Of Living Buildings

Moss and grass.  Two plant species, simple, and just a stone's throw from one another.  Here is where this story begins.  Or perhaps one should say here is where this story "lives."  Beginning implies a start, and the reality is quite different.  This is more like a chapter in a book, or, better yet, the opening of a flower, coddled in sun, seed, and water and nurtured through the mysterious processes of photosynthesis and evolution.  It is part of a whole, a history with threads that, if one had the patience and imagination, could be traced through eons of chromosomes, climate, wind, and dirt.  The opening of a flower is an event, though not a discrete one.  The story extends backward and forward along that convention we call time, from the dawn of creation to some distant, unrevealed, and hopeful destiny.  

Looking at Earth from an astronaut's perch, on the eastern edge of North America and southeast of the undulating braids of the Appalachian Range, is the bluegreen, spiny, crab claw we call Chesapeake Bay.  The lower pincer is the outfall of the great Potomac River, which starts as a docile and innocent newborn, then rapidly grows into a wild, freefalling toddler sandwiched between the igneous walls on which it cuts its teeth, and ends as a wise old grandfather in a broad and verdant valley patiently planed over millennia.  Somewhere around late middle age, the adolescent rebellion of Piscataway Creek changes the old man's life and pushes him west.  

Here is Mockley Point, a kind of tiny Cape Cod turned the wrong way where anything-but-solid land has yielded to their conflict. 

For ten thousand years aboriginal peoples have lived on this spot.  Once decorated with palisades and wigwams, the scent of their lives still stirs the air.  Lurking beneath the rich loam, arrowheads, stone tools, potsherds, and ossuaries can be turned up with a casual toe.  There is magic in the place.  The confluence and the landscape combined create an environment that proved better than most for the provision of food, transport, raw materials for tools, and the intangibles of space that draw human beings together in community.  Even today an observer armed with quiet and patience can meet bald eagles, beaver, deer, fox, osprey, and a vast assortment of smaller creatures on a casual walk.  Perhaps, too, the benevolent power and sheer beauty of the hills and forests guarding this alluvial plain beckoned those ancient peoples to build in their shadow.   

Perched here - on the Maryland side - is a breathtaking 330 acre slice carved out of the 9 million acres of dry land drained by the great river and its offspring.   Opposite - on the Virginia side a broad mile away - lies Mt. Vernon, family home of George Washington, who once wrote that "No estate in the United America is more pleasantly situated than this."  The viewshed from his home is now protected, preserving this place in time so that anyone standing where he was so inspired might see it just as he did.  Looking due north from Mockley Point, a scant ten miles upriver, the monolith bearing his name and marking the epicenter of global power stands out bright and pointed on a clear day.

The place is called Hard Bargain Farm.  It's a name that conjures up a story, but the specifics are unfortunately lost to history.  Like its prestigious cousin on the other shore, it was once farmed by slaves.  A tobacco barn and corn cribs that survived the war which freed them still grace its landscape with eloquent simplicity.   And cows (both meat and dairy), pigs, goats, chickens, and barn cats are all in permanent residence.  But for all its bucolic beauty, by the dawn of the last century Hard Bargain Farm had become a hard scrabble place.  It was probably the tobacco that did it in, suckling on the bounty of the sun stored in eon-inches of humus and turning it into gold and sputum.  This favored home of generations of Algonquians was in the last throws of an ignominious demise.   Then, in 1922, the farm was discovered and saved by Alice Ferguson and her husband, Henry.

By all accounts, Alice was a woman of remarkable complexity and depth.   An evocative artist, amateur archeologist, lover of nature, and shaman for a local community of thinkers, she discovered this then-forgotten homestead in her search for a retreat from the frenetic and perplexing pace of DC life.  Like the native peoples who preceded her, her spirit still permeates the place.  It can be felt most strongly in the white clapboard farmhouse she built on the summit of the great hill that stands guard over the Jeffersonian landscape of the farm.  Upon her death in 1951, Henry felt the need to memorialize Alice's remarkable character and spirit by finding a way to share their magical place with others, and, in 1954 along with a handful of long time friends, he established the Alice Ferguson Foundation to own and operate Hard Bargain Farm. 

