Perspectives on Built Buildings: Q+A with Larry Strain, FAIA
As Built Buildings Lab celebrates its first-year anniversary, we are recommitting to our mission and reflecting on WHY Built Buildings Lab was created. In this series of posts, Building Buildings Lab’s board members offer their perspectives on why existing buildings matter and what work is needed to fully harness their embodied values.
Q: In your role as an architect, firm leader, and community member, you have been an outspoken advocate for the value of built buildings. Why do existing buildings matter to you?
A: When I first started focusing on reusing existing buildings it was all about carbon emissions. Operating existing buildings are responsible for 28% of global emissions; building new ones accounts for another 11%. Reusing and upgrading existing buildings reduces current operating emissions from existing buildings and allows us to build fewer new buildings, thereby reducing future embodied emissions. But after reading Robin Wall Kimmerer ‘s Braiding Sweetgrass, I began to see the World as a gift. While it is easy to understand the natural world as a gift, it’s harder to see buildings as gifts, but the materials they are made from are gifts from the earth, the skill and craft that went into their construction are gifts from the people who built them. What would change if we treated buildings as gifts? We treat gifts with care; maybe we would start caring for them.
Q: What motivates you to volunteer as a board member with Built Buildings Lab?
A: As a society we are enamored with new shiny things, but intuitively we also know the value of caring for what we already have. The actual benefits of reusing and upgrading existing buildings are under appreciated and under studied. These benefits needs to be revealed, measured and quantified. This is the mission of the Built Buildings Lab.
Q: What is needed to harness the environmental and social role of existing buildings as solutions to global challenges?
A: Existing buildings make up our shared reality. We all live and work in them: they shelter us, keep us warm, protect us and keep us safe, they can be a refuge or an invitation to get together. Buildings make up our neighborhoods and communities and reflect the staggering diversity of the people and cultures who inhabit them. But, they are not owned, cared for, or maintained equally. Everyone deserves safe, affordable, efficient, comfortable, non-polluting buildings. Caring for and improving our existing buildings has the potential to vastly improve the lives of the people who live in them and the health of the planet. The human benefits are at least as important as the environmental benefits.
Image: New climate-responsive cladding on the renovated Edith Green - Wendell Wyatt Federal Building, Larry’s favorite carbon-smart reuse project. Credit: Another Believer, CC BY-SA 3.0
