Stewardship of the Built Environment: the Emerging Synergies from Sustainability and Historic Preservation

In the United States, the predominant land use goal has been to extract and maximize profit from the land in the near term. Sustainability and its underlying concept of stewardship of the built environment run counter to this extraction-based philosophy. Beyond sustainability, the recognition of the value of existing buildings has resulted in a growing interest in historic preservation. Sustainability, stewardship, and preservation have reached a nexus and are beginning to espouse similar values—economic, ecologic, and social viability. Unfortunately, the entrenched mindset of immediate return imperils the realization of the economic and social sustainability implied by these three approaches of how to reshape the built environment. This case study explores a rehabilitation project that enabled its owners to meet concurrent historic preservation and environmental conservation goals while reusing an existing historic building. Beyond modeling a paradigm that an individual homeowner can readily undertake, it reduces energy consumption while increasing thermal comfort and demonstrates that reusing a building minimizes the total stream of building materials coming through a site. Most importantly, it shows that rehabilitating an older house is financially competitive with constructing new buildings. With acceptance of the synergies that these concepts interactively generate, a longer term sustainable built environment can be realized. Through the stewardship of the built environment, the relationship between reused buildings and a healthy natural environment will become increasingly evident in the future societal viability of reused buildings that can result in the reduced suburban expansion pressures and renewed use of the urban core.