How to Help the Grass Roots Grow Greener
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 31, 2008
Green, it has been said, is the new black. The ability to throw around such buzzwords and phrases as "sustainability" and "carbon offsets" is today as sure a marker of hipness as owning a first-generation iPhone. But do we all know what we're talking about when we talk green?
"Green Community" is here to help.
The third and latest in a series of National Building Museum shows on a green theme, the year-long exhibition seems like a natural progression from the macro to the micro. The series started in 2003 with "Big and Green," a showcase of environmentally sensitive design in skyscrapers. But how many of us are building office towers in our back yards, as museum director Chase Rynd noted at a recent press walk-through? "The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture," in 2006, was a step in the right direction, bringing the theme of eco-minded living home, as it were.
"Green Community" doesn't look at buildings so much as the spaces in between and around them.
It features, for example, a roof at One Judiciary Square, where a rooftop garden takes the edge off heat and filters rainwater. Other examples of green thinking on a community level include downtown Atlanta, where the construction of a simple pedestrian walkway over a car-choked highway has turned an area that was once inaccessible except by automobile into a walkable neighborhood. Danish wind farms and solar arrays, along with geothermal plants in Iceland and tree-lined streets in Argentina, are also highlighted as examples of alternative energy and smart urban planning.
But unlike most Building Museum shows, this isn't just about projects, or pretty pictures of them.
As "Green Community" takes its arguments to street level, narrowing its focus to what matters most to ordinary people on an everyday basis (healthy, livable communities for ourselves and our children), it suddenly becomes clear that we're in the territory of that old bumper sticker: Think Globally, Act Locally.
In other words, as it went smaller, it got bigger.
What does that mean? Only that your individual actions matter.
Here's an example: In the show, you'll find a mock-up of a core sample drilled out of the Earth. The cylindrical tube, which runs the length of the gallery, is annotated with a timeline listing such great milestones in the history of Earth consciousness as Jimmy Carter's 1978 installation of solar panels on the White House (and Ronald Reagan's subsequent removal of them). At either end, it's bookended by small circular mirrors, inset into the wall.
On the one hand, those facing mirrors suggest that Earth's timeline has no beginning and, one hopes, no end. On the other hand, they suggest another possibility: That we are as much a part of the solution as the problem.
Here's another example: The first thing you'll encounter at "Green Community" is a piece of interactive flooring that lets you select a mode of green transportation: biking, say, or taking the bus. As you walk along the hallway outside the show, you'll learn such green stats as the fact that a 130-pound cyclist burns about 400 calories an hour.
According to curator Susan Piedmont-Palladino, the exhibition's designers wanted something that would carry visitors along to the show's main entrance even as it introduced them to its themes. The tricky part, she says, is that it couldn't take up any space.
Ah, but it does, if only conceptual space. Which just goes to show that the most important space that "Green Community" talks about is not the one between buildings, but the one between your ears.
