The historic Showers building is now home to city and county government offices and other businesses. Jeremy Hogan | Herald-Times
The mantra of the environmental sustainability movement is “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Though those actions typically involve garbage, a less common energy-saving movement also works toward all three: the preservation of historical buildings.
When thinking about green living, we often look to creating a sustainable future. Susan Ferentinos, a writer, consultant and public history researcher, thinks we need first look to the past.
“There are a lot of elements of historic buildings that actually lend themselves quite well to sustainability, particularly in terms of saving energy,” she said.
The United States Energy Information Administration estimates that residential and commercial buildings consumed 40 percent of total energy use in the U.S. While the green movement works to build new structures that use less energy than their predecessors, there is a fundamental flaw in this concept. The fossil fuels and materials used during construction, and any waste that is sent to a landfill if demolition is needed, are resources Ferentinos says we can’t afford to lose.
“Eventually, the historic preservation profession piped up and said, ‘It’s a little problematic to be creating new buildings in the effort to reduce our carbon footprint,’” she said. “’Why don’t we have a conversation about what we can do with buildings that already exist?’”
The prominent example of historical building preservation in Bloomington is City Hall, which is more than 100 years old and was originally a Showers Brothers Furniture Factory.
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