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IF DULL DEVELOPERS want to transplant tufts of grass and call them green roofs, and if Hundertwasser would weave thick, shaggy manes onto the tops of buildings, Malcolm Wells would turn them into sasquatch structures, unrecognizable to our industrialized eyes. The only possible contemporary comparisons are to acknowledged wonders of the world, Peru’s Machu Picchu, or Cambodia’s Temple of the Unknown. But though he once taught environmental design at Harvard, don’t expect institutional architecture to acknowledge his greatness and shower him with accolades today. Up until now, only maybe three or four thousand earth-sheltered houses have been built in the USA; the godfather of underground architecture is an unsung eco-hero.

I HAD THE PLEASURE of visiting Malcolm Wells at his home in Massachusetts in the winter of 2005. Unlike almost all other egomaniacal architects, he is lovingly humble. Incredibly articulate, I will let Mac speak for himself, tell you in his own words about his half-century-long mission for a more gentle architecture: “Every building on Cape Cod — residential, commercial, religious — looks like this, or like some modified version of it. There are tens of thousands of them, and they are very popular. They show us, at a glance, just how far the human animal has come in its 10,000-year quest for an appropriate means of shelter. To build in that way requires that the native New England forest be stripped away and replaced, after construction is complete, by a toxic green lawn and plants native to some other region.”

“AS AN ARCHITECT, I’m ashamed of what my fellow professionals and I have done during the last fifty years. Russell Baker was right when he asked, ‘Why do Americans hate lawyers so much when architects are doing far more than lawyers can to make the country unlivable?’ Pay us a fee and we’ll do anything. What do we do? Look around you: America’s best land: destroyed, nature: crushed under buildings and parking lots, resources: squandered, energy: wasted. The saddest part is that we know better and still do nothing about it. We actually know how to build without destroying land.”

“REGISTERED TO PRACTICE architecture in 1953, I spent the first eleven years basking in my own greatness. I got design awards, I got my name in the paper, and I made more money than perhaps a young man should make. Churches and factories and schools and offices of my design were built on nature woodlands and fields of wildflowers. Then I woke up: I wasn’t a creator. I was a destroyer: my buildings, with their parking lots, walks, plazas, and toxic green lawns had wiped out everything that had been alive there… In 1964, after ten years spent spreading corporate asphalt on America in the name of architecture, I woke up one day to the fact that the earth’s surface was made for living plants, not industrial plants. I’ve been an underground architect ever since.”

“WE LIVE IN AN ERA of glitzy buildings and trophy houses: big, ugly, show-off monsters that stand — or I should say stomp — on land stripped bare by the construction work and replanted with toxic green lawns. If the buildings could talk they would be speechless with embarrassment, but most of us see nothing wrong with them, and would, given the opportunity, build others like them, for few of us realize that there’s a gentler way to build. It’s called underground… By letting our structure hog all the sunlight wherever we go, we stamp out much of the natural riches of our land. Weather is not kind to building materials. They need to be protected by a blanket of earth. Otherwise, ice cracks the freeways, water rusts bridge structures, floods rage because water cannot soak into impervious ground.”

“A BUILDING SHOULD consume its own waste, maintain itself, match nature’s pace, provide wildlife habitat, moderate climate and weather and be beautiful. That’s a series of pass/fail evaluation criteria… And it was quickly apparent that unlike all conventional buildings these actually healed the wounds cause by their construction, allowing native plants and animals to move back onto them. Blankets of living land not only made sites healthy, they offered all kinds of other benefits: greatly reduced energy use; bright, dry interiors; fire resistance, silence, ease of maintenance, and permanence. Not only that, they were living proof that there is a simple and appropriate alternative to America’s wasteful and destructive building practices.”

Freidensreich Hundertwasser

NEARLY SIXTY YEARS AGO, Hundertwasser began formulating his philosophy of roof reforestation. It took him a full five decades to realize his dream, but by time of his passing at the turn of the millennium, several cities in Germany and Austria had graced their skylines with his magnificent tree temples. At street level, his buildings don’t blend into the background because they’re bright and colourful, but from an eye-in-the-sky perspective, their topographic appearance is completely green. Hundertwasser didn’t pot plants into concrete cubes, he stuffed housing under bushy turf and leafy trees — hundreds of them! He considered it his human duty, even appropriating apartments within the buildings for ‘tree tenants’ that cantilever their canopies out the upper-floor windows. Hundertwasser’s houses are hyper-futuristic — if you believe that future is something worth fighting for.

