Shower Heads, Valves Boost University’s Green Mission

the energy load of the building,” he said.

“The bottom line is that it’s all a system, and if you analyze what you have and what you’re trying to achieve, along with new materials and techniques, you have an opportunity to achieve several objectives. It’s always a goal for me as an architect to have one solution solve many different things,” Ennis said.

The fact that buildings grow and change, “provides for a natural and sustainable future,” said Sweet. In addition, “Renovation tends to foster ingenuity from the redesign team, as changes to the building can demand creative solutions. However, it is important to be honest about the realistic timeline on the building’s life. For some buildings, such as a wood-framed apartment building, it may not be appropriate to make those renovation-friendly decisions, as it is unlikely the building will remain for more than 100 years. If creating a commercial building with a more permanent structure of concrete or steel, it could prove beneficial to consider the future when designing entrances and exits, or elevator and stair cores, for example.”

Ennis agrees that buildings evolve. “I always think about the static versus dynamic aspects of any building. I look at the stair and the elevator cores as the static portion, although a lot of people think of them as dynamic because people move up and down them. But to me, those are the static pieces because those are the things that just don’t change,” he said.

“The real challenge that we as an industry have to be aware of is not making a change we regret later,” Ennis said. The demolition of New York City’s Penn Station, (the one designed by McKim, Mead, and White, that is) is one example. At the time of its demise, a decrease in rail travel and related retail seemed to justify the decision.

“Fast forward to today,” Ennis said, “and everyone bemoans the fact we don’t have a really good commuter rail station with decent retail in it. Look at Grand Central with all the retail there but with a very limited number of trains coming in and out. Why can’t we have that at Penn Station? Oops, we did once.”

Miscalculations and successes notwithstanding, “There is never going to be a time when the city is finished,” Ennis said. “There won’t be a time when everybody says, ‘OK, we’re done, let’s go to the next city.’ It’s always going to be evolving and changing.” CBP

Ken’s View

Buildings change—and those that don’t often vanish without a trace. Well, that’s not entirely true. Those that don’t just quickly and quietly cease to exist often refuse to fade away gracefully. A multitude of buildings in the U.S. have been left to decay in silence. Cities can’t afford to tear them down. Some call it demolition by neglect.

Detroit most likely would win, hands down, any tally of the most abandoned buildings in a once-thriving city, but there are plenty of other forsaken buildings, moldering in cities and small towns alike, useful assets for post-apocalyptic zombie movies, perhaps, but for little else.

Photographer Seth Lawless, a pseudonym, lately has been traveling the country documenting abandoned and derelict shopping malls, which he remembers with great nostalgia.

Others wax less nostalgic. Fifty years ago the rise of the shopping malls precipitated the demise of business districts in many small and not-so-small towns. While Lawless is sentimental about the demise of the malls, those who remember going “downtown” may view the collapse of malls with a degree of grim satisfaction.

Malls were, in retrospect, temporary structures thrown up to pander to passing economic and social trends, and now those fads seem destined to follow the course of all trends. Downtowns are gone, presumably forever, and shopping malls are dying. Fifty percent of malls currently operating will close in 10 years, according to a CBS News report. In most cases they won’t be renovated. They aren’t worth it.

Perhaps the dissolution of institutions and the social fabric they represent is a misfortune that might have been avoided by timely renovation. But was that all it would have taken to reverse major economic and social trends? Probably not. It wasn’t in the case of large and small downtowns across the country.

Saving bits of the past and fi nding new uses for them isn’t easy, of course. Many lament the loss of New York City’s Penn Station—the one designed by McKim, Mead, and White, and not the disagreeable underground series of passageways that is today’s Penn Station.

But what should have been done with the old station? Chicago’s Union Station exemplifies just that dilemma; the grand waiting room was spared demolition, but no one waits there much any more. Most of the benches have been removed, and it’s a vast, empty space. The newsstands and restaurants and the people have all gone, stuffed into a couple of basement-like concourses that supplanted the original passenger concourse.

Outside the station one recent afternoon, a sidewalk proselytizer harangued homeward-bound commuters as they boarded escalators to carry them to the lower depths of the station, warning that they were descending into hell. While he may have thought he was referring to some sort of biblical or suburban hell, his prophecy might have been seen as an unintentional reflection on their shoulder-to-shoulder descent to traverse, if not hell, a torment of cinder-block and concrete passageways, before boarding their air-conditioned rides to the wicked suburbs.

A few blocks from Union Station is the former home of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. It was hardly derelict, but its faded and doleful countenance was enough to cause an involuntary shudder in those who notice such things. It now houses a mid-level chain hotel. It’s not magazine architecture—something that’s flashy and photographs well but loses points on function—but, rather, an example of practical re-use and adaptation. Some renovations work better than others.

When it comes to buildings, mistakes can be made, at times permanently. With luck, however, renovation gives architects, contractors, and owners a second opportunity to get it right. Sometimes, the results are even gratifying. — Kenneth W. Betz, Senior Editor, CBP

ˆ DATA CACHE

Connect to the following items through our digital magazine at www.cbpmagazine.com/digital/julaug2014:

Visit the National Trust for Historic Preservation website http://www.preservationnation.org

For more information, including interactive maps and web-based tools displaying key fi ndings from the Older, Smaller, Better report visit www.oldersmallerbetter.org Read tips for Greening Older and Historic Buildings -- http://www.preservationnation.org/ information-center/sustainable-communities/buildings/#.U6h08qgqtUc

Explore State of Place, a data-driven decision-making and community-engagement tool to guide investments, interventions, and policies that boost walkability and economic development. http://www.urbanimprint.com/about/state-of-place/#sthash.g9fkJDwA.dpuf