High-Performance Building: Perspective and Practice

Rocky Mountain Institute, 2008. 29/17 minutes, $5. Also available for viewing online at www.bet.rmi.org/video/.

Green building is increasingly synonymous with building well: healthfully, efficiently, durably, and even profitably. Yet some designers still struggle to make the business case for green practices. For them, Rocky Mountain Institute and the U.S. Green Building Council have produced a video that they can use to persuade clients to take a closer look at environmentally conscious design.

The film begins and ends with Ray Anderson, the CEO of carpeting manufacturer Interface. Anderson’s conversion to sustainability has become iconic for those arguing for the convergence of business and environmentalism. The rest of the film is organized into a series of case studies, which include a wide range of building types: a school, government buildings, a Toyota distribution facility, and several large office buildings. The architects of these buildings and their clients discuss how they arrived at green building strategies and why they consider high environmental standards sound business practice.

No one is likely to learn a great deal about the specifics of green building from this video, which focuses on the benefits of green building rather than on strategies. The fast pace, accompanied by voiceovers and on-screen text, provides an abundance of information about costs and paybacks in a visually engaging but somewhat distracting manner. Shots of waterless urinals and daylit rooms of cubicles show that these high-performance buildings look much like conventional buildings. Although presented without much explanatory detail, the numbers tell the real story. As one businessman in the film notes, a company that fails to take advantage of the potential savings in green building is going to be left in the dust.

Available in full-length and abbreviated versions on DVD (with an accompanying booklet of case studies) and online, this video is a very usable and well-produced piece of salesmanship. It would take a stubborn skeptic to refuse to look deeper into green building after viewing this presentation.

– Michael Wilmeth