Does green architecture have to be ugly?

An interesting couple of blog posts have appeared over the last few days on Treehugger . First, Lloyd Alter pondered why so many green buildings are ugly. Alter referenced an interesting ">article by Kirston Capps in American Prospect. Capps wrote:

The field of architecture is experiencing a design crisis, with clients ranging from private owners to cities demanding that architects prioritize sustainability above all else — as if design itself were an obnoxious carbon-emitter.

Alter goes on to write:

Indeed, for many years the starchitects who were getting all the press in the design magazines, the Franks and Zahas and Rems, were not particularly interested in the mundane and mechanical fixings of green buildings. One also sees a lot more of lousy green buildings as it still doesn't take much more than a LEED badge to get in the press or on the blogs...

Alter then suggests there might be a link between green design and ugly buildings:

There is a causal link between the two. Making a green building great is a lot harder, when you have to worry about so many additional issues. Your material choices are limited, they are often more expensive and the technologies are new. Green architecture is at an awkward stage, as architects learn how to play with this new palette. There is a reason architects are usually old when they get famous- it takes years to build a building and it takes many buildings until you really know what you are doing.

But architects are getting practice with it now. No matter what class of building you look at, from housing to hotels to opera houses, there is a ratio of quality to crap. Green architecture is not yet at the same ratio as the rest, but it is getting close.

That Treehugger discussion was followed up a few days later with a post on Malaysian architect Ken Yeang's approach to making green buildings beautiful. Yeang elaborates on the "green aesthetic":

Our aesthetic is the green aesthetic. What should a green building look like? I don’t think it should look like a modernist building; it should be something new. I don’t think it should be pristine; it should be a bit fuzzy. The green aesthetic is something we are constantly exploring.

Yean goes on to make a couple of salient points:

The trouble with buildings today is that they are not ecologically designed. 80% of all the environmental impacts of buildings are designed into the buildings before they have been built.

and

A lot of ecodesign is essentially pretentious green wash.