William Morgan: 'Strategy of hope' on Cape -- Architectural, environmental marvel

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, October 24, 2003

WOODS HOLE, Mass.

ON A RIDGE between Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound stands a revolutionary work of architecture masquerading as a modest Victorian house. Hilltop House, an 1877 farm and later inn, has been turned into the home of the Woods Hole Research Center: a small but respected think tank that studies such critical environmental issues as forest depletion and climate change.

For 18 years, the WHRC was scattered in buildings in Woods Hole, the village that's home to the world-famous marine-biology and oceanographic institutes. Now, at this former farm and inn, the WHRC has an office and laboratory wing amid eight acres of Cape Cod forest and meadow.

Even more than a centralized location, the WHRC wanted a place that would express its philosophy. George Woodwell, the WHRC's founder and director, said, "We aspire to nothing less than to replace the strategy of tragedy that has prevailed over the past centuries with a strategy of hope written conspicuously into all the details of the structure and function of this new institutional home."

Besides recycling an attractive old house, the WHRC insisted on a building that would use no fossil fuels and that would generate more energy than it used. The result is handsome, efficient and planet-friendly.

We all know someone, a former hippie in Vermont, say, who has solar panels on the roof or a composting toilet. But it's not easy to find environmentally literate architects, contractors, and local governments.

WHRC interviewed a handful of designers with experience in building commercial projects that take their power from the sun and wind. It chose the Charlottesville, Va., firm of William McDonough & Partners.

William McDonough is the guru of green design. "Imagine a building as a kind of tree," he has said. "It would purify air, accrue solar income, produce more energy than it consumes, create shade and habitat, enrich the soil, and change with the seasons."

Combined with McDonough's philosophy are impeccable corporate credentials. He has designed office buildings for GAP, Herman Miller and Nike (which he persuaded to make its shoes of recycled materials), and he sold Ford on an environmental retrofit of a huge Detroit factory.

McDonough welcomed the challenge of this relatively small (19,000-square-foot, $8 million) but high-profile laboratory and conference center.

Client and architect constantly pushed each other, demanding ever more in the way of imaginative solutions. Hilltop House was saved and a leaf-shaped laboratory-office wing was constructed behind it. The wood-clad addition has the demeanor of a well-built New England barn: It does what it has to do, no more, no less.

Making the restored house and new office block visually pleasing was fairly easy; demonstrating how a building would not harm the earth was harder. WHRC's goal was to use a fifth of the energy demand of a comparable "normal" building. To do achieve this, photovoltaic panels generate almost half the building's electricity (the WHRC sells surplus to the power grid). Sharing the roof with the solar panels is a ventilation system that pre-heats and pre-cools incoming and exhausted air, as needed; so the building is cool in summer, warm in winter. This is augmented by a heat pump that uses ground water from a 1,200-foot well. Soon, a wind turbine will dramatically augment the center's energy production.

Only wood from sustainably harvested forests was used in construction. All the windows are operable, wood framed, and tripled-glazed. The lighting is fluorescent.

The office furniture looks conventional but is made of recycled foam and covered in hemp. There are no carpets with formaldehyde backing -- no nasty chemical contaminants of any kind. Much of the interior woodwork was salvaged from a 19th Century Baltimore factory.

A self-sustaining building requires more than a tight envelope, so the landscape is also part of the design. Landscape architects Susan Nelson and Warren Byrd changed the Cape Cod feeling as little as possible -- Hilltop House looks much as it did a hundred years ago. The trees have been there a long time, while the newly planted wildflowers look like the progeny of many generations past. This delightful meadow covers an enormous leaching system to remove nitrogen. And when did you last park in an office lot not covered in asphalt?

This is not a razzle-dazzle piece of architecture that will make its designer a star. But the Woods Hole Research Center represents something of much greater value. If we can learn the lessons that this New England office building can teach, we might just save a good chunk of our natural patrimony -- as well as our souls.

William Morgan, an occasional contributor, is an architectural historian.