-By Brad Lukanic

Sustainability seems to be on everyone's mind and every newsstand these days. Just now, as I sit on an American Airlines flight, the in-flight magazine is dedicated to the green cause. There is the current TV series produced by Leonardo DiCaprio titled "Greensburg," which documents the challenges faced by Greensburg, Kansas, as it transforms into an environmentally conscious town following a devastating tornado that leveled 95 percent of the community in May 2007. On many fronts, it appears the marketplace is saturated with products and advice responding to our desire to imprint change, while at the same time struggling to find tangible solutions that can rapidly alter our lifestyles and habits.

Approaches to sustainability are diverse, from low-VOC content materials to recycled content to embodied energy like aluminum. Most every manufacturer these days is purporting its "green thumb," from videos that allow viewers to witness green manufacturing processes at plants to new green ads focused on the sustainable qualities of products. However, it seems the front and center challenge today is the price of oil; it has the greatest impact on trucking and shipping costs when one considers how to get these sustainable materials to the site.

A look to the past reveals that most buildings were made from the local construction materials. Long-distance transportation was neither economical nor practical except for the most extraordinary structures. The industrial revolution—and with it advances in transportation in the 19th and 20th centuries—made it fashionable to select materials from afar. However, the current need to build sustainable structures has again made it worthwhile to seek out local materials.

At Holzman Moss Architecture (HMA), a mainstay of our design philosophy has been to root buildings in their communities. To that end, we strive to select materials and products that are familiar to the buildings' users as well as in close proximity to the cities in which we work. With each commission we endeavor on the challenging task of bringing together indigenous materials with regional characteristics. It makes good sense in terms of economics and best practices of sustainable design and also gives the users an opportunity to celebrate their local culture. Use of local materials fosters a sense of community pride while supporting a most basic principle of sustainability.

At the outset of each commission we engage our clients in a conversation concerning local materials, industries, and manufacturers. A list is prepared and visits scheduled for tours. We are currently developing a new University Center at the University of Southern Indiana, where the director of facilities planning has contacted regional manufacturers and become a true partner in the design process. During the programming phase, a day of each trip was dedicated to visits to regional manufacturers. As a result, a unique palette of materials advanced the architectural design rather than conforming to it. The University Center will include several local materials including aluminum benches constructed from the ends of ingots spotted at the nearby Alcoa plant. Local clay pipe used for the building's columns was sourced from a clay tile manufacturer who typically produces sewer pipe. These columns will be the formwork for cast-in-place columns. An unscheduled trip to the Jasper Chair Company in Jasper, Ind., happened on the way from a stone quarry we were visiting. The impromptu stop resulted in a tour of the plant and a new understanding of the production process. As a result, the University Center's Heritage lounge will feature 1,200 rear chair legs arranged in an umbrella-like floral pattern on the ceiling; it is to be the main feature in the breakout lounge space of the meeting rooms.

For a new Performing Arts Center at Francis Marion University in Florence, S.C., the use of regional materials parallels the approach in Indiana, but the result is markedly different. Here, we are using local remnant stone from two sources discovered after site visits to each fabricator. One is a South Carolina granite called Winnsboro Blue—termed "the Silk of the Trade" in a previous era—that was widely used from the 1800s well into the early 1950s as the prominent stone for battle monuments and buildings around the country. The quarry went defunct in the 1960s, but before doing so, had extracted millions of tons of material that was then abandoned as large quarry blocks but ready for fabrication. This is not material one finds in a catalog or online but rather is discovered through alternative methods. We discovered that the quarry owner largely uses this left-over material for roadside curbing. HMA will employ this very same granite as the primary building material for the New Performing Arts Center in Florence; the community embraces this novel application because it is from the area.

On the same trip we found ourselves at a Georgia marble quarry, where we discovered the primary purpose of the fabrication plant is to produce veteran monument stones for national cemeteries. The marble itself has many variations and slight imperfections; when the quality does not meet the standards for a monument stone, which happens often, the pieces are discarded and then crushed into roadside gravel. The quality, however, is suitable for exterior building materials and therefore will be placed on the primary façades adjacent to the South Carolina Winnsboro Blue Granite.

At a recently completed project, the George Purefoy Municipal Center in Frisco, Texas, our office visited Cold Spring Granite, a large producer of residential kitchen countertops. At the fabrication site, while there was a keen interest in the products produced, it was the remnant material from one product that garnered great interest. When the granite is slabbed to make countertops, the edges are trimmed and cut as scrap. For this project we worked with the fabricator to stockpile the remnants and cut them to a uniform dimension that were then used as part of a fluted pre-cast granite column. What might be considered waste became an articulated granite column for a civic structure that will be a symbolic anchor in its community for a long time.

For HMA, selecting regional materials is not new to our thinking—it is the stimulus for the buildings we create. In collaboration with our clients no project or materials are the same. With no end in sight to rising oil prices, which in turn directly affect the cost of shipping materials, each commission we undertake further ignites our adventuresome spirit in collaborating with our clients to discover and uncover those materials right in one's backyard.

Brad Lukanic is a principal at Holzman Moss Architecture in New York. His current projects include the New Performing Arts Center for Francis Marion University and The University Center Expansion at the University of Southern Indiana. He also recently completed the Thomas Jefferson Library at the United States Military Academy at Westpoint.