Liz Dunn
Liz Dunn
Consulting Director
Preservation Green Lab
What is preservation's role in promoting sustainable development?
Sustainability has many facets.
One is reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and our own energy use. Retrofitting – rather than throwing away – viable existing buildings plays a pivotal role in this – one that is not yet well understood by many policy makers or by the general public. Beyond that, sustainability requires that we nurture the development of dense, thriving urban environments that are attractive to people who might otherwise choose to live in the suburbs. Denser urban land use and better co-location of jobs and housing can reduce energy use and emissions, as well as help preserve our rural land.
How is this connected to preservation? Besides creating neighborhood character, the fine urban grain provided by small commercial buildings plays a key role in determining the quality of the local economy that takes root. Older buildings are often much more affordable and attractive to the kind of small, local businesses and cultural organizations that make urban neighborhoods unique. Older buildings can also give cities a key “competitive advantage” over the suburbs in terms of where residents and businesses choose to locate.
What is your personal vision for the Preservation Green Lab?
The role of the Preservation Green Lab is to put real analysis and real case studies to work in demonstrating the connections that I just mentioned.
I see us playing a key role in providing rigorous analysis around the energy, green-house-gas and water-impacts of buildings during their entire lifecycle, as well as helping cities to implement building and energy codes that incentivize outcomes that are consistent with this. We’re not the only ones working on this and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we will collaborate with other agencies around the country.
Sometimes the analysis and solutions will happen at the district level rather than at the individual building level. An example would be inserting a new district-wide heating system to upgrade the energy footprint of an entire collection of older buildings.
However, I believe that all of this needs to be put into the context of land use and transportation planning. I come from a background that combines real estate development with helping to formulate urban policy from the perspective of a community activist. I understand the financial challenges that developers and property owners face, and I’ve worked for a long time on the issue of how to construct both smaller-footprint new development versus adaptive re-use.
What do you hope the Preservation Green Lab will accomplish within its first year? Its first five years?
Given what’s at stake in terms of sustainability, we need to move fast, but on the other hand we need to establish credibility.
Year one will be all about forming research partnerships and working with our pilot cities to launch some key demonstration projects. These projects will be selected on the basis of what lessons and experiences they can provide that can then be applied to other projects around the country.
After five years, I hope the Preservation Green Lab will have assisted many cities in revising their land-use, building and energy codes to reflect the lessons that we will learn, and that we will be supporting property owners around the country with retrofit projects that clearly improve sustainability outcomes for their community.
What lessons do you hope elected officials and local decision-makers will learn from the Preservation Green Lab and its initiatives? What about the general public?
I hope they learn that the reasons for preserving our existing building stock aren’t strictly cultural and sentimental; preservation should be understood as a land-use tool and as an economic tool that can be used to build denser, more attractive cities.
I think the general public gets this at a gut level, perhaps more than the policy-makers and the developers. Fundamentally, what we want policy-makers to learn is that their automatic reaction should be “Why should we throw this building away?” rather than “Why should we keep it?”
Submitted by Larry Menkes at: April 21, 2009
I'm working on an interesting project in Ivyland Borough and Warminster Township, PA that involves a number of historic buildings. We have a late 19th century mill in continuous adaptive use, a unique barn, a 1903 Victorian House, and the world's largest ever dynamic flight simulator at the Johnsville Naval Air Development Center. The two project sites are linked by an existing railroad that could revert to passenger service with minimal work. We are looking at net-zero retrofits for the house, as a starter. Although we plan to pull out al the stops on the Victorian, I've been using my own Warminster home for years as a lab for low cost retrofits. I wonder what opportunities for partnerships you might offer.
Submitted by Toni at: April 15, 2009
How can my organization, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, get involved in the Preservation Green Lab? We're including green sustainability in our restoration/rehabilitation of this historic landmark, a former U.S. Army military base. We would like to partner with the SF branch of the Lab.
Submitted by Anonymous at: April 1, 2009
The E.B. Dunn (I don't think there's a relation?) Historic Garden Trust in North Seattle, a 1914 Olmsted garden has buildings that need restoration, and we're excited to see this new opportunity in our "backyard" too.
Submitted by Roge at: March 25, 2009
A great idea! And here's a follow-up for a demonstration project. The University Heights Center for the Community is a non-profit organization that operates a community center in the historic University Heights School. The Center will acquire the property from the Seattle School District this year and then begin the process of needed repairs, and determining how the building and site should be preserved and enhanced for long-term use. We would love to discuss how the Green Lab could participate.