Green products not so great, says Gehry specifier
Friday, April 25th, 2008Often, I long for your comments though they never come. In response to my post below on the Stranger’s not so pleasant coverage of Seattle City Hall, I got more than I bargained for from Anne Whitacre.
Whitacre is a senior associate at Gehry Partners in Los Angeles, though she spent 30 years working in Seattle at firms like ZGF and NBBJ. She’s a full-time specifier there and deals with products, both green and not green, on a daily basis.
Whitacre isn’t against green buildings or green products as a whole… rather her qualm is how a product’s ”greenness” often trumps whether it actually is a good product.
Among her comments in her very informative letter to me, she said, “I simply do not understand the bally-hooing of LEED buildings. From a design professional’s perspective, there are “good” buildings and there are “bad” buildings, and the procuring of a LEED rating does not automatically turn a “bad” building into a “good” one.”

