On Building Codes

NOTE: the absolute necessity of changing the way we design and build most new buildings is obvious to me and the current way building design is controlled by the government's concerned is through various Building Codes. So they will have to be changed. The basic concept behind those changes is equally obvious - both construction and operation of all buildings must consume less energy. As for how that might be achieved, I'm spit-balling here.


Sometime soon, probably in the next ten years, every Building Code in North America will have to be completely re-written. There are two simple reasons for this; one is very simple, the other slightly more complicated.

The first reason is energy consumption. Architecture is very energy intensive. We have been designing buildings for the last 60 or 70 years that are predicated on a circumstance that no longer applies, and hasn't applied in a long time. Concrete and glass buildings made sense when it was cheaper to heat and cool a building than insulate it. This was because we didn't calculate the true cost of heating buildings, just the user cost. Now we know the true cost is much higher - and possibly unimaginable. So building codes will become more prescriptive by necessity. If you are involved in either the building industry or the environmental movement that will be kind of self-evident.

The dominant type of large building in every city, big and small, in North America changed decisively because of the invention of air conditioning. Prior to air conditioning buildings were designed with thick skins and relatively small amounts of glazing - a delicate balance between dark interiors are stifling hot spaces. After air conditioning that balancing act was no longer necessary. Buildings were turned into giant windows with enormous cooling loads. There is almost no subjective difference between a building with relatively small windows and one with floor to ceiling glazing. The only time it really matters is the first time someone walks into the space and gets a chance to say, "I love the view." Then they hang shades over all the glazing to prevent the glare from blinding everyone. But the cooling load isn't changed by the shades.

So one very simple way to make buildings many times more energy efficient than they are currently is to start designing them like architects did in the 1930s. More articulated plans (the "T" and "H" plans being very effective), thicker walls off materials like stone and brick, and much smaller windows (preferably operable).

The second reason is the current structure or ideology of building codes. Pretty much every building code in the world is based on the lowest allowable standard. When people talk about something being "not up to code" it can sound like a bureaucratic complaint. Really, it's a pretty stunning indictment since the code defines the absolute lowest quality a building can be and still be legal. There are a lot of auxiliary guides (recommended practices and so on) that set a higher standard but they are strictly optional from a legal perspective. A client can demand a building that conforms to best practices but the legal authorities can only demand code compliance. This makes sense in a stupid kind of way. The law defines only what is legal and illegal. It does not define proper and improper or even good and bad. So less than the given standard is illegal but the standard is not necessarily typical or desirable.

Building codes have to address buildings as complete wholes and not address the isolated components within them. For instance, it isn't enough to specify the minimum R-value for a wall assembly and a roof assembly and so on. The total energy consumption of the entire building should be calculated in life-cycle cost and regulated based on a combination of volume, life span, and program. The problem with making this kind of measurement the basis of a legal code is no one has, to the best of my knowledge, created an acceptable measure for life-cycle costing. It is a measure that is surprisingly tricky. Take aluminum. It requires a massive amount of energy to get aluminum from the ground into a building but, once that energy has been spent, it requires surprisingly little energy to recycle the stuff. Steel is much cheaper (in terms of energy) to get from the ground to the building site but recycling it is surprisingly inefficient - the only net change is the energy spent getting it out of the ground.

I can imagine a set of codes devoted to energy budgeting. A certain type of building of a certain size is allowed a maximum amount of energy - one number for construction and another for yearly consumption. If you want to use more than that, you have to generate your own. It's not really difficult to make a building that generates its own power - we had many different ways of doing it prior to the invention of the electric turbine and we have even more now. You can choose the relatively simple (sticking solar panels on the roof) or the fairly expensive (like ground source heating and cooling) or relatively complex (check out this building by Baumschlager and Eberle) The point, to me, is we know how to make these. It isn't rocket science. It is a set of components and procedures that requires nothing more than a small additional expense during the design and construction phases and which, if we built every building as efficient as this example, would have an enormous effect on our net energy use.

Of course that energy would just be used some place else and the planet is still going to overheat on schedule and force the human race into a condition not unlike that portrayed in The Road Warrior or The Walking Dead. Shit, did I type that? I was trying to be constructive for once and write something that was only moderately bitchy but it just kind of slipped out.