Some statistics: Cornell has, ahem, the number one architecture program in the United States. The United States each year produces six billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions — which is, per capita, almost 200 times more than poorer countries in the world. Buildings represent 39 percent of those emissions. Let’s round that up to 40 percent. While turning off the lights in Rockefeller overnight is important, the energy saved by doing so is chump change compared to what could be wrought by the education of a well-trained and knowledgeable generation of builders and designers.

Architects can be either the change that saves us or just another too-slow-to-jump profession in a society doomed to Day After Tomorrow-like scenes of destruction. This is not apocalyptic fare — we’ve all seen the stats that show that if something doesn’t change now, we’re obviously fucked.

Paradoxically, however — or, with more candor, hypocritically — as a designer, I’ve spent years doing a guilty little side-step to avoid dealing with climate change and sustainability in my own work in architecture. I’m worried about how I have the potential to overhaul that 40 percent, and yet I’m letting it slip through my fingers. Here in Rand Hall, it’s like we know about the creeping glaciers and the rising oceans, but we haven’t exactly figured out how to integrate it into the work in front of us.

One group, however, obviously just did.

Cornell’s Solar Decathlon team — which is coming back this week from D.C., understandably exhausted after two years of committed work — are the whistle-blowers reminding us that it’s the responsibility of architects to do our part. Their solar house, which took seventh place in the capital, was designed and built by students. Don’t read that sentence too slowly: They designed it … and they built it. That’s a once-in-a-decade sort of happening in architecture school. (Team Germany purportedly contracted out their construction on an obscene budget. Cornell, on the other hand, was out there with saws and tape measures, from making the swinging door wine-glass cabinets to disassembling the whole she-bang this week.) There’s a lot to say about the house, most of which is best said by the spread sheets that document the building’s performance online.

The importance of their Silo House, however, is not in how it fared against the others in the competition (unfairly shafted for points in “architecture”) but how it is a symbol of what architecture school could be. Those that participated in it found it gratifying and — goddamn it — fun, rather than the usual words that we use to describe classes like Environmental Systems (which start with “boring” and go mostly downhill from there). Solar Decathletes make shirts, have pride, know the specs of GE solar cells, build things. They know about designing for building performance. They also like doing it.

It’s a vision of a potential future for Cornell architecture, where “green building” is as redundant as “structurally-sound building.” I say this with full understanding that, considering my own naïve and often ungrounded work and irrational fear of the table saw, I would be an utter failure in this new, green-minded architecture school. Nonetheless, Solar Decathlon proves that studios (which in recent years have already started to move in this direction) can deal, unreservedly, with real world constraints (namely, climate change and sustainability) while also not being utterly fucking boring to people interested in space and aesthetic design. “Building performance”: these words would replace the old vocabulary of formalism. Cradle-to-cradle understanding, sources and sinks. Building performance.

Rural Studio, for example, with Samuel Mockbee at Auburn University, spends each semester with a group of students conceiving of a home from drawing board through construction for in-need members of the community. We could do this. Tompkins County, obviously, has poverty like anywhere else in the US.

The department is taking steps, of course, but it’s allowing slackers like me — who have little interest in calculating the R-values of wall insulation — to get by doing the bare minimum, convincing myself that sustainability and architectural design can stay strangers. It takes a group like the decathletes to remind us of a need for change. The Silo House makes clear that sustainability in architecture is not just about the technical sides of things (efficiency of photovoltaics and more effective roof flashing) but also about how strange and new design can be the product of environmental needs. That instead of feeling like talking about sustainability in design is like talking about calculus in poetry class, green building — passive techniques and all — can be the basis and motive for a new type of architecture, not just a painful footnote.