Q&A with Hank Dittmar

Hank Dittmar is chief executive of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, the London-based educational charity established by the Prince of Wales to teach and demonstrate the principles of traditional architecture and urban design. Before taking that post in 2005, he was president and CEO of Reconnecting America, which seeks to develop communities around transit and walking, not automobiles. Dittmar is a board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism and is currently its chairman. He is the author of the 2003 book The New Transit Town: Best Practices in Transit-Oriented Development.

Are Green Buildings Here to Stay?
While there is a substantial amount of faddism to the green buildings movement, the need for greener buildings and greener neighborhoods is compelling and vital to the planet, and the movement will not go away.

Too much of green building is about technological fixes. At least here in the U.K., many “green” buildings are normal buildings with green gizmos tacked on. Little attention seems to be paid to the question of whether steel-and-glass-curtain-wall buildings can ever truly be sustainable no matter how many CHP [combined heat and power] plants or wind turbines are stuck on them.

While it is certainly a step in the right direction for Wal-Mart, for example, to “green” one of its stores by incorporating environmental features, the question is: if it is located by itself in a sea of parking on an arterial roadway not served by transit, and its customers all must drive from a 30- or 40-mile radius to shop there, is it truly green? It is the need to go deeper that has led the Congress for the New Urbanism, the U.S. Green Building Council, and the Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC] to work together to create the LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] standard for neighborhood development [LEED-ND].

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