AFF's primary mission is environmental education of a special kind.  Their core programs are delivered on the farm, and they focus on nature starved children, many of whom have never ventured out of our urban landscapes.  These are children weaned on asphalt and blight, who are often struck dumb with fear when they witness the alien landscape of the farm through the windows of their yellow school bus.  During their visits to the farm, the staff of AFF ever so gently salves their fears and nurtures in them a nascent love affair with the wild world of living things.   After half a century of such visits, there is now a small army of adult residents peppered about metropolitan Washington who can trace the root of their environmental ethic to their first experience of Hard Bargain Farm. 

In the years that followed Henry's gift, the programs expanded and so did the facilities used to deliver them.   Overnight students were once lodged in the cow barn…with the cows… which proved effective but problematic.  So, in 1975, the Foundation constructed Wareham Lodge to house the kids and provide classroom space during inclement weather.   (The farm is the classroom otherwise).  For reasons unknown, the builders of Wareham Lodge chose to site their new building on the face of a heavily wooded, north facing slope.  It is a beautiful site, but a cruel place to put a building that wasn't designed to cope with its wet and shaded microclimate.

And so, we come to where this story "lives."   Wareham Lodge slowly deteriorated and the Foundation's programs grew to include multiple, simultaneous school groups and the teaching of the teachers who taught the children.  And so grew their need for new and larger facilities.   

It was early in 2006 that the Foundation set about the job of searching out people to replace Wareham Lodge and build a new day use education building.   Because of their mission, AFF thought it would be a good idea to make these environmentally friendly facilities, and so they chose a team of people who understood how to do such a thing.  And in the chill brace of November that year, our team brought the community of stakeholders around the project together for a four day design charrette.

The farm was both the setting for our charrette and the fertile ground where these buildings would take root.  The participants - who included designers of every ilk, staff and board, community members and content experts - descended on the farm one Sunday morning like a swarm of industrious bees buzzing with impatience from being held back too long from their work.  That energy had started to build in the moist heat of summer when we began the deliberate labor of sussing out the aspirations and goals for our work, and developing a deep understanding of the place and its people.

I started my career in the building industry by accident - or so I thought for many years.  I was born a seeker, made hungry to seek by parents who were seekers.  As a young man, I played this out by spending lots of time with many different groups who proposed to have answers for people like me.  I frequented meetings and monasteries of various persuasions, and when I went to college I chose majors in both physics and philosophy, thinking that between the two I'd discover something useful that would help satisfy that hunger. 

It was during this time in my life that I experienced my first encounters of that unique human experience that we call "insight."  I want to share two of those incidents with you that stand out above all others because they laid early stones in a foundation of understanding that I would start building later in my life.

The first occurred as I walked across the campus of St. Norbert's College in De Pere, Wisconsin one sunny afternoon watching nothing in particular but my feet.  At one point my gaze rested on a crack in the sidewalk in front of me that had been caused by the root of a large tree growing beneath it.  For some reason at that moment that crack jumped up and grabbed me, and I was instantly overwhelmed with a sense of awe that it existed.  As I raised my eyes and looked around me the sense of awe extended to include everything that I could see and I wondered why anything existed at all.   From then on the world became a different place for me.   That moment has stayed with me for 33 years, sometimes deeply subdued, but always there. 

The second incident occurred a year later when I was reading a book by the French paleontogist and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin, called The Devine Milieu.   Sitting with the book on my lap, I raised my head to digest an idea he had just presented, and looking out of my apartment window at the colorful cacophony of early spring, I had a flash of incredible clarity about the connectedness of everything and the irrepressible movement of evolution and our place in it.  That insight also stuck with me and is exquisitely relevant to this story.

A few years later, confronted with the reality of making a living, I stumbled into the development and construction industry, and those insights were put on the shelf for a time.   I was good at building things.  I enjoyed it.  And I quickly learned how to make money at it, which kept me gainfully employed and supplied me with interesting new challenges for twenty years.  Then one day I woke up with the realization that I was working just to make money, and I looked around at the consequences of my choices.

It was during an early October workshop that brought AFF staff and board together to share their aspirations that the idea of Living Buildings erupted.  As we sat in the living room of Alice's house looking out across the first blush of autumn to the great river marching through the fields below, first one voice, and then another, and then every voice present sang out that nothing else was possible.   This was a place to breed stewards of the future, and these buildings needed to embrace that future as only the idea of Living Buildings could.  The realization washed over the group in a great synchronized wave.  Sitting in stunned silence as the reality of what we were about to undertake took root in our hearts, questions sprouted like spring hay:  "How would we define success, and how would others define it?"  "Exactly what is a Living Building?"

Does it run on sunlight?

Does it bank on diversity?

Does it recycle everything?

Does it reward cooperation?

Does it curb excess by design?

Does it tap the power of limits?

Does it change with the time of day and seasons?

Does it connect to, rather than disrupt the web of life?

Does it embrace the four ancient elements?

Does it patina rather than degrade?

Is it able to adapt and evolve?

Is it Beautiful?

These questions became the rich fertilizer for the field of potential we would plow with our charrette.   

A decade ago I read a book by E. O. Wilson called Consilience.  Wilson, a biologist and professor emeritus at Harvard, is renowned in the world of science for his work with insects, particularly ants.  More recently, he has become a hero to all of us who care about the future.  He is also as close to a Renaissance man as I think you can get in our complex world.  Consilience, which means "coming together," "coherence," or "convergence" is an incredible journey through the history of western thought that illustrates how all branches of knowledge - the sciences, the humanities, even the arts -are being drawn together into a unified field of understanding through the very reductionist methodology that split them apart in the first place. 

Since the time of Plato, perhaps before, those of us who are part of this heritage of "western" thought have tried to understand the world by breaking it down into pieces… like trying to understand how a watch works by taking it apart and examining each of its gears, screws and springs in isolation. The weaknesses of this approach seem obvious.  It ignores the larger whole; it doesn't explore the relationships between those pieces.   On the other hand, in "eastern" thought, the focus has been almost entirely on the relationships between things, often with no regard for the individual pieces.  The reality is that the pieces together are an expression of creativity manifest through their relationships.  Scientists and philosophers in the vanguard of today's thought are now seeing that this is the case for all of existence and beginning to give us a glimmer of understanding. 

Every charrette is unique.   A character evolves out of the core problems that need to be solved.   Sometimes those problems are physical challenges, sometimes they are programmatic, sometimes they are people, and often they are all three.  Usually, these idiosyncrasies emerge in the first few hours of work, and the charrette at Hard Bargain Farm was no exception.   

Almost immediately, it became evident that the core problem was how and where to use the land - and for good reasons.   That scenic easement, which protected old George's view, created an invisible boundary that could not be violated.   The rich open vistas and unspoiled landscapes are precious to the people who love, and live on and around the Farm.   The environmental ethic of many at the table clamored for building only on already degraded sites.   And the challenge of Living Buildings demanded that we do everything possible to wring everything possible out of every available resource… particularly the sun.

We began with the familiar iterative cycle of breaking down the problem and attacking it in small teams and then coming together to share our solutions and elevate the best ideas.  Like skimming the cream off milk, those good ideas would become the rich feedstock for the next round of design.  Each team was assigned a lens to focus their work.  Often competing with each other, these filters would help us understand where and how to build.  By the morning of the second day, after two complete cycles of work-feedback-work-feedback, the answer was clear.   Everyone agreed.  Our efforts needed to be constrained to a scant few acres of the Farm defined by the site of old Wareham Lodge, nested on its wet and shady ledge, and an adjoining, open, south-facing meadow. 

