The Bay Area is full of a particular breed of conscientious human beings – they vote democrat, worry about Sudan, fret about climate change, eat vegan/organic/free-range, pretend they’re in France whilst consuming vast quantities of wine and cheese, and are always keen to point out how lovely their Apple iBooks are. Naturally therefore, the powers that be at Stanford have also been rightly concerned about not being eco-friendly enough and consequently are presently engaged in demolishing the entire campus to construct new buildings that are ‘smart’ and ‘green’ and ‘clean’ and ‘modern’ and ‘efficient’ and ‘open’ and ‘light’ and quite possibly, though this is still only rumour, also alive.
I’ve been lucky enough to have my research group shifted wholesale to the first such construction, the rather grandly named Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (or as the cool people call it, Y2E2). This is -on paper at least- something of a step up from my current abode – a quaint wooden office (or as T would insist on saying – ‘study area’) within the termite ridden Terman Engineering building.
And yet first impressions of Y2E2 seem uniformly negative for most people. Since this is the prototype for virtually all the new buildings on campus, thats a bit disappointing. Put simply, there are two ways of saving energy. One is to leave out big energy guzzling options such as whole building lighting or space heating/cooling. This is what countries like India mean when they talk about the need for americans to take a long hard look at their lifestyles. (which is not to say thats a particularly helpful position or always economically efficient, but there it is). The other way is to build ‘smart buildings’ that take quantities of technology and money and attempt to have their cake and eat it too. Y2E2 does the latter.
Thus this new building features a design meant to allow sunlight to light the rooms, underground tunnels to increase natural cooling and a roof that opens at night to allow cold air to enter in preparation for next morning. To make all this work though, the walls are made of a rather unattractive translucent plastic (lets in some light but sadly not enough to be much use), half of them don’t reach the ceiling, and the floor is made of unfinished concrete. Carpeting is a strict no-no because of the need to create an appropriate thermal mass for the night cooling system. This leads to the interesting side effect that most conversations are now broadcast down the length of a whole corridor, aided by echoing concrete and incomplete walls, and punctuated by the clip-clop of shoes and heels on said floor. The unfinished concrete has proven particularly unpopular because it also looks quite frightful, remarkably like something out of New Delhi railway station in fact. Its also, I’m told by some faculty, rather hard on the knees. No one’s falling in love with it yet.
This might all be worth it if this actually saves a significant amount of energy. Unfortunately, thats not something anyone knows for sure yet. But I can’t help wondering – as this country tries to get a bit more eco-friendly, might it decide that all the little things – carpets and pretty walls and sandstone exteriors and wood panels are as important as those so called necessities like central cooling and heating. And if they are, well then, perhaps its time to pull out sweaters and room heaters and go easy on penny-wise pound foolish technology.
Update: A month or so into working in Y2E2 and it’s grown on me somewhat. Its not inherently attractive and never will be, but as with most buildings, once people move in and make the rooms more lived in, things improve. Whether a building that costs tens of millions of dollars in order to shave a few percentage points off energy consumption (in many cases, as with the lighting system, the gap between theory and practice will ensure even that does not occur), is the way forward still seems highly debatable though.
