The Original Green

Two years after Hurrican Katrina, I spent sometime living in Biloxi and constructed houses for Habitat for Humanity as a volunteer. I was familiar with the Habitat for Humanity house designs and the notorious FEMA trailers. I was delighted to see a Katrina Cottage displayed outside of a large home improvement store one day. It was thoughtful, regionally appropriate, relevant and sustainable. The Katrina Cottages were on lots where a single family home had been destroyed. I toured a few of the different models (they came in different sizes and styles) that had been formed into a small community. I also saw them sitting behind newly constructed homes. After people who owned a Katrina Cottage received their insurance check and could afford to rebuild their houses, they would often locate the Katrina Cottage near the back of their lot to use as a rental property or a place that an adult child or extended family member could live in.

Steve Mouzon, author of the Original Green, helped to design the Katrina Cottages. As his lecture at the University of New Mexico on March 4^th, 2011, he spoke briefly about the Katrina Cottages. He said people could “sniff out” some resemblance of a trailer in them and FIMA trailers were not exactly houses to be envied after Hurricane Katrina. He said the cottages were “not strikingly better than trailers” so they did not have the success he hoped for. Although they were not as widely used as he had hoped, the people I spoke to in the South liked them and bragged about their friends who owned them. They were loveable.

“Loveability” is one of the four characteristics of a sustainable building that Steve lays out. He criticized Modernism’s emphasis on beauty. He explains that beauty can inspire admiration but loveablity can inspire action, and therefore, loveability is a more appropriate value for architecture to have. Action is important because activated people who love a building will prevent it from being mistreated and torn down. Throw-away culture is an enemy to sustainability. “Loveability” is also a term that is accessible to people without a background in architecture or aesthetics. People may feel more comfortable expressing love for something than speaking about its beauty because beauty is a judgment sometimes associated with the snobbery of aesthetic discourse.

The lecture was accessible. The soothing colors and bulleted cursive font reminded me more of a popular self-help book than a lecture on sustainability. I felt refreshed to see and hear a lecture on sustainability where I did not feel left out because I do not share Al Gore’s philosophy. The lecture did not engage polarizing language or focus on silver bullet solutions. Steve Mouzon introduced a complex solution to the complex problems that threaten the sustainable design of places and buildings.

At the end of the lecture, an audience member asked if he would comment on a book called Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. The authors offer the idea that both nature and industry produce nutrients. Most people do not have a hard time realizing that nature offers us many nutrients that are essential to our survival, such as the fruit we might consume. Some nutrients are “biological nutrients” that can reenter the water and soil without depositing toxins. Other nutrients called “technical nutrients” will continually circulate through closed-loop industrial cycles without losing their purity and value. When buildings or industrial processes are designed, they should strive to use materials made with these nutrients, so they will not contribute to ill health effects on the environment.

Mouzon paid respect to the book but, in his opinion, the philosophy presumes failure, at least as applied to buildings and placemaking. If buildings are loveable, and people were to take care of them and reprogram them as needed, the result would be highly sustainable and efficient. In other words, buildings that last are more sustainable than buildings that are assumed to have an expiration date and than upcycled into new products.