Four decades of green design

Passive design—or design that takes advantage of the climate to maintain a comfortable temperature range—has been used to heat and cool living spaces throughout human history, but the practice saw a strong groundswell among architects in the United States in the 1970s.

The 1973 oil embargo, sweeping policy overhauls like the Clean Water Act, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency all contributed to the conviction of a small group of passionate and environmentally conscious architects that they needed to design differently. These architects saw it as an essential task to revive practices that could heat and cool buildings without relying on the energy-intensive mechanical systems introduced in the decades prior. In the process, much of the sustainability discourse present in the architectural profession today began to take shape.

With climate change conversations becoming increasingly urgent, sustainability has shifted from a nascent movement to a major focus. We talked to four architects—two who started their careers working on passive residential projects in the 1970s, and two leading sustainability initiatives at larger firms today—about how they use passive design techniques, how a drive for designing low-energy buildings informs their practice, and what sustainability means to them.

David Wright, Owner, David Wright, Architect, Grass Valley, Calif.

David Wright is a pioneer in the field of passive solar design, a practice he still continues today. He is also the author of The Passive Solar Primer: Sustainable Architecture (Schiffer Publishing, 2008).

I graduated from CalPoly [California State Polytechnic University] in 1964, and there was not a lot of concern for energy conservation in the early ’60s. I joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Tunisia, and one of the projects I worked on was a 60-unit affordable housing design for police, schoolteachers, and nurses—people who couldn’t necessarily afford “good” housing. I had learned several things about some of the traditional architecture in North Africa, which used natural conditioning features—orienting the buildings properly to let in sunlight in the wintertime, and allowing breezes off the Mediterranean to cool them in the summertime. Lo and behold, the buildings worked to naturally heat and cool themselves.

I finished my stint there and was reassigned to Guinea, in tropical West Africa. My job was to design and build an agricultural junior college, 300 kilometers up in the jungle. There, I was designing for a whole different climate. I looked at traditional ways of keeping the rainfall out, making sure the breeze could blow through, and generally adapting the buildings to the climate zone.

When I came back to the U.S. and became licensed, I moved to New Mexico because I was enamored with the idea of using natural materials like adobe. I analyzed the performance characteristics of traditional adobes in conjunction with more modern materials, and with—by then—a very strong understanding of physics and the laws of nature, started developing what became known as passive solar techniques.

It was fascinating to evolve new ways of space-conditioning buildings, and when the 1973 oil crisis occurred, we went from what I call the “lunatic fringe”—people out there in New Mexico trying to figure stuff out—to what I call “lunatic center.” All of the magazines, all of the newspapers, and all of the people writing books showed up to check out what was going on.

From then on, everything we did was an evolution. I got away from adobe and into super-insulated and earth-integrated buildings, especially in Oklahoma and Minnesota—but with heavy insulation and thermal mass, using all of the principals of passive solar. At the time, my staff and I all thought, “We’re going to revolutionize architecture here because we’re going to create buildings that are functionally formed in response to the climate, and that will become a methodology for architects all over the world to start developing their own microclimate regional-style buildings.”

It’s still totally fascinating to me as an [older] architect. I’m amazed at how the code [has] changed and how, today, the things that I and a couple of other guys [were talking about] in the 1970s are actually in the code now, especially in California—you have to pay attention to passive solar effects on a building, even with big buildings like the Federal Building in San Francisco.

I think, personally, passive solar–designed buildings are both very energy efficient and generally healthier architecture, buildings that are actually more comfortable because they’re responding to their local climate.

Dennis R. Holloway, Owner, Dennis R. Holloway, Architect, Rio Rancho, N.M.

Dennis R. Holloway, an architect and professor of architecture, directed development of the University of Minnesota Ouroboros Solar House in 1973, a pioneering alternative energy project.

In the late ’60s and ’70s, all of us were environmentalists. We knew about the problems with industrialization and the use of fossil fuels. When that first oil embargo became a reality, I thought, “This country needs to be independent [from fossil fuels]. And while we’re at it, why don’t we start thinking about alternative sources of energy?”

In 1973, [things were] really starting to look critical. There wasn’t enough gasoline, and you had to wait in line. I was teaching at the University of Minnesota, and that really made me think, “Let’s do something in the classroom.” Because education has to be the beginning of this change.

I was teaching a large class of freshmen, about 150 students, about environmental design, and a big part of that was the energy focus of the country. So in 1973, I started a threeyear project where we were going to design a house. These were freshman students who had never designed before. It was going to be off the grid. It was a really exciting time. Using the energy of freshman students who don’t have a preconception about what architecture is made for really great potential. The whole class came up with a startling design proposal for a house that was off the grid, supported by active and passive solar systems, thermal mass storage, and more.

