“Eventually, with courage and political will, some [American] cities could return to something like sustainability, or places wherein sustainability would be possible. But without a fundamental, broad and sustained look at what is needed for sustainable cities, we’ll be left with futile, feel-good initiatives, like rainwater collecting on 35-story condominium buildings. Sustainable cities require, first and foremost, sustainable layouts and physical form, and, if they are beautiful, we will want to sustain them.”

—David T. Mayernik, FAAR, NCARB, RSA, president, David Mayernik Ltd., writing in Traditional Building’s roundtable on sustainability in an urban context

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“The phrase ‘green building’ will someday be seen as a truism, as it would also have been viewed before the Thermostat Age. Originally, places and buildings had no choice but to be green, otherwise people simply couldn’t live there. They would starve, freeze to death, die of heat strokes, or be eaten by wild animals. Building sustainably was a life or death proposition. Today, even the word ’sustainability’ has been muddied by the marketers, who are attempting to turn it into the cool new way to sell their products. But in reality, it should mean what it has always meant: keeping things going in a healthy way long into an uncertain future.”

—Stephen A. Mouzon, AIA, CNU, LEED AP, principal, Mouzon Design, writing in Traditional Building’s roundtable on sustainability in an urban context

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“As traditional practitioners, we can persuade others (and remind ourselves) that what we do has great capacity to respond to the imperative for lower-carbon, more sustainable settlements–with everything that entails. Meanwhile, our professional colleagues who are currently captivated by retro-modernist or avant-gardist thinking will slowly learn that traditional design is much more than a reactionary style. In the end, it offers nothing other than the simple but fundamental capacity to learn from our mistakes.”

—Michael Mehaffy, executive director, Sustasis Foundation, and chair, USA chapter of the International Network of Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU)

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“Increasingly, I feel a new consensus emerging – a new kind of modernity, if you will. It implies that we can find effective ways of dealing with the big problems of our day, which do not oblige us to bury beneath our abstractions the very things that make life worth living. And it requires we build again the types of places we all know strike a chord in our hearts – however ‘modern’ we are, places that convey an everlasting human story of meaning and belonging.”

—His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales

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“The modernist vernacular, which conceives buildings as curtains of tinted glass raised on invisible scaffolds of concrete and steel, represents both an unusual advance for ignorance and a giant ecological threat. And architects and their theorists devoted an immense amount of intellectual labor to achieving this result.”

—Roger Scruton, resident scholar, American Enterprise Institute

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“Design integrity has been assaulted and the salvage business is burgeoning. Rather than being restored or rehabilitated, many valuable historic buildings are being raided for salvage—and these parts often don’t impart value to the new structure. ‘What can you tell about a chicken from a nugget?’ asks Lauren Pinney Burge, AIA, a partner with Chambers, Murphy & Burge Restoration Architects…‘What can you tell about a building from its parts?’”

—Elizabeth Corbin Murphy, FAIA, partner, Chambers, Murphy & Burge Restoration Architects

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“For many of us (maybe most of us), modern architecture often seems chilly and dull, and ever so repetitious. How droll that early Modernists would complain of dreary repetition within traditionalist architecture, when no era in architectural history has ever produced so many totally repetitious and unimaginative buildings as our modern times since 1945.”

—Alvin Holm, principal, Alvin Holm A.I.A. Architects

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“At most, perhaps 10 percent of what the environmental movement does advances the cause of historic preservation, but 100 percent of what the preservation movement does advances the cause of the environment. You cannot have sustainable development without a major role for historic preservation. Period. It is about time we preservationists start hammering at that until it’s broadly understood.”

—Donovan D. Rypkema, principal, PlaceEconomics

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“The glass curtain wall. . .has drawn criticisms from a number of building researchers, including those who are pointing out the solar gain and the heat loss from all the glazing, plus the cost of the materials and the maintenance with the use of the building over time. Is it going to become dated precisely because it is ‘of its time,’ so strongly ‘of its time’ that in 40 or 60 years, it’s going to be torn down? Something like half the energy of a building is embodied in its construction. These are really disturbing questions that I think we have to answer.”

—Michael Mehaffy, president, Structura Naturalis, Inc.

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“Preservationists must learn to embrace adaptive reuse. Many fight change and, though they pay lip service to adaptive reuse, do not want to allow changes that make re-development attractive to the development community.”

—Mark Thaler, AIA, principal, Einhorn, Yaffee Prescott Architecture & Engineering, PC

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