Green Building Elements

South African Anglican Archbishop and renowned anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu will give the keynote address at Greenbuild 2008, to be held in Boston on November 19 through 21.  Tutu’s appearance marks a continuation of the US Green Building Council’s commitment to tie green building to world issues.  Last year in Chicago, former President Bill Clinton gave the keynote address, which can be viewed here.  Archbishop Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, worked for social justice in South Africa as the General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, pushing for reconciliation after the end of apartheid, as well as using his clout to fight poverty, human rights abuses, and AIDS.  “Bishop Tutu’s life, work, and message demonstrate the power of transformational change,” commented Rick Fedrizzi, President, CEO, and Founding Chairman of the USGBC.  “Bishop Tutu’s role in ending apartheid in South Africa and bringing reconciliation to its people will inspire us toward the transformation of our buildings to a sustainable future, and will give us an extraordinary example of social justice in action.” Read the rest of this entry »

Step outside Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry’s back door and you’ll find a fully functioning, high-tech, modular, green wonder house.  The project, called Smart Home: Green + Wired, showcases ways to go green, both major and minor.  Inside the 2,500 square foot prefabricated home, you’ll find re-covered thrift store furniture surrounding a dining room table made from a slab of a fallen Michigan ash tree.  The wall-mounted LCD screen controls not only the enertainment for the house but monitors the energy consumption of the entire house.  Landscaping consisting of native prairie plants nearly eliminates the need for irrigation. Read the rest of this entry »

Mostly when we talk about LEED certified buildings we think about office buildings or government centers but here we scope out another first. The Advanced Data Center building in Sac-town already became the first data center to be pre-certified LEED Platinum. Surprised? You bet. Most people think that these data centers with all of the computers are huge energy hogs, and they’re right. That’s why the firm had to work extra hard to create efficient cooling systems. They designed a cooling system called an “air-side economizer” that reduces energy use through careful airflow, and water-flow design and to utilize outside air because the temperature and humidity reamin in the correct range for 75% of the year.

Besides being so cool with the air side efficiency, we like their H2O technology savings effort. They utilize recycled (grey) water from a local municipal water system and captured roof rainwater for landscaping, restrooms and cooling tower backup. They even went so far as to install low- and even better no-water fixtures in restrooms.

Someone was either thinking about LEED points, just doing the right thing or perhaps tax breaks but the fact that the ADC built the location on a brownfield in the former McClellan Air Force Base shows some real foresight and green thinking. It didn’t even scare them that the site contains polluted groundwater 350 feet below the building.

Perhaps the military should take a clue from companies such as ADC when considering how to use (or abuse) the land that they seem to be protecting.

Up here in the Bay Area where people are crazy about their wine and their green building, Gonzalez winery decided to combine both. No, the Monterey County based isn’t the first local winery to go solar but when this 170,000 square foot system gets up and running it will represent the largest solar installation at a winery.

The 1.2 megawatt solar system, built by Pacific Power Management, will provide about 50 percent of the winery’s total energy and putting those numbers into environmental benefits will be equal to planting 2500 acres of trees o put another way taking 2,083 cars off the road.

Even though we applaud the massive move toward solar we’d like to see more wineries move toward other sustainable aspects and not just energy related ones. We don’t expect all wineries to start creating organic wines, however several wineries have moved to biodynamic practices or even grow organic grapes. Some wineries continue the sustainable movement with social justice practices such as maintaining a fairly paid, year round labor force instead of hiring lower paid seasonal workers.

We’re all for the tipping a few glasses of solar produced wine but that’s only the first step in bringing a winery to the next level.

This post, like the masses of crowds, makes its way inside the just opened Academy of Sciences Museum. And why not as the Museum just became the largest LEED Platinum building in the world as well as the world’s most sustainable museum building. Take that Louvre.

As a Green building, the designers highlighted the new qualities but the also the previously used materials. What could be more famous then the seahorse railing and the colorful original tiles that surround the old favorite alligator swamp exhibit? Both the unique decorations are back. Okay, we’ll get to the bigger stuff.

One of the biggest challenges for this building was to optimize the natural light from the 200 some odd roof skylights to reach the living rainforest and coral reef. Unfortunately no LEED for Aquariums exists so the designers had balance radical ideas with practicality because they could take a chance that the wildlife wouldn’t survive.

The new aquariums displays contain twice as much water as the original, however they use less potable water because of filtration and recycling systems that purify water piped in from the Pacific Ocean. They purify the nitrate wastes using natural systems, ensuring that aquarium water can be recycled and reused. We also liked that they used 50% recycled content for the aquarium’s concrete.

Of course, everything can’t be perfectly green in a building. We cornered Water Planet designer Tom Hennes who (together with Urban A&O) designed the exhibit’s innovative wall treatments, about things that he would have liked to changed in regard to making the aquariums more green he said,  “It’s hard to live without fiberglass.”

Even with the fiberglass we’re happy to be living with the fishes in this extraordinary green icon.

Some diehard environmentalists consider eco-mansions an oxymoron at best, with militant types even setting fire to greenwashed mega-homes! But eco-mansion haters sometimes ignore an inconvenient truth: Huge homes are constantly getting built, and most of these are anything but green.

That’s the impetus behind “Playa” (above), a case study green home being built in Westchester, Calif., by Go Green Construction. The house, admittedly, will be huge — 4,300 square feet huge, to be exact — and located in a neighborhood that’s not particularly public transit-friendly. On the other hand, Playa’s also pre-rated for LEED platinum, serving as a self-described “living laboratory of green design” in a neighborhood full of ungreen McMansions.

