Last April, the architect Travis Price spoke at the Odegard showroom, a high-end carpet and furniture dealer in Manhattan. Standing before the kilim rugs with sweeps of silvery hair and a white scarf draped around his neck, he excused himself for being a poor public speaker. (He is not.) Then he presented a slide show of his work, and the images spoke for him: copper-sided and glass houses that hug steep hills; light-filled, rounded, and graceful structures. 

In his heyday, Price was a pioneer of the solar building movement that arose in response to the 1970s energy crisis. His master’s thesis on passive solar design (a term referring to structures heated and cooled by their shape and orientation to the sun) culminated in the cofounding of a solar home-building company in New Mexico. He later became a housing organizer in New York City, fighting to make renewable energy available to the poor by day and socializing with celebrities by night. He worked on the Carter administration’s energy policy, and in the 1980s he oversaw the design of the million-square-foot, solar-powered Tennessee Valley Authority headquarters in Chattanooga. Eventually, as the energy crisis waned, and this early green building movement with it, Price settled in Washington, D.C., where he has lived ever since.

Since then, of course, green building has been resurrected and reinvented, thanks in no small part to the voluntary LEED standard, a point-based system that ranks buildings according to factors like energy efficiency and use of recycled materials. More than 1,000 buildings have been certified through LEED since the standard’s inception in 2000 (with 7,400 under construction and applying for certification), and scores of government agencies have adopted it as a baseline standard for new construction.

But Price hasn’t jumped on the LEED bandwagon. Its goals may be noble, he says, but its methods prize what he calls a “checklist” approach to architecture, rather than nature and inspiration. “The whole green thing today is about engineering, not architecture,” he said when I spoke to him in June. Architecture should be about “making a form, a shape, an experience—not just solving a bunch of technical problems. You’re inspiring people or it’s not architecture anymore, it’s just building.”

So armed with his new book—The Archaeology of Tomorrow: Architecture & the Spirit of Place—and invigorated by his new role as director of a master’s program he helped create at Catholic University focusing on sacred spaces and cultural studies, Price is setting out to create a new vocabulary and philosophy of architecture: “the mythical modern and the ecology of the spirit.”

Despite the 94-degree heat in Georgetown, Price looked perfectly cool sitting at his conference table in a black T-shirt, black jeans, and orange sneakers. His office, in a Federal-style building next to the Ukrainian Embassy, perches above the C&O Canal, a block from M Street where 20-something bearded boys sell “Start a Revolution” T-shirts. His 14-year old Dalmatian, DixieDoodle, holds court (she’s half Southern, he explained, like him).

Price was born in Augusta, Georgia. A military kid, he was shuffled between Georgia; Heidelberg, Germany; and the wilds of Panama. All this cultural diversity may explain a little about his ability to synthesize opposing personality traits: European and Deep Southern sensibilities; unabashed embracing of capitalism and self-acknowledged Marxist tendencies; inflammatory statements about green design and spectacular green buildings.

Posted on Nov 8, 2007 at 11:45 AM
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