There is a law of physics called the second law of thermodynamics.  You have probably heard of this law or at least heard it expressed in the term "entropy".  Very loosely stated, as entropy increases in any closed system, the system will gradually resolve into a state of chaos and uniformity.   The sand on the beach is an example of this process.  Once that sand was made of organized structures… shells, rocks, corrals… but it has broken down into a homogenous and chaotic mass of particles from which you can no longer discern the individual contributors.  Put your cream and sugar in your coffee in the morning and what happens to the cream and sugar?  Leave the same cup of hot coffee sitting on the counter for a year or two and what happens to the coffee?  Leave your children in the living room alone for a few hours unattended and you'll come back to see entropy increasing!   

But let's look at the larger picture.  What do we really see - chaos or order?   The leaves that fall off the trees may, through entropy end up as a homogenous mass of organic chemicals, but what about the tree itself?  The forest that the tree is a part of?  The biosphere that the forest belongs to?  These are expressions of incredible order, growth, evolution, creativity.  Let me offer that there is physical law at work that we haven't yet fully articulated only because science hasn't quite gotten there yet.  For lack of a better term I'll call it the "Law of Creativity."  It is this law that pushes everything we see around us to evolve towards ever higher states of organization, beauty, and consciousness in apparent contradiction to the idea that entropy should always be increasing.  We human beings are, for now, the foam on that advancing wave in this little corner of our universe. 

Nourished in the sunshine of consensus, new groups set to work in earnest to design our Living Buildings… buildings that would fulfill the noble aspirations of the Foundation's courageous staff and board.   Outside the windows of our makeshift studio the meat cows grazed, steam rising from their nostrils in the frosty yellow air.    Inside, the fires of creativity roared, fueled by passion and the bum wad that piled up around our feet.   After a time, we came together again with excitement and anticipation to share the bounty of ideas sprouting from those fertile questions - but discovered, instead, a deep division. 

Palisades were being built around two distinct camps.  One camp believed that to be faithful to the values governing our work, we could only build on the damaged site of the existing lodge, and that we would be remiss if we did not use the project to address that damage.  The other camp was sure that we could never build Living Buildings without giving them every advantage of access to the sun, and so we had to build in the open meadow with its broad and sunny exposure.   Both camps, grounded in the absolute rightness of their thinking, argued passionately for their positions and their plans.  They argued until intolerance and discontent began to replace the collegial warmth that had nurtured those ideas.  This tug of war continued throughout the day and into the next as a red sun greeted the third morning of our charrette. 

Charrettes often reach a point where they begin to look (and feel) like the world is coming unglued.  It's impossible to predict when this will happen or why.   Warning participants in advance does little to relieve their discomfort - or outright pain - when it occurs, and neither did it prevent this divide from eroding the confidence of our group and our remaining time together.  The time pressure helped.  Everyone knew we had to get on with it.  Our substantial investment of time, money, and intellectual capital were all at risk. 

We slogged through the day, grinding away at this problem, to end it in an uneasy compromise.  Most of the program, the overnight lodge and classrooms, would rise on the site of the existing Wareham Lodge.   We would use the project to start the process of healing that site.  A much smaller day use building would go in the open meadow and do everything possible to "sit lightly on the land."   Exhausted, everyone scattered to the night.

If you accept that there is a "Law of Creativity"… that there is a vector that is driving creation to higher states of organization, beauty, and consciousness… and that it is going somewhere. 

And then, if you examine the evolution of our species fully aware of the carnage we have wreaked on our home and each other, you will come to an interesting crossroad.    How can we reconcile our direct experience with this lofty, larger picture of our existence?   

Here is one possibility.  The appearance of human culture is the natural and logical extension of the evolutionary process - that creative upwelling of the universe that we see in everything around us.  With the advent of our large forebrains, opposable digits, and language, evolution has taken a quantum leap into the realm of the created… we have become co-creators.  

Culture has been the product of that shift, and the vehicle for that shift would be our technology.  Following the rules of evolution, our species continues to adapt and select, but we no longer do it principally through biological change.   Instead, we do it with technology - by taking up the stuff of the universe around us and creating artifacts that allow us to overcome any challenge to our survival… like the need for shelter from the elements.  But this shift is a manifestation of something more elemental than survival.  The jump to life as co-creator has enabled the rapid acceleration of possibilities for the Law of Creativity to unfold and carry us, and the universe with us, to new depths and heights as we journey toward that distant, unrevealed, and hopeful destiny.

