Credit: Pro Europa
It would seem that I owe Frank Gehry an apology or, since it is unlikely that Mr. Gehry is aware of my existence, that I at least owe our readers a follow up to my post last year in which I condemned certain aspects of his work. You may recall that Gehry was quoted last year in Business Week, disparaging both the cost and effectiveness of LEED. I had a pretty strong reaction to this, and I wasn’t the only one. More recently Gehry tempered his stance on LEED in an interview with PBS. It’s worth reading the whole thing but he basically says that he would prefer increasing the thresholds of codes rather than legislating the point-based system of LEED. It’s a fair point, though I would argue we need voluntary standards like LEED or the Living Building Challenge to demonstrate what is possible before we can begin to mandate individual elements within codes. In any case, what caught my eye in this interview was his reference to his Novartis building in Switzerland. He is quoted as follows:
