The 2005 Pritzker Prize winner, whose Santa Monica-based firm Morphosis has won plaudits for the aesthetic originality, cultural sensitivity and overall sustainability of its buildings, rejects the notion that green buildings have to look a certain way and bristles at overly specific green building standards. A keynoter at this year's Greenbuild conference in Chicago, Mayne practices ecologically sensitive design but refuses to be co-opted by any particular movement. LEED is far from perfect, in his estimation. A simpler system, grounded in bottom-line metrics and weighted toward a building's long-term performance, would be more to his liking.
TM: LEED should give performance requirements and let the architect solve the problem. The point system doesn't scale. A bike rack and air conditioning get you the same point. I'd much rather see BTU and CO2 requirements and let the professional community solve the problem. If you give proscriptive requirements, it stagnates new development and research. It's like taking a blue book test. You don't need to know the subject. Because architects deal in creative problem solving, some of that will be curtailed by proscriptive systems.
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