Interview: Steve Windhager

Dr Steve Windhager was the first Director of the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES). Dr Windhager holds two degrees in Philosophy and a PhD in Environmental Science focusing on restoration ecology. He has worked on multiple design, landscape and engineering projects to rebuild damaged ecosystems. As Executive Director of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, Dr Windhager continues to extend his theoretical and technical expertise to solving problems in the designed landscape through native plants.
 
What is the central purpose of landscape measurement tools and what are their key benefits?

At their base, the intention behind measurement tools is a recognition that we can go well beyond reducing resource–use in the built environment. We have to move to a design process where we use the built environment to reinforce or regenerate the landscape’s capacity to provide ecosystem services such as clean air and water, pollination services, wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration, heat island mitigation, and so forth. Landscapes can provide all these services if they are intentionally designed to do so. Unfortunately, when not explicit, these goals are forgotten or ignored, particularly when they increase construction or design costs. By participating in a rating system like LEED or SITES, the design team and client are forced to surpass current regulatory minimum standards and move toward actual performance standards in the landscape.

Is landscape able to be quantified or are there important qualities that cannot be measured?

Most ecosystem services can be quantified in the landscape but require a significant financial commitment in monitoring and documentation that can generally only occur after construction and operation for some period of time. Unlike a building, which will typically function most efficiently when it is initially completed, living systems take time to mature before they can performance at their peak capacity. Because of this lag time, the cost of monitoring, and the desire to be certified when the project ‘opens’, the technical committees on SITES have developed ways to qualify for credit based on calculations that can be undertaken during the design process. We hope that these surrogates will provide a lower-cost indication of landscape performance, but we will only know for sure after we assess a range of completed projects to confirm their actual performance. I am sure that there will be further modification to the SITES program, as there has been to LEED over time, which will enhance its effectiveness.

What are some of the primary challenges faced when measuring a living medium compared to say, a building?

Machines and buildings typically function most efficiently with highest performance levels shortly after construction. This is the opposite of living systems, which require a period of maturation before they operate at peak performance levels. This means that measuring initial performance may not be indicative of future performance—which we would hope would improve, but if not well designed, could actually deteriorate further if the designed system fails to thrive.

To what extent are these quantification tools geared towards:
• Providing a means of justification for decision makers to produce ‘hard evidence’ to support their agendas,
• Preventing landscape architecture from exclusion from a built environment culture increasingly oriented towards measurement and justification,Reducing or eliminating greenwash?

Rating systems are indeed intended to address all three of these issues, though none are the primary goals for the SITES program (at least in my opinion). We do want to be able to demonstrate the landscape’s potential to provide goods and services that provide value for our communities in ways that include, but go beyond, beauty. The current SITES rating system will produce a limited amount of hard evidence to support the potential of the landscape, but it will be future research on these and other landscapes that provide the actual data that I believe that decision makers will need to support an agenda which incentivizes ecosystem services into our design goals. These standards are a first step to the measurement of building performance, but alone, they do not provide for a full assessment of landscape performance. They are, however, the best system we have to date, and a large step in the correct direction. I believe that they will help to reduce unintentional greenwashing. There are many practices that are common in the design of the built environment that seem like they should provide environmental value, but in the end require more resources than they produce. Green roofs are a great example of this. In many locations around the world green roofs can be a valuable addition to a design project, providing storm-water mitigation, wildlife habitat, heat island reduction and access to green space in urban centers. But in other locations or in cases of poor design, green roofs can require significant potable water inputs, necessitate high levels of maintenance resources (both in terms of labor and amendments), and actually degrade storm-water quality. But the public cannot tell the difference between these types of green roofs, and therefore might even consider poorly designed green roofs a sustainable element on any building. By looking at the resources required to maintain these systems, measurement tools will be a check against installing sustainable practices in unsustainable ways.

Do measurement tools pose any risk to reducing design (over time) to an overly pragmatic, predetermined process rather than an imaginative, creative one?

There is no risk of this at all. Great art is about overcoming limitations and obstacles and seeing things differently. Great landscape design will always be able to provide for specific project needs (client desires, the protection of the health, safety and welfare, and provisioning of ecosystem services) in innovative and creative ways. That said, there are many building and landscapes, whether certified by a rating system or not, which are examples of unimaginative design. That is the fault and limitation of the designer, not the rating system.

Why did landscape tools take longer to develop than architectural tools?

Architectural rating systems, such as LEED, started earlier, as building performance in terms of energy use was much easier to quantify and gains in resource conservation were more obvious. SITES actually used the LEED model in the development of the landscape tool, and took a similar amount of time to create the tool that is currently available for open enrolment.

Is it feasible to retrospectively incorporate measurements after project completion (such as gallons of water filtered/stored/reused and pounds of produce grown), or do rating tools only apply to new developments?

Like LEED, whose initial tool only applied to new construction, quantification tools are really most appropriately applied to the design and installation of a new landscape. I anticipate that future versions of SITES will be developed for optimizing landscape performance in existing landscapes (similar to the LEED tool “Existing Buildings, Operations and Management”) but that tool has not yet been developed.

Why have materials, much like food, become so highly processed? Why don’t we use natural, ‘healthy’ and ‘pure’ materials?

This is difficult to answer briefly but landscapes in particular rely on natural materials. We are increasingly seeing the use of engineered materials in urban projects to meet project design needs in extraordinary conditions (such as root, water and air penetration under sidewalks while meeting a specific design load). These are not natural conditions and developing an engineered media can provide replicable results. In some cases, these designed media are composed of all “natural” materials, but put together in a recipe that has been studied and provides consistent performance. In other cases these can be a mixture of synthetic and “natural” materials, but the goal is the same.

Can landscape projects’ capacity as generators/providers of ecosystem services and productivity be incorporated into rating tools (more than merely conserving and reducing)?

Absolutely. Increasingly we are finding ways to assess the production of ecosystem services at a more reasonable cost. As we sharpen our ability to monitor or understand the surrogate measures which are correlated to landscape performance in the production of ecosystem services, these will be incorporated. But as with LEED, which has progressively become a greater challenge to achieve and attain through its various versions, we did not want to make the initial version of SITES so difficult to participate in that we could not engage the market in thinking about the potential of the landscape help achieve their sustainability goals. As rating tools become an accepted part of the design process, I expect we will see the requirements to achieve certification increase as well.