Green ArchiTEXT

The Urban Future of Work

From SPUR, the San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association:

How denser, more urban workplaces will strengthen the Bay Area’s economic competitiveness.

High unemployment rates and slow employment growth continue to threaten our economy. Once-successful sectors are in decline. Even the workplace is in transition. New technologies and ways of working have disrupted everything from the speed of a typical product cycle to the amount of real estate a company needs.

But as our economy changes, the emerging story is also a positive one. While many formerly robust industries are struggling, the Bay Area’s knowledge services sector is growing quickly, led by companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. These firms are finding that they need the vibrancy and density of an urban-style environment in order to collaborate, innovate and stay competitive. Despite technology that allows us to work remotely, the role of the office is becoming even more important.

In this SPUR report, we make the case that there is a strong link between density and job growth. In fact, we believe that locating jobs closer to transit — and closer to one another — will be key to the Bay Area’s long-term economic growth. We recommend 20 strategies for increasing density, strengthening the regional economy and promoting job growth.

Download full report: SPUR_The_Urban_Future_of_Work.pdf

via spur.org

Game Changers: Make It Right's Tim Duggan

Congrats to landscape architect Tim Duggan, one of this year's Metropolis Game Changers!

By Martin C. Pedersen

OCCUPATION: Landscape architect
AFFILIATION: Make It Right
LOCATION: New Orleans

Tim Duggan stands in the middle of North Prieur Street, in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. Although it certainly doesn’t look like it to the untrained eye, Duggan is here to demonstrate a Make It Right initiative every bit as radical as the Brad Pitt–sponsored starchitect houses dotting the landscape. This experimental street—built in collaboration with the city’s Department of Public Works and the University of New Orleans—dead-ends at the foot of the Industrial Canal levee, site of the infamous breach that inundated the neighborhood during Hurricane Katrina. Duggan, a bearded landscape architect built like the high school baseball catcher he once was, uncaps a water bottle, extends an arm, and pours. “The city spends almost fifty million dollars a year on electricity to pump excess storm water over the levees,” he says. “But the pervious concrete you see here is still forbidden in the city of New Orleans.” He lets that sink in, literally, as the water quickly becomes a moist blotch on the pavement. “Everything we’ve done, we’ve had to get a variance for.”

His official title at Make It Right is “landscape architect,” but the unique nature of the project, the complicated planning issues, and the emphatic personality of the man made a larger, more expansive role almost preordained. “Tim is tenacious,” says Duggan’s mentor and former boss, Bob Berkebile, one of the fathers of the green building movement and a founding partner of BNIM. “He sees the links and acts on them. I would clone him if I knew how.” READ MORE >>

via www.metropolismag.com

A Salute to U.S. Armories: Adaptive Use for Former Military Buildings

Nice piece in the National Trust's new Preservation Magazine, featuring Portland's Gerding Theater and other historic armories being converted to into new, green venues:

By Margaret Shakespeare

Once abandoned, the nation's historic armories are being rediscovered and restored.

By its 15th birthday in 2002, Portland Center Stage (PCS) in Oregon had grown up enough to merit its own theater. Long a tenant in the city’s performing arts center, the company was ready for a space with  good acoustics, technical flexibility for scene changes, a stage that wouldn’t swallow intimate plays, unobstructed sightlines, and, oh, a central location.

“Our dream of having our own space got more serious” as PCS searched for a new artistic director, says longtime staff member Creon Thorne. “All the candidates said that [moving PCS forward] was not viable without our own space.” But in Portland’s small urban grid, suitable buildings—an old warehouse or an abandoned auditorium, for example—were scarcer than actors who avoid the spotlight.

That is, until the Romanesque Revival armory at the edge of the Pearl District landed in the theater company’s lap.

...

