In a high-end Mumbai neighborhood, Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani's personal high-rise, named Antilia, is under construction. When completed, the 24-story family home will include its own health club, terraced sky-gardens and 50-seat screening room.
Antilia also boasts three helipads and a 168-car garage. This may sound like transportation overkill, if not outright eco-terrorism, for a family of six. But despite its 38-to-1 car-to-person ratio, Antilia has been billed by its American architects as a "green building." And under the leading standards for green architecture, it will likely qualify.
Antilia's architects, Perkins & Will of Chicago, plan to evaluate its greenness based on the criteria of the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit founded in 1993 "to advance structures that are environmentally responsible, profitable and healthy places to live and work." The group's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system, launched in 2000, has become the widely accepted standard.
Using its "Rating System Checklist," the council evaluates a building's water and energy efficiency, land use, choice of materials and indoor environmental quality. Based on the results, it certifies buildings on a scale from simply "LEED Certified" up through Silver, Gold and Platinum. But because of the checklist system, even a building like Antilia loses only a single point for parking capacity.
Critics of LEED – many of them architects who were green before green was cool – see a system that's easy to game and has more to do with generating good PR than saving the planet. Just a few years ago, such criticisms were limited to architectural and environmental circles, but the loopholes in LEED are no longer a trivial problem. Green building has gone mainstream.
The point system creates perverse incentives to design around the checklist rather than to build the greenest building possible. Consider the example of the University of Michigan architecture school, whose dean, Doug Kelbaugh, is a lifelong believer in green architecture.
His school is embarking on a major addition to its facilities, but Mr. Kelbaugh is on the fence about going for LEED certification. The addition is planned for the roof of an existing building – the greenest site possible, given that heat will rise up through the floor and no new land will be used. But LEED gives points for water-efficient landscaping, so a rooftop project that by definition has no landscaping is already down two points out of a possible 69.