Published on January 25th, 2009
It’s not hard to design a suitably cold and moldy home for the family you hate. First, orient your mansion East/West. Make it narrow. This minimizes any chance that sunshine might pierce your Southern flank.
Then pick the stingiest windows you can find and instruct your architect to use them sparingly. Avoid any use of windows on the Southern elevation. One, at the most.
That will keep the sun out.
Sunshine warms homes for free. That’s socialism. Real men use fossil fuel for the daunting task of warming up a frigid family. There’s no free lunch. Tough sh*t.
And when the fossil fuels run out? It will never happen. Real men will dig more up from under somebody.
Published on June 9th, 2008
The headquarters of a construction firm in Michigan has the distinction of being the first building to achieve LEED “double platinum” certification. What is more, according to the company, the cost of construction was no greater than conventional building practices.
The Christman Construction offices in Lansing MI occupy roughly half of the 64,000 square foot building which was initially built in 1928. The project cost $12 million, and also benefited from brownfield credits as well as state and federal historic preservation tax credits.
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Published on June 6th, 2008
Stormwater management is an urban logistical requirement. Rainwater and the water from melting snow have to be dealt with. When plants and soil, which absorb water from rain and snow are replaced with buildings, roads, and other impervious materials, the water from a storm no longer goes into the ground where it can recharge the water table, but stays on the surface and has to be managed in some fashion to keep the streets and buildings from flooding. Low water tables lead to water shortages and increased costs for water supply. However, much of the stormwater that falls on towns and cities is treated as a waste material to be gotten rid of, rather than as a resource for the community and the region. Water conservation is certainly one part of protecting our water supply. But stormwater is another part of the hydrological cycle , and better management of that water can contribute significantly to improving water quality and decreasing resource consumption. Read the rest of this entry »
Published on April 28th, 2008
When the Internet extended its wiry tentacles to the small town that I grew up in, I had no idea what it was. I pictured it being a room full of wires and lights, like a super computer android version of a phone operator.
As I matured, I realized it wasn’t that at all, but a more mystic existence of floating pockets of digital information in constant flux, existing in digital clouds that were suspended just above the atmosphere.
Of course, neither of those images is or was correct. But as it turns out, I was closer to the target with my first guess. Massive server rooms take up space and energy all over the world, storing the information and websites we web junkies feed on for survival. Luckily, they are starting to go green.
Digital Realty Trust, Inc., a technology real estate company, has taken a bold step into the green world by renovating a 90-year-old printing facility in Chicago. They have turned the plant into the world’s first LEED gold-certified data center. Not only is this a paradigm shift for future data centers—it may change the way LEED building companies approach renovations.
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Published on April 15th, 2008
Grand Rapids, Michigan is one of the greenest cities in the country, at least if you go by the number of LEED certified buildings it has. And now it adds to its distinction with the first LEED Gold certified art museum in the country.
Grand Rapids is tied with Pittsburgh and Washington at #5 on a list of cities with the most LEED certified buildings, surpassing even cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, New York. Grand Rapids also has embraced renewable energy for the city. A strong regional commitment to green building and support from philanthropist Peter Wege (who serves on the board of the designerly office furniture manufacturer Steelcase as well as the Grand Rapids Art Museum’s board) has helped Grand Rapids But Grand Rapids’ latest claim to green fame is that it is now the home to the first new construction LEED-certified art museum in the country.
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Published on March 3rd, 2008
There are a number of regional blogs about green building that I follow, more or less, regularly. Some of them are already in our blogroll (at the right), and we’re working to expand that list. One of the best, in my opinion, is Green Bean, which covers green building in Chicago and the surrounding counties. It’s tight in its focus because it deals only with the Chicago region, and it is focused on building projects that have been built or are under construction. Each article is a case study of a green building in a few paragraphs.
Right now, its founder and editor, Erik, is looking for someone (or, more likely, several people) to take over the blog for him. Green Bean is clearly a labor of love but Erik has announced that he has some big changes coming up that are going to take him away and he is not going to be able to keep GreenBean going by himself. He writes, that, because of a new job, he is “…relocating to Stuttgart, Germany for 6-12 months, then to New York City. In addition to this, we’re expecting our first child in April.”
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Published on December 18th, 2007
The Merchandise Mart in Chicago is the largest commercial building and second only to the Pentagon as the largest building. So getting such a large building into the LEED program was a great step for promoting green buildings. In November, the Merchandise Mart received its certification as a LEED-EB Silver building. That’s a whole lot of square footage (4.2 million square feet) to be part of the LEED-EB program.
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