As part of the rehabilitation, construction crews integrated seismic strengthening elements and added acoustic isolation so that even loud noises outside, such as sirens, could not be heard by audiences. “We were very constrained inside,” Brown says, “but ended up with not one ounce of unused space.” The necessary additional 30,000 square feet was created by excavating and finishing space below ground and adding a mezzanine as well as a new third floor on top of the existing structure. The completed armory incorporates a 600-seat main stage, a 200-seat studio stage, offices, and costume and rehearsal space, all within a historic facility retrofitted with state-of-the-art mechanical and energy management systems.

The design team did face some unexpected hurdles—particularly the integration of lighting systems. The U.S. Green Building Council awards LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) points for natural lighting, but landmark-status restrictions didn’t permit the addition of windows in the original masonry walls. The only way to bring in natural light was through new skylights—a total of 42—in the barrel roof. “The Park Service said that wouldn’t be appropriate,” recalls Patrick Wilde, vice president at Gerding Edlen, who was project manager for the 24 months of construction. “We had to make several trips to the East Coast to Washington to explain how we would make them less impactful.” Changing those minds was “a big win for the project,” he says. READ MORE >>

via www.preservationnation.org

Beyond LEED: Regenerative Design: A Symposium - January 27 & 28

What looks to be a fascinating event debuts this week, January 27 and 28, at the University of Texas-Austin School of Architecture. "Beyond LEED: Regenerative Design: A Symposium" will include:

• Bob Berkebile (BNIM): "Promoting Obsolescence: A journey toward regenerative design"
• Bill Browning (Terrapin Bright Green): "Letting Deep Ecological History Determine Building Performance Metrics"
• Ray Cole (University of British Columbia): "Beyond LEED: Embracing holism, engaging complexity & accepting uncertainty"
• Gail Vittori (Center for Maxium Building Potential Systems): "Stewarding the Common Good"

...and many other big thinkers. Should be amazing.

"During the two-day Beyond LEED: Regenerative Design symposium, nationally and internationally known leaders will present their visions of sustainable design and participate in dialogue about the next generation of green building strategies, standards, certification, and performance evaluation."

Visit the event site.

SymbioCity, A Holistic Approach to Environmental and Economic Sustainability

Tonight at the Tulane School of Archiecture: Phil Thompson on "SymbioCity, A Holistic Approach to Environmental and Economic Sustainability":

"The Swedish American Green Alliance has a strong emphasis on the challenge of creating sustainable cities. Sweden is at the forefront of this area and has produced a complete concept called SymbioCity. This concept builds upon the notion that shared urban systems create synergies; holistic approach to landscape planning, transportation and waste management, from which the gain is both environmental and economic."

For more on the SymbioCity concept, check out their website here.

 

The Rise of the New Groupthink? (Or, When to Collaborate - and When Not to...)

Susan Cain, author of the forthcoming book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, writes in the New York Times recently of an intriguing idea - that some people work best in isolation, that perhaps we've gone too far in our radical transformation to an open-office-environment, contstant-team-centric push within our corporate cultures (including for many architecture and engineering firms). Her opinion piece begins:

"SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature."

Further into her essay, she concludes - resoundingly:

"SOME teamwork is fine and offers a fun, stimulating, useful way to exchange ideas, manage information and build trust.

But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. READ MORE >>

Solid rationale...and there is a time and place for the "Wisdom of Crowds", or at least for carefully guided groupthink, especially when conducted by some of the more masterful leaders of design charrettes - people like BNIM's Bob Berkebile and others. So where then does that leave us with the powerful, proven results of the integrated design model, a case for Building Information Modeling (BIM) and other tools and techniques synonymous with sustainable design? Something to think about...alone or in a group.

DesignIntelligence: Embracing Adaptive Reuse

By Griff Davenport

Economic recession has wreaked havoc on the nation’s investment in retail and commercial office infrastructure. Community vibrancy and vitality, along with what had been an economic engine fired by bustling retail centers, malls, life style centers, and office space of the past 50 years, has stalled or been extinguished in many markets.

Today, high vacancy rates, deferred maintenance, and in many cases abandoned retail and office space have left gaping holes in the fabric of our urban communities.

