BuildingGreen Haiku Contest Winners Announced

National Architecture Week is gone but not forgotten. Our readers have immortalized the occasion in green building poetry.

I wonder if all that detail work has paid for itself yet.... Photo from Friar's Balsam on Flickr.

Last week we collected poetic responses to the convergence of National Poetry Month and National Architecture Week, asking our readers to write haiku about sustainable design. What a great response we had!

There were a lot of funny and touching submissions, some of which you can read on Twitter at #GreenBuildingHaiku and others of which you can see in the comments section on the original blog post announcing the contest. Here are our top three picks, in no particular order, with several Honorable Mentions to follow.

Top Three Haiku

From Andrea Lemon, who blogs about the Passive House she and her husband, Ted, are building, we saw a number of poems scrolling by on Twitter. Here was our favorite:

No one ever asked
When they built the Taj Mahal
"What about payback?"

Here's another one on the sardonic side from Craig Bloomfield, vice president for public relations at Jones Lang LaSalle:

Green workplace? Big whoop.
Wait--productivity's up?
Suddenly I care.

Finally, we like the way this one from Tom Butler, residential green building service project manager at Southface Eco, sets its roots firmly in the haiku tradition, starting out with placid natural imagery and then surprising you with the last line:

basking in the sun
quietly, calmly spinning
the meter backwards

Honorable Mentions

There were too many good ones to just show off the top three. Our other favorites range from the "brutally" honest...

Poor, dead Paul Rudolph
His buildings ground to dust, and
No one seems to care
--Lloyd Alter

...to the practical...

librarians in
sun hats. daylight wisely! don't
fry your occupants.
--Melissa Haertsch

...to the Whitmanian...

Up from the black fields
Green buildings growing tall,
Life sustainable!
--Daniel Garcia

...the paradoxical...

Early green builders
Soon joined by large numbers
Head up to zero
--Boone Guyton

...and, finally, the cosmic.

Stormwater splashes roof --
Managing runoff credits
Scorecard and God-card
--Steve Knight

Keep them coming

We don't know yet whether we'll repeat this contest next year, but it's too much fun to stop anyway! If you feel inspired, please add more in the comments below and keep using #GreenBuildingHaiku on Twitter to share your poems.