Tono Architects

The following article was written by the Principle of TONO Architect for a recent edition of Fine Living Lancaster:

“Sustain”

By D. Hunter Johnson, AIA

Principal Architect for TONO Architects, LLC

Among popular culture’s more verdant and overused terms spoken unremittingly in business circles, online communities, print media and slick advertising campaigns, the qualifier “green” has become as ubiquitous and nondescript as “light”, and “free”. We attach the “green” superlative to our cars, toiletries, banking techniques, vacations, and yes, architecture. Whether self-gratifying or self-deprecating, we want to believe we are helping preserve the planet and its natural resources by purchasing products and services with smaller carbon footprints thereby presuming we have lessened the load on the local landfill and patched a little ozone back onto the Stratosphere.

At the same time, we still refer to ourselves as “consumers” with zealous vigor. Can one truly be a “green” consumer?

In the face of one of the worst economies in generations, sluggish, if not paralyzed by consumers shying from spending and thereby “consuming”, we find ourselves in the ultimate quandary. We recognize the need to stimulate the economy through spending therefore increasing sales, services, manufacturing and so on, and yet we refrain. The “economy” after all is the sum of our participation in the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. There’s that word again: “consumption”.

While the spoken mantra for the next generation is to step lightly upon the earth and to reduce, reuse and recycle, by doing so, our new conservationist mindset may in fact inhibit the economy. Or, is it the other way around? Are we inadvertently helping our environment by encumbering the economy simply by maintaining a more fiscally prudent approach at present?

Fundamentally, we should recognize the inherently paradox. While on the one hand, we desire to preserve our livelihoods by invigorating the systems of commerce we have developed in post-industrial America, and yet, we also desire to insure our quality of life by conserving the very resources consumed in that process. Perhaps we need a new model. One in which we move away from consumption and towards sustainability. Ultimately though, our system needs to be one of regeneration.

Having dinner with a friend and fellow pontificator earlier this week at a newly opened downtown establishment, we discussed many of these topics and then he mentioned upon returning to the Lancaster area a few years back he noted the popularity of the “I ♥ City Life” bumper stickers. It struck me as an appropriate allegory for sustainable living.

Lancaster was settled in 1733 as a strategic inland crossroads for regional commerce in the new colony of Pennsylvania. Some 277 years later, the city is experiencing another rebirth among its many by offering a healthy diversity of people, functions and attractions. Through significant civic and private investment strategies among the numerous grassroots “storefront” improvements in owner-occupied structures, the city has become a showcase for sustainability. At almost three centuries young, many of America’s urban centers represent our best opportunity for regenerative living by building upon the physical infrastructure that already exists. Intrinsically, cities, such as Lancaster, contain our largest infrastructure investments, our centers of commerce, and our seeds of government, therefore by their mere density and durability they have become our most feasible ecologically sustainable physical areas to maintain over the long term.

I recently heard Mayor Rick Gray say: “So goes the City, so goes the County.” A viable, healthy Lancaster city, means a robust, livable Lancaster County. As we keep the City healthy, we keep our heritage in tact, we pass legacy to our children and grandchildren, and we maintain irreplaceable physical infrastructure. Now that’s sustainability.