Big and Green and Built All Over

The National Building Museum's latest exhibit brings the outdoors inside.

By Ethan Goffman

Beyond the doors of the National Building Museum is the unexpected: no paintings, no sculpture, no pottery. Instead, you will see architecture in the guise of models, blueprints, and photographs, as well as displays and descriptions of engineering feats, of wondrous technology and equipment. The National Building Museum is itself a prime example of the art it displays. The current "Big and Green" exhibit features ecologically friendly buildings, of which the Building Museum building is a kind of anachronistic version. Enter the building, and you are surrounded by grand

Although the building partly resembles a Renaissance church, its use of light and atmosphere is contemporary.

A Bureaucratic Vision

Although the building partly resembles a Renaissance church, its use of light and atmosphere is contemporary. Designed in 1881 by U.S. Army General Montgomery C. Meigs to serve as the national pension bureau, the building can only be described as visionary -- grounded in superb technical knowledge, despite its humble, bureaucratic function. Gaze across the great hall and the earth meets the sky.

The museum's Web site describes the building as an "ingenious system of windows, vents, and open archways [that] allows the Great Hall to function as a reservoir of light and air." According to curator Howard Decker, it was designed as "a very early green building" a century before that term had been conceived. The design acts as a thermosiphon -- "a natural form of air conditioning" -- in which cool air is sucked in at the bottom vents and then drawn upward, as though through an enormous chimney.

Thinking Green

The thermosiphon is a prototypical principle of green building design. Contemporary green buildings add other principles such as the use of shading devices to regulate temperature; photo cells and wind turbines as energy sources; internal water recycling, trees, and vegetation springing from the walls and doors; and natural materials built into the buildings' sinews.

Collectively, the resulting structures are an eclectic hodgepodge. Some buildings curve and float like sailboats in the wind; others vibrate with greenery that pops out of every crevice. Some are squat, boxlike designs, while most reach skyward. Some are a mixture of curves and straight lines, while others are monolithic, modernist structures.

Architecture has always been an ambiguous art form, built largely for functional aims, yet often capable of inspiring aesthetic wonder. During the modernist period, architecture was considered discrete and distinct from nature. Technology such as air conditioning, electric lighting, and indoor plumbing made this illusion of separation possible. Technology served a post-Enlightenment belief in humankind as superior to nature and of a subordinate environment deferential to human needs.

Nature and/or Nurture

What is new is old. Basic concepts of naturally cohesive architecture can be found in traditional building styles around the world. In Mexico, for instance, buildings have long had thick claylike walls to withstand the heat, as well as a central courtyard. Natural means keep areas cool and shaded. Visitors often find such buildings exotic and attractive, a classic example of how, if form follows function, the form itself may be as striking as that of art created only for art's sake.

Indeed, Nature itself is an astounding blend of function and form. The delicate ecological cycle is based upon systems of interdependence and repetition. Appearances here rest upon the eyes of the beholder -- nature is as wild as a painting by Jackson Pollack or as orderly as Mondrian. Our buildings are really an extension of this, living and breathing and interacting with the elements.

If our conception of architecture has returned to where it started, modernity has allowed more actual choices than ever before: more materials, technological options, and design shapes and patterns. If nature is notable for an astounding variety of species, architecture is rushing to catch up. Nowadays, any style of architecture may appear anywhere in the world: from the wavelike curves of the 901 Cherry Offices in San Bruno, CA, that fade into the distance to the Eastgate building that rises from the African landscape like a child's Lego project. Yet, if the architects and city planners have done their jobs, the buildings will belong, acting as extensions of the surrounding landscape.

Urban Naturalism

Over the years, the environment of Montgomery Meigs' Pension Building has degraded. In the late 1970s, the building -- by then a leaky mess with birds' nests littering its upper level -- was slated for the wrecking ball, until a group rallied to convert it to the National Museum of Building Arts, which opened in 1985.

Again, this is emblematic of social conceptions of architecture. At one time, old buildings were unsightly obstacles and were torn down to make way for newer, more functional structures. This trend has slowly shifted toward a desire to reconstruct, repair, reuse, and recycle -- to build upon the past rather than tear it down.

Today, Meigs' building rises out of a neighborhood dotted with warehouses and the skeletons of small buildings. This gray landscape of urban decay is the enemy of contemporary urban planning. For green architecture, this is a place for revitalization. Like Meigs, the best of the Big and Green architects are visionaries working for a future of light, air, and greenery. They seek to reinstate humanity and its creations as an aesthetic extension of nature.

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