Between term breaks, I raised some money from the local electric company and leveraged the natural gas company to also match that grant—so we had $20,000 to start with. And then I used that to leverage building materials. And so, in the next trimester, we were actually constructing a house with 150 students who had not had construction experience before. We organized the work like a community. We were just going out there, and we knew what we were doing was correct. We knew that this would mean something. It was new students, all this energy, and a new problem—a new paradigm.

I’ve designed about 80 solar houses. My favorite was designed in 1979 in Boulder, Colo.; it’s a fantastic solar house and is independent of fossil fuels. The National Solar Institute gives you about six or seven rules of thumb [for passive solar design], and I’ve used those now in almost every kind of building, from institutional to residential. You can, with high thermal mass and glazing facing south, make architecture that doesn’t need fossil fuel for heating and cooling.

We used to talk about the user’s desires back in the ’70s—“user” was a new word. It was different from the client; the user was more generic. What do people need as humans? That seems to have been forgotten in the last 20 years.

Helena Zambrano, AIA, Sustainability Director, Overland Partners, San Antonio

Helena Zambrano established the sustainability vision for Overland Partners and manages the sustainability group there. She is a member of AIA’s Committee on the Environment (COTE).

I studied in Mexico at the University of Monterrey. It’s a small campus at the base of the mountains, elevated from the rest of the city. When I started, classrooms didn’t have air conditioning, but the buildings were arranged to catch the breezes from the mountains. They were very comfortable buildings, just by using passive strategies.

As the campus grew, the new buildings were blocking the buildings in the core. At that point, they introduced air conditioning. But that raised my awareness of the design of the built environment.

After graduation, I decided to focus my education on sustainable design with a master’s in environmental building design from the University of Pennsylvania. I learned building performance simulation, energy modeling, daylight modeling, and computational fluid dynamics.

Daylighting is one of my favorite parts of architecture because it’s really important for environmental design. Daylighting is one of the cheapest strategies that have the biggest impact on health and happiness. It’s also beautiful. It’s something that you can design—it’s different than energy efficiency in that sense.

In the daylighting design process, as well as in environmental design, I like to start by looking at the available resources on-site. How can the architecture leverage those environmental resources? Environmental loads should be addressed through architectural elements and passive strategies, rather than relying on mechanical systems.

After figuring out the right strategies and conceptual design through climate and site analyses, I use metrics to optimize design. For daylighting, daylight availability is a metric that allows me to test the overall annual performance. However, daylighting design is dynamic in nature, and point-in-time illuminance is a metric that helps me understand the seasonal performance of different design elements. Both daylight autonomy and point-intime illuminance map the available direct and indirect light falling on an analysis grid from a light source, in this case, the sun.

Finally, post-occupancy evaluations (POE) are critical to evaluate our design assumptions, optimize operational issues and learn about occupant satisfaction of the space. POEs allow us to document lessons learned and apply those lessons in our next building.

Arathi Gowda, AIA, Associate Director, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Chicago

Arathi Gowda is an associate director at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and a member of AIA’s Committee on the Environment (COTE).

During my career, sustainability went from a “nice to have” to an imperative. We have reached a limit to our resources, and while that presents challenges, it motivates a necessary revolution which will let us fundamentally reposition our entire economy.

Environmentalists and many of my mentors were fighting the good fight in the ’70s and ’80s, when it just seemed like a world of plenty. I’m thankful for the early leadership from many, many people in the environmentalist movement who said, “Hey, we need to plan for the future.”

I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2002, and even at that time there was a dialogue around sustainability. There was a cohort of professors who studied in Germany and taught a return to passive design techniques that architects historically practiced, but lost with the advent of technical solutions like air conditioning. To design more passively, we need to understand things like sun, wind, and light.

As a young architect, one of the first people I worked with in Chicago was Howard Alan. He was an early leader in passive design, and he was talking about renewable [energy] when people were slamming the door in his face. There was a moment in the late ’70s when oil and gas prices spiked, where people were listening. He paved the way for what we are seeing today.

I’m a leader of our performance team at SOM, and we use a lot of analytical simulation, paired with our MEP [mechanical, electrical, and plumbing] team. My team is half engineers and half architects, and I think that’s really important for the group because with the complex buildings we work on, often a technical solution builds on top of a design technique.

I started my career almost 17 years ago [at SOM], a firm that has always been a champion of sustainable design thinking. What was once a passive discussion is now an active one; our collective priorities and goals have changed.

Our clients want sustainability. Without question, it must be present in our work. The sustainable revolution is very exciting, despite the eco-anxiety that I and others focused on sustainability feel. We must stay focused, use what we know, and champion the solutions we’ve developed. Luckily for us, there is a groundswell of support.

This story was originally published in the December 2019 issue of ARCHITECT magazine.