Critique of Residential LEED Buildings Ben LeBrun Mike Natanzon Jesse Prager Residential energy consumption accounts for over one-fifth of all energy consumed in the United States.1 Securing our energy independence begins by reducing our energy consumption at home. Homes today are unsustainable, generating immense amounts of waste, and requiring large amounts of infrastructure to support them. LEED has become the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. LEED for Homes is a new program specifically designed to promote high performing and sustainable green homes. In addition to the original LEED categories of Sustainable Sites, Water Efficiency, Energy & Atmosphere, Materials & Resources, Indoor Environmental Quality and Innovation in Design, LEED for Homes also awards points for Location & Linkages and Awareness & Education. The following is a breakdown of the different categories of the LEED for Homes rating: 1. Innovation & Design Process (ID): Special design methods, unique regional credits, measures not currently addressed in the Rating System and exemplary performance levels. (11 points) 2. Location & Linkages (LL): The placement of homes in socially and environmentally responsible ways in relation to the larger community. (10 points) 3. Sustainable Sites (SS): The use of the entire property so as to minimize the project’s impact on the site. (22 points) 4. Water Efficiency (WE): Waste‐efficient practices, both indoor and outdoor. (15 points) 1 "US Energy Use, by Sector (2004)", EIA.5. Energy & Atmosphere (EA): Energy efficiency, particularly in the building envelope and heating and cooling design. (38 points) 6. Materials & Resources (MR): Efficient utilization of materials, selection of environmentally preferable materials, and minimization of waste during construction. (16 points) 7. Indoor Environmental Quality (EQ): Improvement of indoor air quality by reducing the creation of and exposure to pollutants. (21 points) 8. Awareness & Education (AE): The education of homeowner, tenant and/or building manager about the operation and maintenance of the green features of a LEED home. (3 points) With any attempt to standardize a broad overarching concept as green building, there are limitations, and pitfalls. We identified the need for holistic analysis which examines a building relationship to its environment, affordability, and lack of performance based evaluation to be LEED's main weaknesses.Making design intuitive When looking at the overall structure of the LEED rating system we realize that an overall philosophy for addressing the design “aesthetics” of a building is required to make it fundamentally green. It is not enough to have the various systems work to reduce the overall energy consumption of the building itself, it is also important to understand the interaction of the building with the rest of the built environment and integrate it in such a way that the common and most clear-cut use of the building is environmentally sustainable. The users’ habits have to be taken account of, and integrated into the design of the building in such a way that the impact on the environment is minimized. In one of our examples we looked at the Verdesian, which received a LEED Platinum rating. The building is a second in the series of three LEED buildings in Battery Park City built by the Albanese Organization. The building contains 253 units ranging from studios to three-bedroom apartments, and cost about $74 million to construct. The building has an array of sustainable features, such as a cast-in-place system that was engineered to be 40 percent more energy efficient than usual, optimization of indoor air quality, and filtration of 85 percent of particulates, utilization of 17 percent less water, sustainable materials and finishes throughout the building, natural gas-fired microturbine that produces 70 KW of electricity and a waste heat that is used to warm up the building’s hot water. In addition there are photovoltaic cells on the rooftop that provide the building with 5 percent more electricity and various other passive systems that conserve energy.One major drawback of the building, however, is the fact that it provides a parking garage for the building’s residents. While many of the sustainable systems that the building incorporates helped it earn a LEED Platinum rating, the basic fact that the building provides parking for its residents in New York City greatly offsets many of the benefits that the building provides. Instead, the building should have made residents look for alternative means of transportation by virtue of not having a parking garage, or by putting a very high cost on renting the garage. The design of a building should guide its inhabitants to choose more sustainable means of living. By not providing a garage the inhabitants need to look for public transportation or biking. The design of the space itself can be made in such a way that residents would prefer to work or use the space when there is more natural light, by orienting the building toward the path of the sun. There are many ways in which the design of a building can guide its inhabitants in being moresustainable, and such practice should be promoted through LEED because building use and the habits of its residents accounts of a wide portion of energy use. Regionalism and Using the Environment The approach of the LEED rating system to integration with the environment involves, for the most part, the idea of not wasting any part of the site for non-sustainable purposes. However, this does not go far enough in addressing the connection between the building and the unique characteristics of the site it is located in. To improve on this matter we would suggest a more integrated view of the site and the networks it is placed in, whether it is a transportation networks, or an ecological ones. This will compel the planners and designers of the project to look more closely at the unique aspects of the site and examine how these could be utilized to maximize the level of integration of the building with the environment so as to increase its sustainability. For an example of a project that utilizes the unique elements of the site it is located in we turn to The Rocky Mountains House. The building, designed by Alexander Gorlin, is a 13,000 sq. ft.