Adaptive reuse is a practical solution to the economic issue and also aligns with the tenets of the 2030 Challenge posed by the nonprofit Architecture 2030, which asks the global architecture and building community to adopt targets to reduce greenhouse gases. Reaching those ambitious 2030 goals will require a fundamental shift in how the A/E/C industry approaches the needs and wants of owners, a commitment to the idea of local community, and a change in how practitioners view the design profession.

Now is the time to revisit and reconnect with the core strength of the design profession: creative problem solving. Untapped opportunity lies before us in the existing building stock of this country. As designers, we have an opportunity to lead the dialogue in our local communities. It is our place to reclaim the high ground from hedge funds, lenders, and developers who seemingly always look out to the edges and the coveted ZIP codes when they could be looking toward the urban core. READ MORE >>

via www.di.net

eVolo: Conference Center “Green Solution House” Takes Sustainability to a New Level

IMAGE: 3XN

Danish practice 3XN is the architect behind a new experimental conference center and hotel where everything is adapted to the circulation of nature and where guests will get an idea of how it feels to live in a world without waste.

No waste
The Green Solution House conference center on the Danish island of Bornholm is designed and developed in accordance with the principles of Cradle 2 Cradle®. This means that all materials used in the building are either fully recyclable or biodegradable. Hence, the building design takes on the ambition to eliminate the concept of waste.

The project is managed by Kasper Guldager Jørgensen, head of 3XN’s innovation unit, GXN: In Denmark, the construction industry alone is responsible for 30% of all waste generated. Waste that puts an enormous burden on the environment, but with Green Solution House we demonstrate that this is a problem, which we can actually solve.

Eliminating waste means that everything must be part of a circulation. Thus, the building is designed for disassembly and constructed of defined recyclable materials. Solar energy produces the energy consumed in the building, rain water is collected and water used is biologically cleaned and reused. Integrated green houses produce organic fruits and vegetables for the hotel restaurant. Further, the daily material flows from running the center is either recycled or composted. READ MORE >>

via www.evolo.us

Historic buildings embrace the future | Green Futures Magazine

By Fiona King

As a self-confessed enthusiast of all things heritage, I love the stately homes, ancient churches, and many of the other beautiful historic buildings that Britain has been building for centuries.

But I’m even more excited when I discover that these buildings are not what they seem: when they reveal adaptations and additions that are surprising, creative and even challenging. And this is happening more and more. Once considered static, sacred and untouchable, the rhetoric around our heritage buildings has moved towards one of managed change and conservation, rather than simple preservation.

This can only be good for their long-term sustainability. Buildings – all buildings, regardless of heritage status – must adapt to survive, just as they have always done. Historic houses are often displayed and interpreted as if frozen in time – but the truth is that the buildings we see now are the products of centuries’ worth of retrofit. Take lighting. It’s progressed from candles to electricity, involving the embedding of wires and cables in precious historic fabric. Heating, meanwhile, has developed from wood and coal to oil or gas. Buildings have to adapt to survive. And with 3% of Grade I and Grade II listed buildings in England at risk, sensitive retrofitting might be their only chance to do so.

The Churches Conservation Trust is doing exactly that with All Souls [pictured], a redundant Grade II-listed church in one of the poorest parts of Bolton, Lancashire, which is to be reborn as a community centre. Its pews and floor are being removed to make way for separate pods to create a ‘building within a building’. The design leaves the historic fabric untouched, while enabling huge savings by heating individual pods as needed, rather than the whole interior.

Such radical transformations can be controversial, and there is a balance to be struck in maintaining what makes an historic building special and what can be done to ensure its long-term sustainability. READ MORE >>

via www.forumforthefuture.org

Eden Hall Campus - A splendid vision (VIDEO)

A cutting-edge "living and learning laboratory" underway at the new Eden Hall Campus for Chatham University near Pittsburgh.

