in the 1960s, merchant builders focused on delivering quickly and cheaply built rather than custom-designed, climate-responsive, and site-specific houses. During the same period, although passive climate-control strategies attracted unparalleled interest, more market-friendly climate-control solutions were being defined by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, commonly known as ASHRAE.

While the first energy-conservation standards were introduced in the 1970s, similar measures were already contained in the 1958 edition of the Minimum Property Standards for Properties of One or Two Living Units, published by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Adopted before the rise of environmental awareness, however, their rationale was clearly aligned with the economic interests. In fact, these standards embodied almost twenty-five years of efforts to standardize the American house, normalize its cost, and minimize financial risks while promoting economic growth. Already in 1922, Secretary Hoover’s Department of Commerce started to promote uniform and cheap construction methods to increase homeownership among middle-class families, ultimately to reduce workforce instability and secure steady economic activity.

Although the purpose was novel, this, too, was a declination of an earlier project, the one undertaken by the first code makers in the early twentieth century. Their main concern was the basic safety, health, and welfare in tenements occupied by a poor (and highly unstable) workforce. The preoccupations embedded in the century-old triad of terms health, safety, and welfare still resonate in the current use of the term resilience. The difference is that back then, the threat came from industrialization and excessive urban growth; today, it comes from climate change and environmental disasters. It is deeply ingrained in the regulatory landscape for the code makers to be narrowly concerned with human safety and protection of property as opposed to caring more broadly for the natural environment. The ultimate goals remain unchanged: ensure community stability and economic growth or, in modern terms, increase community resilience and economic development.

If it is deeply ingrained in American culture to consider the housing industry as a vehicle for economic growth, it is equally well impressed in the cultural landscape to think about the environment in economic terms. In the early period when the American house was being made safe and healthy, environmental awareness manifested itself in the creation of urban parks, garden cities, and wildlife reserves—initiatives inspired by early environmental preservationists, such as John Muir. Although nature was abundant—as it was thought at the time—the utilitarian attitudes of the conservationists, among them forester and politician Gifford Pinchot, concerned with resource-use efficiency gradually came to the forefront.

At this determinative stage, environmental dynamics were still poorly understood, and, hence, it was impossible to apply scientific management methods to them. Even when regional planning emerged in the 1920s, ecology was still defining its key concepts, and the first impact-assessment methods would not be developed until the 1960s. It wasn’t until the 1970s—and in reaction to the devastating impact of chemical industries as famously exposed by many scientists and activists in the 1960s, among them Rachel Carson in Silent Spring—that Americans witnessed the creation of the first comprehensive federal environmental-protection framework (i.e., the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970).³

It became evident that it was no longer possible to simply set aside green reserves to offset the impact of industrial development and that a more systemic action was required. Various events, conferences, and reports, among them the first Earth Day (1970), the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (1972), and the econometric report The Limits to Growth raised alarm about the state of the planet, but the second wave of environmental legislation (e.g., the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975) was in large part also triggered by the 1973 oil crisis and the threat of energy scarcity.⁴ Unfortunately, the voice of economist Herman Daly, who criticized the excessive focus on relative efficiency and advocated for setting absolute limits for the economy, remained largely ignored.

The Reagan administration brought a drastic revision of US legislation favoring economic growth over environmental protection. Similar attitudes marked the 1980s across the entire Western world, slowly deregulating most of the existing control mechanisms in favor of a free market and private property. The negative effects of this backlash, together with the growing scientific evidence of the global economy’s impact on climate change and a series of major environmental disasters (e.g., Chernobyl) triggered the first wave of intergovernmental actions. The 1987 Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future, published by the United Nations, introduced the concept of sustainable development into global politics, and the issue of emissions reduction was first discussed at the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere held in Toronto in 1988.⁵ The collapse of the Communist Bloc, yet again, pulled international attention toward issues of economic growth and triggered a new wave of expansion of capitalist markets.

