Systems Thinking: Have you hugged your building scientist today?

Systems Thinking: Have you hugged your building scientist today?

A big topic around our office is how critical and how difficult it is to approach green building from a systems perspective. A building, like the environment, is a system in which “everything affects everything”—it’s hard to discuss a single aspect of building, develop a tool, or develop a new building product without envisioning all the connections and feedback loops that make up the building and its performance.

I recently attended Building Science Corporation’s annual Westford Symposium on Building Science, a sort of “Summer Camp” for building science geeks at which the flow of ideas and the flow of malted beverages are equally copious. In its fourth year, the event attracted over 110 building scientists, builders, building product manufacturers, and architects from all over North America. The agenda is heady and often involves equal doses of building science, building failures, and architect bashing. At the end of the second day this year, a prominent architect and long-time survivor of the Symposium was brave enough to give a presentation on a sustainable architecture project his firm had recently completed. You could feel the tension in the air—a “green design” project? Would it pass building science muster?

After an excellent presentation, and to everyone’s surprise, the Q&A period broke into an almost emotional discussion of the need to build—not bash—bridges between the design community and the building science community—together both could do a better job of systems thinking. The next day the Symposium hosts—Joe Lstiburek (a building scientist) and his wife and business partner, Betsy Pettit (an architect)—arrived armed with a supply of stickers and a pronouncement: “Better buildings need scientists AND architects! All architects stand and everyone else deliver—give ’em a hug!” This simple, comical gesture was followed by distribution of the stickers—“I hugged my architect”—and a challenge from Joe and Betsy: “Next year, all building scientists must bring along an architect and all architects must bring a building scientist!”

The message is pretty clear—fields of study are converging, integration and systems thinking must prevail, and architects must marry building scientists. To design and construct high-value, high-performance, low-impact, long-lived buildings, we need more cross-fertilization between building science and building green. Here at

EBN, our content within an issue and from issue to issue reflects our commitment to this cross-fertilization and systems thinking. And we encourage you to seek out building science forums such as the Westford Symposium—rumor has it that the sticker next year will be, “Have you hugged your building scientist today?”

For more information on the Symposium and other building science events, see the BSC Web site:

www.buildingscience.com.

– Peter Yost