We are infants - toddlers at best - just beginning to learn the rules of Life.  Collectively, our awareness has not grown to the point where we can yet set aside the apparent law that has driven evolution for so long - survival of the fittest - and the consequences of that rule.   But our awareness is growing.   We feel the "Blessed Unrest" and the see the "Great Turning" to a "Promise Ahead."

                        With knowledge, comes culpability.

 It is time to govern ourselves with the deep, universal Law of Creativity, which requires that we approach our doingness and creatingness with reverence and humility.  It is time for us to wake up and understand, that our acts of creation - that the very ability to take up the stuff of creation and create with it - is our place in the story, our birthright, our solemn responsibility, and our joy. 

                        With knowledge, comes liberation.

A brilliant, crisp fall day dawned the last morning of our charrette.  It was a welcoming and hopeful start following the fitful night's sleep and anxious wee-morning hours playing out scenario after scenario of how we would manage to give birth to a design of our Living Buildings with only one day left.   Armed with coffee and eggs - straight from the hen houses up the hill - we circled up to review our work and deploy for the final assault on the design.   And then - Revolt!   How naively I had trusted that uneasy truce from yesterday!    A small contingent of insurgents composed of AFF's environmental educators and a handful of design professionals had banded together to challenge our alliance:

"How can we build Living Buildings if we don't put them in the light?"   

"We're making a mistake!" 

"We can't support this plan!"

Pencils down.  

In his book "On Dialogue," David Bohm, the brilliant quantum physicist and philosopher, wrote:

"...I propose that Dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today.   Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that [our] creativity can be liberated.

[Dialogue] can reveal the often puzzling patterns of incoherence that lead the group to avoid certain issues or, on the other hand, to insist, against all reason, on standing and defending opinions about particular issues. … It is a way of observing, collectively, how hidden values and intentions can control our behavior, and how unnoticed cultural differences can clash without our realizing what is occurring.  It can therefore be seen as an arena in which collective learning takes place and out of which a sense of increased harmony, fellowship and creativity can arise."

This seeming our only option, we moved into the open space of Bohm's Dialogue with the simple question once again: 

Exactly what is a Living Building?   

Have you ever been in a room full of brilliant environmental educators?... people who live and breathe the rarified air of loving life for a living?... who muck around in the bottom of stream beds armed with tweezers and field microscopes and who can watch a bird fly by and tell you the whole the story of where it came from (evolutionarily and physically), what it's up to, and where it might be going?   It was the staff of Hard Bargain Farm who seized this question and worked it, challenging us all to look at what we were creating as a system, AND giving us permission to do so. 

Thirty minutes into this exchange, one of our architects raised his hand and spoke up:  "I have a confession to make. Yesterday, when we agreed to build on this shady site, I thought we had made a terrible mistake.  I was mad - so mad that I left the charrette and walked up on the hill above the lodge to blow off steam.   I sat on the ground, fuming and sputtering.  I put my head between my knees, and there on the ground was a beautiful mound of emerald green moss.  As I stared at it, I began to marvel at its complexity and beauty - and then the light bulb went off:   I need to think like the moss, not like the grass." 

                    Life happens everywhere.

The room fell silent.  Everyone shifted.  Everything came into focus.  In collective waves of insight our conversation turned, and then turned again.  What is a Living Building?

"Not every site is ideal. 

We need to learn how to create Living Buildings on any site."

We talked about the differences between the two sites we were contemplating.  About the sunny meadow, not degraded or changed by our predecessors with roads or buildings, but certainly changed through centuries of agricultural development - now, in its new nature, an expression of the ecology of the farm.    And we talked about the wet and wooded hillside surrounding our charrette studio in the lodge, degraded as it was by the forces of human industry, and how it held the dim reflection and promise of the native ecology of this place.  The native ecology of this place.  The new ecology of the farm.  What is a Living Building?

"No site is ideal. 

We need to learn how to create Living Buildings on any site."

