Green Building Elements

New York City plans to train one thousand superintendents on green buildings this year. City managers of commercial and high-rise residential buildings now have the chance reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the city on a sky high level.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg took part in the program, “One Year, One Thousand Green Supers” which was also approved by the U.S. Green Building Council and the Building Performance Institute. It’s also made possible by the Thomas Shortman Training Fund. This is part of NYC’s huge goal to reduce their building-generated carbon footprint. Read the rest of this entry »

City Dirt is a brilliant urban gardening blog. The founder will be publishing the book A Little Piece of Earth this coming winter. Don’t wait to start planting some seeds now and have fun experimenting with growing food in small spaces. It is truly possible! Read the rest of this entry »

There is a brilliant sustainability series on urban gardening (Alive Structures and roof garden tutorials will be featured) in New York City this summer put on by a non-profit called New York Restoration Project. There will be four talks, every other Thursday from 7 pm to 8 pm, in NYPC’s Toyota Children’s Learning Garden. All of them are open to the public. 

Where? Toyota Sustainable Summer Series Toyota Children’s Learning Garden 603 East 11th Street, New York, NY

When?  July 30, 2009 from 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

What? Sarah Seigal, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.  She will give a short garden tour and speak about the garden design, specifically the shade tolerant planting palette she created for this garden. 

What else? Refreshments at the end of each event.

NYRP works exclusively in New York City managing community gardens to help ensure their liveliness in each community. Keep reading for more details on the series in August and beyond… Read the rest of this entry »

Whenever I see my friend James D’Addio, the architectural photographer, I ask him about which new green buildings he’s been shooting. Not surprisingly, in a city with dedicated green building blogs and the NYC Department of Design & Construction’s award-winning programs, NYC may be the greenest city in the United States.  Here two projects in NYC that exemplify where green building is going.

It seems like if a building is going up, its just as likely as not to be green. McGraw-Hill research tells us that 53% of building professionals expect to be dedicated to green on over 60% of their projects in the next five years. It seems like there is ample opportunity for innovation in the building industries despite a downturn in overall building. I guess NYC is as good a place as any to lead the charge.

Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower, which sits atop a 1928 landmark building in Manhattan is engineered to use 25% less energy than required by code and boasts the world’s largest “air conditioner.” The two-story, stepped waterfall is also a huge radiant cooling system that along with other measures saves 1.7 million gallons of water every year. Other interesting facts about the building include:

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had the opportunity to compare a walkable urban city with my own Silicon Valley suburb. I have read about the environmental benefits of the “New Urbanism“. On a recent visit to Washington, D.C., I observed the health benefits of an urban lifestyle. I was surprised that residents of Washington, D.C. appeared more trim and physically fit than my health-conscious California neighbors.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the economy in turmoil, a real estate prices dropping, green communities and green building will become more important. It’s easy to see how broken our current community model is in terms of the urban sprawl; the average American commute continues to grow longer. Between 1969 and 2001, the number of vehicle miles traveled for commuting jumped from 4,180 to 5,720.

The Sierra Club notes that today’s average American driver spends what amounts to 55 eight hour workdays behind the wheel every year. Gas won’t stay at the current level so we need to look at developing more sustainable communities.

San Francisco area architect Michelle Kaufmann & Kelly Melia-Teevan came up with a top 10 (sorry Letterman) EcoPrinciples for Communities.

Read the rest of this entry »

A new study in the December 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine suggests that an increase of green space in a neighborhood may decrease the chance for childhood obesity among neighborhood children.

In the study, researchers from the University of Washington, Indiana University-Purdue University and Indiana University School of Medicine followed more than 3800 children aged 3 to 16 over a two year period. Using satellite imagery, the researchers found that of the predominantly African-American and poor children studied, those who lived near greater concentrations of green space had a greater chance of lower body mass index (BMI.) Children whose activities were limited to streets and sidewalks faced greater risk of childhood obesity than those who had access to open spaces such as yards, parks, or vacant lots.

