Your attention to the issue of sustainable design is laudable,
yet it omits a player in the green-building movement: historic preservation. Rehabilitating existing buildings is almost always more environmentally efficient than tearing down and building anew. Maintaining and improving historic buildings and the neighborhoods in which they stand allows for the continued use of valuable infrastructure.
McClain has an ally in historian and essayist Adam Goodheart, whose essay "This Old, Organic House" appeared in the same issue of the NYT Magazine. Goodheart, the director of Washington College's Center for the Study of the American Experience, reminds us that "green" building is nothing new:
If by “green architecture” we mean buildings designed to exist in harmony with environmental conditions, to conserve fuel and regulate temperature by “natural” means, then it is easy to forget that this did not begin with the invention of solar panels, photovoltaic cells and LEED certification. Americans have been experimenting, adapting and reshaping their architecture to suit their local environment since the very beginning.
As if any of us here in the Aycock Neighborhood needed reminding.
