Aleksandra Jaeschke - The Greening of Americas Building Codes: Promises and Paradoxes

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.

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 thatnext to financeimposes 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 logicsthe internal architecture and verbiageforces that I intuitively sensed still inform the regulatory landscape and logics that continue to determine architectures 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 beginners 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 factsall listed in the included timelinespan 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 comprehensivestructural and linguisticreform 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 changereflected in the final titlethat he joyfully observed in Americas social landscape. 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 wont do it. We need a total recircuiting of mindsets. Obviously, the story I tell in this bookone of the interactions of agendas and programs that inform the regulatory circuits and by consequence shape the built environmentis 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.