Every so often, although not often enough, along comes a book that turns the way you look at a topic upside down. Carl Elefante’s Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future (Island Press) is such a book. Appearing just as architects and designers in this country are witnessing a wholesale retreat by the power elite from making our built environment more responsive to climate change, this book broadens the horizon about how architecture can move toward a carbon-free future and achieve it. 

Elefante, who served as the 2018 National AIA president, writes from firsthand experience about the myriad valuable lessons that our built heritage can teach us. In a nutshell, his concern is that architects have forgotten, or never learned, how to build intelligently—that new buildings are inferior to our built heritage when it comes to such factors as proper site orientation, building form designed for environmental performance, daylighting, natural ventilation, etc. The author believes that this a result of our Global North sensibility, which posits that there’s always a “technology fix” to improve building performance, so sensitive design isn’t really necessary. In a society and culture that puts its faith in the latest green gizmo, instead of culling environmental design lessons from thousands of years of built heritage, Elefante calls for us look at the native genius of traditional architecture and to shift our attention from building anew to retrofit and rehabilitate, extending the life of older buildings. 

He’s certainly not the first to look to the past for valuable lessons. Almost 80 years ago, the historian James Marston Fitch published his landmark American Building: The Environmental Forces that Shape It, followed a decade later by Sybil Moholy-Nagy’s Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (Elefante studied under her at Pratt). These books, in addition to Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects and Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, along with Victor Olgyay’s Design with Climate (1963) and Edward Mazria’s The Passive Solar Energy Book (1979), documented the lessons to be learned through traditional buildings and landscape. Thanks to a career as a preservation architect, Elefante writes passionately about the environmental design lessons he’s learned from designers and builders across centuries. “Working with existing buildings taught me how much better traditional building materials and technology are than many of their modern-day counterparts,” he states. 

Going for Zero is organized in four sections: “Climate Imperative,” articulating the present environmental catastrophe on our doorstep; “Justice Imperative,” linking our climate response to environmental and social justice; “Urban Imperative,” recognizing the city as the future of human habitation; and “Beyond Modern,” calling for a new approach to an architecture free of Global North bias. “Few in the Global North see any value in learning from premodern times and nonmodern places,” warns Elefante. This needs to change, he says. 

The author skewers the blinkered view that characterizes much of what passes for “sustainable” architecture. He notes that in the name of energy conservation, building and energy codes favor sealed buildings that require constant and continuous energy use. Without power, these buildings are uninhabitable. Why not instead focus on climate-adapted design, he asks, which has distinguished heritage buildings for thousands of years? Elefante believes that the culprit lies in our unexamined reliance on new technology (materials, products, design software) to make our otherwise uninhabitable designs habitable. 

Elefante writes that one of the greatest misunderstandings in today’s accepted building-sector decarbonization beliefs is that constructing new energy-efficient buildings reduces cumulative operational emissions (carbon released by building operation). But, he warns, “more buildings equals more energy demand and carbon emissions, period.” 

It also means that every time we choose to demolish instead of preserve an older building in order to construct a new one, we contribute to carbon emissions and mountains of waste. 

Elefante includes an illuminating diagram that shows how renovation, rehab, and retrofit avoid more carbon emissions than new replacement construction, which boosts embodied emissions (released in material extraction, manufacture, transportation, and construction). He points out that embodied emissions are equal to at least 20 years of operational emissions. “Building reuse is climate action,” he states. “Decarbonization goals can only be achieved rapidly and completely through building renewal.” 

And the sheer waste of our building heritage is staggering. The author reports that more than a half-million buildings are demolished in the U.S. every year, and the impact on landfills borders on the unbelievable: “Annual building demolition generates nearly double the waste landfilled by all U.S. cities and towns combined.” Two-thirds of that demo waste is concrete. That’s a lot of carbon. 

If achieving a carbon-free architecture is hobbled by a modern bias toward technology fixes and an unwillingness to consider “beyond modern” solutions based on our built heritage, Elefante sees greater progress in urban and landscape design that transcend the “fractured cities” of postwar America. He credits the Congress for the New Urbanism and models such as the 15-Minute City for moving us toward people-centered urban design, more walkability, public transit-centered development, and mixed uses—all of which fight carbon emissions. Elefante documents strides in carbon-delimiting urban ecology, such as the oyster-tecture scheme by the SCAPE landscape firm to restore tidal zones along New York City’s coastline. The author profiles other urban ecology efforts that reduce carbon emissions. 

The hole I find in Elefante’s otherwise excellent book is his silence on the role of architectural education in moving architecture toward a carbon-free future through building reuse and learning from our built heritage. When I spoke with him about this, Elefante admitted that he struggled with his decision to not include such a discussion in this book. But as a sometime-educator himself, he sees the shortfall in most architecture schools focused on new construction and designing “object” architecture. 

“I know of no architecture school in the country that requires every architecture student to take a studio focused on building rehab,” Elefante told me. The National Architectural Accrediting Board’s criteria for accrediting architecture programs includes only one program criterion—PC.3: Ecological Knowledge and Responsibility—that makes a passing reference to building “adaptation.” And only a handful of schools teach architectural history “not as a series of styles,” says Elefante, but as a response to the predominant energy flows in a given society. 

If we’re preparing students for the world of practice, an exclusive focus on new buildings is out of step with what is actually going on. Elefante points out that in 2022 AIA’s Architecture Billings Index revealed that rehab/retrofit work outpaced new construction. And rehab/retrofit work has not slowed as new construction increased. “Sixty percent of our building stock is of an age that major reinvestment is coming,” he says. “That’s a guaranteed employment program for architects.”

Elefante’s arguments are persuasive, and as much as I agree with the case he makes in this book I suspect that many in the profession will bridle at his call for “a mode shift from a mindset focused on making new things to one of reintegration and healing.” His plea runs counter to Global North cultural values and a powerful modern-era bias that Elefante describes as “old equals bad and new equals good,” and a disbelief that renovated buildings can meet the performance standards of new ones. Another limitation is the narrow horizon of most AEC professionals: change in a building’s use over time is typically not a design consideration, but the best architecture is one that’s flexible and can evolve. The author points out that “the legal and financial framework of the planning, architecture, engineering, construction, and development professions focus on delivering projects, period.” Which leads him to conclude: “During the careers of architects practicing now, everything about the design, construction, and operation of buildings must be retooled to eliminate the greenhouse gas pollution causing climate change.” It’s a tall order, and we should thank Carl Elefante for laying it out. Let’s hope it’s not too late. 

Feature image: Statens Vegesen, Oslo. Photo by Flemming Christiansen, via Wikimedia Commons.