This project could serve as a prototype for deep green campus design in the 21st century. Two of North America's leading sustainable design firms are leading this development:

• BNIM led development of the master plan for restoration and adaptation of a number of historic farm buildings and the original homestead mansion, as well as plans for new academic and residential facilities for students and faculty while restoring the natural systems to become learning tools for the school and the larger community.
• Mithun is providing architecture, landscape architecture and interior design for the first phase of the campus which includes the design and construction of the EcoCenter, a renovated barn with a large multi-use assembly hall, gallery space, classrooms and offices; New Lodge housing for up to 100 students; a Cafe and Library; and a Field Lab with water treatment facilities, lab and classroom spaces and aquaculture systems.

For more information on Chatham University, the School of Sustainability & the Environment and plans for the Eden Hall Campus, go here.

Forbes: NASA's "Mission to Earth, the New Sustainability Lab

By Kerry A. Dolan

A sleek new building at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. is one any rocket scientist would love. When it warms up outside, humans won’t have to be the ones to open the windows or lower the shades to block the sun. That will happen automatically, thanks to some of the 5,000 sensors in the 2-story, 50,000 square foot building.

The wireless sensors, which measure carbon dioxide levels, temperature, lighting and air flow, will also indicate when to pump cool air into the copper pipes in the ceiling from 106 geothermal wells dug deep below a lawn nearby  (there is no traditional air conditioning)  — as well as when to turn the heat on if it gets cold. In addition, the building’s energy systems–which include solar panels and a solid oxide fuel cell made by Bloom Energy in additional to the geothermal wells — will produce more electricity than the structure needs, making it a net positive energy building. The building also uses 90% less potable water than a traditional building would.

Move up Move down

“It will prove to be one of the highest performing federal buildings ever,” boasts Steven Zornetzer, the associate center director at NASA Ames Research Center. As part of an effort to replace aging buildings, various NASA sites submitted plans to create more efficient new buildings. The new NASA Ames building, called the “Sustainability Lab” is in line to receive LEED Platinum status...

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How could a building with such advanced bells and whistles be built for such a low premium to traditional structures? A lot of the energy saving features were baked into the design: It’s a narrow building with lots of daylight exposure and a raised floor that enables cool and warm air to flow through underneath. READ MORE >>

via www.forbes.com

360 View of Wetlands Around Oberlin's Adam Joseph Lewis Center

A great tool to view and monitor the newly rebuilt wetlands adjacent to the Adam Joseph Lewis Center at Oberlin College - still one of the greenest buildings in North America (even after more than 10 years). This panoramic view is made possible using Microsoft Photosynth - an onsite, on-line camera feed.

More on this special restored landscape is available on the college's AJLC site:

"Wetland restoration entails three tasks: reestablishing wet hydrological conditions, reintroducing native species and selectively removing invasive and non-native plant species. With time, a complex set of relationships between living and non-living components develops and results in a resilient ecological system that is resistant to invasive species and to disturbance. The reconstructed wetland at the Lewis Center was initially planted with a diverse community of wetland vegetation in the spring of 2000. Fish and painted turtles were added. Song birds, ducks, toads, frogs and a wide variety of insects also inhabit the wetland but have come of their own accord. In 2010, in response to a breach in the lining the wetland system was rebuilt. The new wetland restoration was expanded in size in order to accommodate a more diverse and representative aquatic ecosystem at a scale that better matches the building. A number of the original plant specimens were saved and reused."

NYTimes: Seeing the Building for the Trees

By Sarah Williams Goldhagen

A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.

This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know. Many of the associations we make emerge from the fact that we live inside bodies, in a concrete world, and we tend to think in metaphors grounded in that embodiment.

This metaphorical, embodied quality shapes how we relate to abstract concepts, emotions and human activity. Across cultures, “important” is big and “unimportant” is small, just as your caretakers were once much larger than you. Sometimes your head is “in the clouds.” You approach a task “step by step.”

Some architects are catching on to human cognition’s embodied nature. A few are especially intrigued by metaphors that express bodily experience in the world.