And then we talked about life.  We talked about moss; about its unique and complex beauty, completely derived from its adaptation to moist, adumbral places - capturing and holding the water that supports itself and the infinite tiny universe of the forest floor - water, that most precious substance without which life could not, would not exist.   We talked about grass - and all grasses - a source not just of life, but of who we are - turning sunlight into the energy that has fueled our species and the evolution of culture:  art, music, philosophy, science, landing on the moon… and buildings.   Moss and grass.   What is a Living Building?

"Every site is ideal. 

We need to learn how to create Living Buildings on every site."

                        Life happens everywhere."

It was noon on this last day of our charrette when we ended this dialogue and pushed together all of the tables in our studio so that everyone could work together to give life to our buildings.   The deep divide, the months of preparation, the hundred little strokes of brilliance that had manifest over the preceding three days, all came into consilience, and what emerged in those last few hours was precious. 

Moss, the new lodge, rises off the site of old Wareham Lodge, stretching upward like the trees around it to compete for what sunlight it can and to gather water from its canopy… enough water to support itself and its distant cousin, Grass.  Sleeping pods for the children, who will come here and learn to love these woods, are lofted high into that canopy, and each bunk has a portal so that each child can watch the daily drama unfold in that aerial world.

Grass, the new day use education center, sits low and lightly in that sunny meadow.  Its footprint is small, but its roof is large.  It opens its arms wide to collect the energy of the sun… enough energy to supply all that is needed for itself and its cousin, Moss.   Each building, unique and interdependent, takes what it needs and gives what it can; species in the ecosystem we now call the Living Farm. 

 

All of us have continued to grow in new and unexpected ways since that day.   The Living Building Challenge, and our own evolutionary additions to its requirements, is pushing our very green architects and engineers out of their individual comfort zones, daily remapping the boundaries of their knowledge and experience, and testifying to the importance of the word "Challenge" in its title.  It is pushing us all to think and do in new ways and is influencing every other project that we touch.  And it is pollinating a growing community of people who "get it" and who want to be a part of the story of the Living Buildings at Hard Bargain Farm.

We are also learning, each in our own way, that we have the opportunity and the ability to participate fully and directly in the unfolding of creation in a Living Universe through our daily work as builders of buildings. 

Imagine, if you will, the very first scene that greeted me the very first time I drove onto Hard Bargain Farm.  I arrived there by accident, or so I thought at the time.  A winding gravel lane lead me through a dappled forest, shafts of sunlight piercing the lush emerald canopy to spotlight clumps of jonquils singing their yellow-green chorus from the stage of the forest floor.   I rolled down my windows to marvel at the scene and drew in the cool and pungent air.  It filled me with a delicious anticipatory excitement.   It does so now.  Ahead there is a bend descending deeper into the wood.  Around it lays the unknown and a bright and hopeful future.

We are… stuff!

The same stuff as fish, and deer, and cows, and birds. 

The same stuff as moss and grass.

The same stuff as water and wind. 

The same stuff as stars. 

The same stuff is mind… and beauty,

and… buildings.

It's all connected -

synapses and windows,

heart and stone,

spirit and the warm air coming out of registers.

We just need to get in touch

And find the harmony.

Sandy Wiggins, LEED AP, is founder and principal of Consilience, LLC a national consulting and real estate development firm with a mission to build environmentally, socially and economically sustainable communities. Sandy's vision and leadership have been responsible for the development of more than two dozen LEED commercial projects and the nation's first LEED Gold certified homes, which were also net zero energy consumers. Sandy is the immediate past chair of the U.S. Green Building Council. He is a member of the LEED for Neighborhood Development Core Committee and serves as a juror for the Delaware Valley Smart Growth Alliance. He is a founding member of the Pennsylvania Green Building Forum, a state-wide collaborative focused on public policy for the built environment. He previously served as the Vice Chair of USGBC and as the founding Chair of the Delaware Valley Green Building Council - a Chapter of USGBC. He presented this paper at the Living Future Conference in Vancouver, BC on April 17, 2008

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