The Trouble with LEED

Orfield Laboratories, Inc., of Minneapolis is a design and testing firm with a particular focus. It measures and evaluates the perceptions—the direct experience—of the people who use products and occupy buildings.

Founder and president Steven Orfield is not an engineer or an architect. At the University of Minnesota in the late 1960s he majored in modern philosophy. By education and by disposition, he believes that to arrive at a meaningful answer, we first must ask meaningful questions.

For instance, what is the point of creating an office building? Orfield’s answer is, “to give people a good place to work.” He says that a great deal of research, including his own, demonstrates that companies reap tangible benefits when employees are comfortable and happy with their working environment.

But, surprisingly the premise that buildings should be fundamentally about the people who work in them puts Orfield at odds with the sustainability movement and the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Why in the name of all that’s green would an architectural consultant object to LEED? TCB sent writer Jack Gordon to find out.

Twin Cities Business: Sustainability in general, and the LEED program in particular, tend to be viewed as self-evidently good. What’s your complaint with LEED?

Steven Orfield: We think that LEED and other sustainability programs are a good start. They’re good for the environment. It’s good to think about saving energy. But they leave out the most important variable, which is, do you make people happy with buildings? That has nothing to do with LEED. What we’ve been doing for 37 years is trying to promote “occupancy quality,” which means spaces that people like and are comfortable with.

TCB: Do you see LEED as irrelevant to that goal? Or actually counterproductive to it?

Orfield: What fights against occupancy quality is the belief that LEED is about quality. If your company wants to do a LEED building, and you want to be sustainable and a good community citizen, and you want to save lots of energy, you just about inherently believe that a LEED-certified building will be much better for your people. That’s simply false.