Years ago, green design and good design were very different things. It is one of the reasons that Graham Hill founded Treehugger with its ironic name as a design site with nothing on it that had any sort of hippie treehugger aesthetic. The division was so stark that the American Institute of Architects had two awards programs: one for “good” design, and the AIA/COTE awards for “green” design. When I started contributing to Treehugger in 2005, it was actually hard to find good green buildings to write about. In 2009 I wrote in a now-archived post, “Why is so much green architecture so ugly?”:
And then there was Lance Hosey. He wrote often about the rift between design excellence and environmental performance, most famously in Architect Magazine in 2010 after a notorious Vanity Fair article about “the greatest buildings of the last 30 years,” almost none of which even had a tinge of green. Hosey wrote:
It became Lance Hosey’s mission to bring beauty and sustainability together. In 2012 he wrote the now-classic book, “The Shape of Green,” still in print from Island Press. In it, he argued that you actually can’t have sustainability without beauty.
I learned so much from Lance. I concluded my review noting that he changed the way I looked at and wrote about architecture, and about the way I taught my sustainable design class.
Lance Hosey changed the way we think about sustainable design. His death at only 56 years old is a tragedy. I met him at a conference in 2008 and did a really terrible interview of him, and have considered him a friend ever since. Architect, writer, and speaker Eric Corey Freed knew him much better. I asked him for a few words, and will end with his:
A lovely obituary has been published on Lance Hosey’s website.
