It has been interesting watching the advance of the green movement in the architecture, engineering and construction industry over the last 20 years. I remember attending conferences in the early ’90s when we heard panelists admit that the technology was then available to build net zero buildings. However, there was little demand for it and few buildings were completed.
Since that time, though, the AEC community has adopted green technologies wholesale, and building owners and developers have begun to demand these attributes in their buildings. All of that is good. The bad side is that many claim they are building green-but not really. We are still inundated with green washing and claims from all sorts of industries, suppliers, groups, associations and others who say their product, service, methodology is green-but not really.
I blame the word. “Green.” It’s too wishy-washy. While it has a poetic nuance that captures people’s attention, what we really want is something measurable. Green allows people to pretend they’re serious without actually having to prove it. Unless you hire an outside firm to measure the success of your product, project or process, you are just making an unsubstantiated claim.
Sticking with green also allows us to remain wishy-washy about what our true objectives are. As Peter Drucker, father of the management by objective philosophy famously said, “What gets measured, gets done.” Well, you can’t measure green.
You can measure performance. And isn’t that really what we want from our buildings? We want them to perform to certain criteria that we can measure. Energy consumption. Occupant comfort. Productivity. Greenhouse gas reductions. All of these objectives
(which are all green, by the way) can be measured and are performance aspects of a building.
I think this is especially important for the metal construction industry. We are in competition with concrete and brick and plastic and a huge variety of building products made from other materials. If you listen, you can hear all of those other industries making claims about the green nature of their products. It’s like a constant murmuring in the AEC community.
But if metal starts talking about how it performs, how it lasts longer than other materials. How it is made with higher recycled content. How it can reduce energy consumption. If we talk about how it performs as a building material, we can also talk about how it performs aesthetically. There is little about aesthetics that speaks to green, but there sure is a lot to talk about in the performance venue.
Using performance as our mantra gives us the benefit of having measurable, objective results that we can demonstrate and are easily provable. It changes the discussion to a more modern, objective-oriented sensibility. And it rids us of the curse of greenwashing, which undermines everything we want to accomplish in the AEC community.
It’s time to get serious. It’s time to talk performance.