Vienna Hundertwasser House - View 1

Vienna Hundertwasser House - View 2

Vienna Hundertwasser House - View 3

Vienna Hundertwasser House - View 4

HUNDERTWASSER’S MORTAL ENEMY was the right angle. His first manifesto, published in 1953, was entitled ‘The Straight Line Leads to the Downfall of Humanity’ (La ligne droite conduit a la perte de l’humanité). He proclaimed, “The eyes’ nervous system perceives the infinite number of straight lines as acute dangers. Man grows mentally ill without knowing why.” Chinese feng shui practitioners, anthroposophic interior designers, and most modern environmental psychologists would agree. Hundertwasser applied this philosophy to all three spatial dimensions, undulating not only a building’s walls and windows, but its floors, as well — “An uneven floor is a melody to the feet”, he asserted with typical aplomb, “Flat floors are good for machines, good for dictators — not human beings.”

Darmstadt Waldspirale - View 1

Darmstadt Waldspirale - View 2

Darmstadt Waldspirale - View 3

HIS REVULSION FOR all things rectilinear extended even to the fourth dimension, time. Buildings, he believed, should not remain constant, but instead morph from moment to moment. “We should be glad when rust settled on a razor blade, when a wall grows moldy, or when moss grows over the geometric angles of a corner, because, together with microbes and mushrooms, life thus moves into a house and through this process we more consciously become witnesses of the architectural changes from which we must learn.” Predicting the field of biomimetics a half-century before it became a meme, Hundertwasser felt that the best examples of engineering occur where an edifice degrades and non-human nature reclaims the man-made environment.

Magdeburg - View 1

Magdeburg - View 2

Magdeburg - View 3

HUNDERTWASSER WAS so far ahead of his time, that just in order to get noticed, he would have to be radically theatrical. During a university campus speaking tour in the 1960s in which he fearlessly promoted composting toilets (which he later named the Sacred Shit Manifesto), in order to underscore his contempt for contemporary architecture, he would launch paint projectiles at the surrounding structures, and strip naked for added emphasis! Asked if he saw himself as a good architect, he quipped, “No, I don’t… But the others are so bad!” Inevitably, the police would arrest him for creating a public nuisance. In his defense, he would cite Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and the environment, who purportedly would also preach in public without any clothing on.

Tree Tenants

HUNDERTWASSER WOULD claim that clothing is a person’s second skin, and housing is their third skin. When the emperor has no clothes, sometimes you have to take off your own just to draw attention to that fact. So he removed his own secondary stratum to draw attention to the paucity of our tertiary layer. And this he did out of love for our shared humanity, not for his own personal benefit. When the spirits moved him (and they often did), he donated his drafting skills on a pro bono basis. It was well worth it to design a healthy house for free, he felt, if it would “prevent something ugly from going up in its place”. If, in his own place, another dozen Hundertwassers had sprouted out, we would see a real ecological leap forward in our time. And if we could co-create a culture that nurtured a hundred Hundertwassers, then we would truly deserve a collective pat on the back!

ONCE THE LAW goes into effect on January 31, all new buildings — residential, educational, institutional, and commercial — with over 2000 square metres in gross floor area (which is equivalent to approximately six storeys or more) fall under the jurisdiction of the law. At 2000 square metres, 20% of the roof must be green; at 5000 square metres, 30% must be green, and for every additional 5000 square metres, another 10% of the roof must be green, up to a maximum mandatory minimum of 60%. Green roofs mean much more insulation, will translates into lower heating bills in the winter, and lower cooling bills in the summer. And of course, green roofs humanize the atmosphere by removing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and replacing them with oxygen-rich habitats for living beings.

IN 2005, CITY COUNCIL authorized an analytical study of green roofs. Conducted at Ryerson University, it came to the conclusion that 21% of Toronto is roofed, and that it could capably support 50 million square metres of greenery! They deduced that with this kind of investment in ecological infrastructure, the city would save over $300 million to start with, and an additional $37 million annually. The municipal government funds key commonwealth capital like roads and bridges — why not roofs, too? According to the NGO EcoJustice, between 2006 and 2007 over 2.7 billion litres of what Toronto flushes down its toilets was dumped into Lake Ontario; green roofs would have prevented this from occurring by retaining rainwater that overloads the sewage system.

THE RYERSON STUDY recommended mandating green roofs on all buildings with a multi-floor footprint of 350 square metres or more, but by the time the legislation came to council, building industry interest groups had rewritten the requirements, making 2000 square metres the cut-off point. Another loophole lets industrial buildings off the hook if only 10% of their roof area has been greened. And developers can outsource their ecological commitments by forking over funds for the retrofitting of older buildings. Ecological lobbyists Green Roofs for Healthy Cities are “very concerned that there’s been a watering down of the requirements, and we’re concerned it will set a negative precedent for cities elsewhere in North America.”