Although major climate summits took place during the 1990s, it was free-trade agreements, such as NAFTA, and the entry of China into the World Trade Organization that determined the course of the global dynamics during the next two decades. Climate action suffered heavily from the increasing deregulation of global markets, and attention hypocritically shifted from the impact of global trade to the efficiency of products and sustainability of daily practices. Amid these dynamics, and thanks to an impressive set of regulatory mechanisms, America’s natural and domestic environments continue to work (as source and vehicle) in service of the same—although apparently greener—market.

2. Green Building Standards: Promises and Paradoxes

It is abundantly clear by now—think of all the competing eco-labels—that the notion of sustainability has been hijacked by suppliers of products and services to generate new niche markets. This mechanism is so widely diffused that many free-market economists claim that we can only be sustainable in ways that generate profit. On the global scale, the argument that the way to reduce pollution is to create a market for it resulted in cap-and-trade mechanisms that triggered a wave of lucrative speculation, replacing previous policies that imposed simple limitations on individual polluters.⁶

On a more tangible scale, it created a market for solar panels, eco-cars, low-energy bulbs, and many other green consumer products. Even though mandatory green building regulations carry the risk of social exclusion—homes equipped with more and more green appliances become less and less affordable—as social activist and writer Naomi Klein highlights, Policies based on encouraging people to consume less are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that are about encouraging people to consume green.⁷ As a consequence, economic incentives coupled with mandatory green building standards address the environmental impact (or cost) of individual households in a very limited—if not inadequate—manner, diverting attention away from other, less tangible environmental issues. Also, our commodity-driven culture and long working hours mean that most people do not have the time to engage in voluntary environmental action or even do some gardening, which—if done thoughtfully—can bring environmental benefits.

Market-driven logics promoted by the media and supported by green building standards make an average owner of a McMansion believe that their home is sustainable—that is, it can sustain itself without imperiling the environment—if its daily operations are powered by solar panels and their water flows from an efficient faucet. Unfortunately, this conviction is not simply born of naivete or hypocrisy: a house that consumes less energy due to spatial solutions will not receive a tax write-off, while one that promises to cover predicted consumption with an array of solar panels will. In this context, there is no motivation to adopt environmentally friendly solutions that do not require a purchase, even though residential construction and domestic operations cannot possibly achieve a net-zero impact using solar panels alone.

Perhaps more importantly, the net-zero concept is simply not a valid answer to the ecological question since nothing (at least in our Western society) will result in a net-zero impact if the real system boundaries and all processes—not just energy consumption and carbon emissions—are considered. A result of a strategic manipulation of knowledge in support of the green apparatus, the net-zero quantity is one of the most deceptive market propositions successfully disseminated by the media. Additionally, many environmental issues cannot be quantified and therefore easily accounted for. Also, when the risks do not appear immediate and when the economic benefits of environmental action will surface in a poorly defined future, we lack the tools to address them.

Commonly, alternative solutions that look beyond the narrow system boundaries considered by policy makers are also either not sufficiently advertised or simply not allowed unless by special permission.⁸ While, as discussed in Chapter 6, The Power of Redesign in Four Conversations, to standardize an alternative technology—such as straw-bale construction or composting toilets—can take years of voluntary work, complying with the current green building standards by tweaking the efficiency of existing products is relatively easy, can help increase the sales, and can potentially act as a shield against environmental criticism.

And if criticism arrives, companies can join forces with professionals and citizens to form standard-setting nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to indirectly bend the norms toward their own needs. As philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri observe in Empire: NGOs extend far and wide in the humus of biopower; they are the capillary ends of the contemporary networks of power.⁹ In the absence of governmental measures, many green nonprofit organizations, such as the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), emerged over the last two decades to promote sustainability among architects and builders and eventually develop voluntary green building certification programs, such as USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). The broad spectrum of social groups that support the USGBC offers unique opportunities. Neither directly representing industries and suppliers nor the state, NGOs offer a perfect structure to exert indirect influence. To use psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari’s description, they are best fitted to capture desire and harness it to the profit economy.¹⁰

Industries support NGOs to promote their products, real-estate developers comply with their standards to green their public image, and environmentalists, concerned citizens, teachers, and students turn them into a trustworthy third-party authority. Grassroots alternatives not aligned with the