Written by Stewart Burgess

For an architect, the fundamental design process consists of the melding of a client’s needs with the architect’s design philosophy. Generally, an architect’s design philosophy is personal. It stems from their lived experience, personal values and study. The variety of influences from which an architect can choose is staggering. Vitruvius suggests classical motifs. Ruskin gives us a number of lamps to choose from. Le Corbusier scribbled a man giving us the finger and suggested this should seamlessly integrate function and
form. Will McDonough insists we consider the entire life-being of our product. The uninformed designer may think that the Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design system (LEED TM) is one more influence to reference in their future biographies. Not so.

Certainly there is a design philosophy underpinning LEED, yet the LEED program is not a design philosophy. It is a certification system based on a fairly prescriptive set of credits backed by requirements that must be met. In the industry, one standard argument against my use of the word ‘prescriptive’ with reference to LEED, is that the design team can simply choose not to pursue certain credits, yet still attain some level of LEED certification. Maybe so.

A LEED building can be one of four levels: certified, silver, gold or platinum. Generally, most institutional clients will request a minimum of gold. This requires 39 out of 70 credits to be achieved. When we consider the fact that many of these credits are two-part achievements or may not even apply to your project, suddenly your design must reflect the requirements for an increasingly limited choice of credits.

The word ‘must’ means necessity. A design philosophy informs, not necessitates design decisions. This is the key distinction between LEED and a philosophy of design. Another standard response at this point is that credit requirements are target-based and thus do not necessitate structural, spatial or material choices. Despite this seeming flexibility, a cursory examination of Canada’s LEED certified projects suggests a certain design aesthetic is at work with aluminum eyebrows, lots of glazing and open concept floor plans. Is this the pernicious influence of LEED, or is it a lack of imagination in the modern Canadian design community?

Additionally, a design must be finessed and documented correctly throughout the design and construction process in order to satisfy an anonymous committee of certifiers. These individuals are your peers and consequently have their own ideas as to what a LEED-compliant project should look like. Not prescriptive, per se, yet definitely presumptive.

We now start to see the disenfranchisement of the designer in favour of their client. Prior to the idea of LEED certification, the designer worked within a client’s budget and program to produce a product. The product was informed by the designer’s philosophy and education which was assumed to be sufficient. A client would be satisfied or unhappy based on the success of the collaboration and the final product.

Now, when the client demands a LEED-certified product, suddenly they have introduced another level of influence; control over the design philosophy itself. This is reinforced by non-payment clauses based on the level of final certification, a process that is largely out of the hands of the designer. The client’s satisfaction and the success or failure of the project itself is no longer based on a dialogue between expert designer and client, but rather on the intervention of a third system with implicit control over design decisions. The client is no longer happy with a product unless it is approved by an academic process that relies heavily upon certain prescribed management practices.

To the casual reader this article is critical of LEED. Maybe not.

It is disputable that LEED has swept the design world towards positive change of many kinds. New material choices, widespread production of FSC certified lumber and renewed commitment to low energy-consumption buildings are a few of these changes. One unfortunate evolution is an increasingly client-centric control mechanism.

For a new generation of architects this is not necessarily good. For our climate change-infected world, this is good. For a generation of designers and developers that have left us with a legacy of centrally heated or cooled glass towers and stucco suburban tracts, this is good. For my generation, those that have been born and education to the stewards rather than the exploiters of our environment, I hope this will not be necessary. Let us hope that the very good concepts underlying LEED will be the essential foundations for our beautiful future.