The rooftop view from Playa (left) alone shows the need for green building in this neighborhood, where smoggy haze floats above multi-story single family homes. In contrast to the massive footprints of its neighbors, Playa will boast a full solar array, graywater recycling system, living walls, and smart house automation which allows residents to control the power of the house remotely. Read the rest of this entry »

I happened to live in France back in 2002, and during my year there I noticed a pretty significant gap between sustainability as practiced in Europe in the US. In Europe, I was working with large public companies who were already integrating the implications of global warming and sustainbility into their businesses. In the US (and sadly still today), many companies were still arguing whether global warming even existed!

This difference was also evident in houshold products - from luxury hotels in Italy fully outfitted with CFLs to low-flow water fixtures and dual-flush toilets in many homes to small upright washers in even the most basic apartments, the kinds of products associated with our burgeoning US green movement today were already the norm in many parts of Europe back then.

On a recent trip overseas I happened to pick up a French architecture magazine for the flight home. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we had really caught up in the past six years - outside of being written in French, you would have been hard-pressed to distinguish this magazine from any of the leading US architecture magazines.

One article caught my eye, though, for it did point out a slight difference that needs to move across the pond. It was on a beautiful and practical prefab home, called the EvolutiV house by Olgga Architectes of Paris. The house itself is striking, made from two rectangular prefrabicated sections that can be rearranged to develop different floorplans and having exterior walls made from sections of wooden logs. The homes also come with the latest and greatest in eco-design: natural ventilation, rainwater collection, solar panels (both PV and thermal), green roof, radiant heating with an option for geothermal heating/cooling, and the typical eco-friendly materials throughout.

The most interesting piece of the story, though, is that the literature for the house and the articles written about it all refer to the home’s target energy usage: less than 48 kWh / m2 / year, which translates to about 4.4 kWh / ft2 / year. This is 70% less energy usage than the typical US home in similar climates.

It’s not the level of performance that makes this interesting, for many prefab options in the US can do as well. It’s that the media in France AND the architecture firm who designed the house feel compelled to advertise efficiency in terms of a single number that is easy to understand and can be used to compare this home to others one might choose. I’ve rarely if ever seen that in discussion of US prefab options (or other green homes) - outside of a LEED rating, we’re often left to guess exactly how eco-friendly that home is. We’d love to see this become more widespread in the US - information is power, and simple, objective numbers like this can help us separate the truly eco-friendly from innovative designs that are green in name (or advertising) only.

To see more photos of the Evolutiv house, click here to view the balance of this posting. (FYI, the EvolutiV house is about 800 square feet and is available in France for about $150,000.)

And click here to find great green prefab homes available in the US.

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It sounds like a war effort or some great new candy bar, but it has been ten years in the making. Yes, the Academy of Sciences museum finally opens in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. We’re totally jazzed to have this Green building icon finally opening up, with some of the old exhibits, the completely updated planetarium and the sustainably based dining options by Charles Phan and Loretta Keller. While most of the advance crowd marveled at the Africa Hall, the various fish aquariums, even the albino crocodile, we turned our attention to the building itself. Yes, a LEED Platinum structure that supposedly marks the largest LEED Platinum building in the U.S. With a building so large, we decided to get cute (or maybe efficient) and do an outside and inside post. And because humans spend 90 percent of their lives indoors, we’ll start outside for a change. Well, actually upside.

Look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane no it’s a living roof. Not just a Green roof with scattered plants but one covered with 1.7 million native plants. Architect Renzo Piano designed the roof as an homage to the hills of SF. Even more creative is how the plants keep from slip sliding off the hills. Rana Creek worked with Piano to use 50,000 porous, biodegradable trays (called a BioTray®), that they made from tree sap and coconut husks as containers for the vegetation to keep the little green guys in place.

In addition to the natural habitat created by the roof, the roof reduces the Urban Heat Island effect and reduces the building’s temperature by an average of 10 degrees versus a nasty old standard roof. Additionally, the roof’s cistern system will captures 90-98 percent rainwater, with 3.5 million gallons of rainwater per year expected to be absorbed by the roof.

With all the time we spent outside the museum it’s a wonder we didn’t get sunburned. But of course we used sustainably concocted sunscreen. Next museum post, we’ll take a green look at the interior.

Green roofs are great - they’re very energy efficient, they capture and filter stormwater, they reduce the urban heat island effect, and they soften the harsh grays and blacks of our cities (at least from above!). We’ve written at length in the past about these benefits. If it works so well on roofs, why stop there?

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Green building tours are becoming popular in many cities, and are an excellent means of introducing green construction options to professionals and laypeople alike.

The Cascadia Region Green Building Council will host a tour of green buildings on September 25th, 26th, and 28th in the Victoria, Vancouver, and Okanagan regions of British Columbia. British Columbia is the Canadian province with the most LEED-certified buildings per capita, and Cascadia’s Green Skyline tour will include over 25 green buildings. Both residential and commercial tours will be included. They will emphasize what constitutes green design and offer ways to incorporate it into a project, as well as detailing the costs and benefits of building green.

The tours are designed to be walkable, bikeable, and accessible by public transit. Several organized bike tours will also be offered. See the CRGBC website to register.

Photo: The University of Victoria Medical Sciences Building; provided by the University of Victoria

To read about green tours which will come to you, see:

• Sustainable Living Road Show: Be the Change Tour on EcoLocalizer
• See Sustainable Oregon… On a Bike on Sustainablog
• Green Road Tours Bring the Fun to You on Green Options