This study finds that what is good for adults may not be good for children. A previous study done by the same researchers found that higher urban concentrations led to less driving and more walking by adults, and a corresponding drop in BMI. Read the rest of this entry »

In August, Seattle’s Queen Anne/Magnolia neighborhood Design Review Board approved a proposal for Seattle’s first prefabricated apartment building. Known as “inhabit”, conceptualized by Unico Properties and designed by architectural firms Mithun and HyBrid Seattle, the structure will be comprised of factory-built, wood-frame modular units.

Two of the prototype models were put on display on the base of Unico’s Rainier Tower last fall. But inhabit’s first permanent installation, at Dexter Avenue North (in West Lake Union), will consist of 62 units that will be manufactured in Idaho, shipped to Seattle, and stacked in groups of 3 and 4 atop a concrete base. The base will also accommodate parking and live-work units. Each prefabricated module will be either a 450 sq. ft. studio apartment, or a 525 sq. ft. one-bedroom unit. It is hoped that the first tenants will move in by May. Read the rest of this entry »

Sprawl is a constant issue at the outside periphery of every city in the country. Although matters have abated temporarily in the midst of the housing and mortgage crunch, new construction continues to decimate the countryside at further distances away from the city centers. However, the state of California is weighing a measure in the state legislature that might help curtail the growth of exurban sprawl developments.

The extension of suburbs further and further out from the core of businesses and services not only consumes acres of land, with its attendant loss of woods, fields, wetlands, farmland, and animal habitat, but it also requires miles of pavement, and the attendant infrastructure (sewers, phone and power lines, etc.) to support the new development. Residents of these displaced communities are forced to rely on cars for more and more of their access to various services and amenities, and very often travel greater distances to work as well as other destinations. This increases both the consumption of fuel resources and the pollution caused from the extra travel. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, some of the greenest solutions come from the simplest of ideas.  Take the cottage community.  What could be simpler than the idea of building houses that are radically smaller in square footage than the national average?  Not everyone wants all that extra space, and many would rather have a smaller home built well than a cheaply made box full of emptiness.

Cottage communities are not yet widely known in planning and development.  Cottage communities are primarily located in the Pacific Northwest, though there are indications of interest, if not actual communities yet built, in other parts of the country.

The individual cottages have a small footprint.  The first cottage community built in Langley WA had half the cottages no bigger than 800 square feet, and the other half no bigger than 700 square feet.  These homes are far smaller than the average size house in the U.S. (which was almost 2,400 square feet in 2004).

Cottages serve a niche community.  Obviously, a family of more than 3 or 4 people would start to feel crowded living the typical American lifestyle in such a space.  But many households have only one or two people, and a 700-800 square foot house is perfectly adequate for them.

Cottages work best where several cottages can be placed near one another.  If you still require a full size lot for every home, a cottage doesn’t really do anything towards reducing sprawl.  But a cottage development typically has twice the number of houses as would normally be permitted.  So a piece of land that could normally accommodate four houses can be developed with eight cottages.  By developing as a community, cottages also benefit from common amenities such as landscaping and shared parking areas.  (The small size of the cottages precludes attaching garages to them.)

While cottages reduce the amount of land needed for development, they also reduce the volume of resources needed in their construction.  It is intuitively obvious that an 800 square foot cottage takes much less material, from studs and shingles to pipes and cupboards, than an average sized 2,400 square foot home.  In addition to all that material saved, the smaller cottages also need fewer resources to keep them heated and cooled.

Cottage communities can break up the texture of an otherwise undifferentiated development, and provide opportunities for other kinds of owners to be added into the housing mix.  While they serve the needs of a limited part of the population, they can contribute to better communities with just a simple idea.

See other related Green Building Elements stories:
Green Communities, Part 1: New Urbanism
Traditional Neighborhood Development and LEED Go Hand in Hand
Living Green in the 21st Century

images via: The Cottage Company