AND LIKE SO MUCH environmental protection legislation, the green roof bylaw isn’t backed up with nearly enough bite. If developers fail to meet these percentage requirements, they can be fined up to $100,000. But if ‘going green’ on a large project can mean increasing the cost of the roof by “hundreds of thousands of dollars… if not more”, as industry lobbyists BILD (Building Industry and Land Development Association) claim, then levying a mere $100,000 fee against the offenders would mean that they would have a greater incentive to break the law than to abide by it. In his June 27th article “Is green roof bylaw valid or a cash grab?”, New In Homes title page columnist Bob Aaron even suggests that the green roof bylaw is nothing more than a ploy by City Hall to squeeze more money out of virtuous developers.

ON THE PHONE, Aaron told me, “Green roofs are idiotic… they’re not cost-effective… and they’re ecologically insignificant.” When I asked him to substantiate his claim that green roofs are ecologically insignificant — would he also claim that green lawns are ecologically insignificant? Would he recommend that the bylaws requiring residences to include a certain percentage of green ground cover surrounding the house be repealed? — he admitted that he did not have any factual information to justify this assertion. I just didn’t understand why a reporter who has written a weekly Saturday column for the Toronto Star for the last decade would be so resistant to green roofs. That is, until is learned that in addition to his job as a journalist, he is also on the board of directors of the Tarion Warranty Corporation.

THE TARION WARRANTY CORPORATION is a privately-owned company that has been chartered since 2004 to mediate the legal relationship between disgruntled homeowners and derelict developers. A year ago, André Marin, the Ombudsman of Ontario, chastised the provincial government for misleading the voting public into assuming that it would protect their interests by overseeing the activities that they delegate to the Tarion corporation. Tarion’s own internal literature states: “Tarion’s mandate is unique in Canada. No other province or territory so completely transfers responsibility and liability for management of the home building industry to an independent organization.”

ALL NEW HOME BUYERS are required by law to pay Tarion between $700-800 to ‘protect their purchase’. Tarion has a state-protected monopoly on guaranteeing warranty coverage, and yet it is a private corporation, not a government agency, and therefore it is not accountable to anyone but its own board of directors. This year, Tarion held one public meeting that lasted less than an hour in the middle of the morning, when nearly no hard-working homeowners could have had their voices heard. It holds $100 million in equity, but consumer advocacy groups like Canadians for Properly Built Homes complain that it is a far cry from “the consumer protection organization it is intended to be”.

SIX MONTHS AGO, the CBC’s investigative report program Marketplace exposed Tarion’s practice of hampering home-owners’s efforts to receive fair restitution, even when they had obviously been defrauded by dishonest developers. Time after time, naïve home-buyers are being ripped off by unscrupulous home-builders, and then left with no choice but to seek legal representation, a course of action which is financially prohibitive for most. In the CBC piece, even Bob Aaron admitted: “The assumption is that [Tarion was] there to protect builders, who actually controlled the [warranty] program… the board is stacked with builders.” A few weeks after he made this statement, he was appointed to the Tarion board of directors himself.

IF A BUILDING DEVELOPER cuts corners and installs a sub-par green roof, there is a chance that it will leak. If that happens, home-owners have a right to demand that the developer return to repair the damage. But builders don’t want to do more work than they absolutely have to, because it cuts into their profit margin. So the government has entrusted Tarion with the task of protecting consumers’ interests. But Tarion corporate offices are stacked with building industry officials. And so one of these elite industry insiders, who just happens to have a public platform for promulgating his views, uses his position to contribute to a campaign of disinformation about this new and exciting aspect of ecological architecture, green roofs.

SO THE INK IS not even dry on this new piece of ecological legislation, and already the forces of big business are making moves to crush it before it can be put into effect. And the Toronto Star probably owes its readership a higher standard of journalism. But we would be remiss if we did not come clean about our own biases, as well. Here at Green Apple, we have our own vested interests in the implementation of this new bylaw: we are seriously considering entering the Toronto market to build green roofs on the tops of houses, in addition to the landscaping work we do around them. So we’ll try to use this blogging platform as a way to tell our side of the story: why we still think going green is the healthiest and happiest way to go, roofs included.

Thanks to Roger Frost for research.

Next Blog: The Green Roofs of Freidensreich Hundertwasser