Take the visual metaphor of a tree as shelter. Most people live around, use and look at trees. Children climb them. People gather under them. Nearly everyone at some point uses one to escape the sun. READ MORE >>

via www.nytimes.com

The Tuning of Place: Social Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media

Interesting book and concept from Richard Coyne, The Tuning of Place (The MIT Press, 2010):

“How do pervasive digital devices influence the way people use spaces? This book examines the concept of tuning as a way of understanding how people adjust their interactions with one other and with the places they occupy. I propose that mobile phones, smartphones, personal stereos, handhelds, wearables, other pervasive digital devices, and the networks that support them become the means of making incremental adjustments within spaces – of tuning place.”

Jeremy Rifkin's Third Industrial Revolution

Charlie Rose interviewed Jeremy Rifkin last night - great segment and am very intrigued with his ideas on the "Energy Internet" – a new distributive, collaborative model that emphasies local, renewable energy.



Here's an earlier print interview that appeared in Forbes:

Economist and energy visionary Jeremy Rifkin is senior lecturer at the Wharton School’s Executive Education Program at the University of Pennsylvania, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, D.C., author of 19 books, and an advisor to the European Union and to heads of state around the world. In his most recent treatise, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and World (September 2011), Rifkin describes how the current Industrial Revolution is drawing to a close and why and how we should work to shape the next one.

...

How did you come up with this idea?

My read on history is that the great economic revolutions occur when two phenomena come together. When we change energy regimes, it makes possible much more complex economic relations. When energy revolutions occur, however, they require communication revolutions that are agile enough to manage them. If you look at the 19th century, print technology became very cheap when we introduced steam power into printing. That decreased the cost and increased the speed, efficiency and availability of print material. At the same time we established public schools in Europe and America. We created a print literate workforce with the communication skills to organize a First Industrial Revolution driven by coal and steam power.

Then we did it again in the 20th century with the convergence of communication and energy: Centralized electricity—especially the telephone and then later radio and television—became the communication vehicles to manage a more dispersed Second Industrial Revolution, organized around the oil-powered internal combustion engine, suburban construction and the creation of a mass consumer society.

Energy historians only deal with energy, and communication historians only deal with communications, but in history you can’t really do one without the other. That’s the framework that led me to this kind of search, and the Third Industrial Revolution really came out of that narrative on how history evolves.

So, what exactly is the Third Industrial Revolution?

First of all, it’s based on a new convergence of communication and energy. The Internet has been a very powerful communication tool in the last 20 years. What’s so interesting about it is the way it scales. I grew up in the 20th century on centralized electricity communication that scales vertically. The Internet, by contrast, is a distributed and collaborative communication medium and scales laterally.

We are in the early stages of a convergence of Internet communication technology with a new form of energy that is by nature distributed and has to be managed collaboratively and scales laterally. We’re making a great transition to distributed renewable energy sources. And we distinguish those from the elite energies—coal, oil, gas, tar sands—that are only found in a few places and require significant military and geopolitical investments and massive finance capital, and that have to scale top down because they are so expensive. Those energies are clearly sunsetting as we enter the long endgame of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Distributed energies, by contrast, are found in some frequency or proportion in every inch of the world: the sun, the wind, the geothermal heat under the ground, biomass—garbage, agricultural and forest waste—small hydro, ocean tides and waves. READ MORE >>

via www.forbes.com

Salon's Dream City: The bold urban future starts now

By Will Doig

CREDIT: Salon/VikaSuh via Shutterstock)

America doesn’t do big projects anymore — we’re too broke, no one can agree on our priorities, that era of bold thinking is over.

That canard has been repeated so many times that it’s now accepted as gospel. Except it’s not true. In cities in every region of the country, pie-in-the-sky ideas are moving from brainstorm to blueprint to groundbreaking — and 2012 will prove it. From a massive re-imagining of a postindustrial Chicago landscape to the rebirth of the Los Angeles River, these seven ventures point the way to a brave urban future. READ MORE >>

via www.salon.com

Putting a Dollar Value on Nature

By Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio

Scientists in Minnesota are trying to do something that may be impossible: put a dollar value on nature.

Nature performs many important functions that benefit humans — not just offering beauty but cleaning water, taming floods and pollinating crops. Some researchers think it's time to put a dollar value on those natural processes.

University of Minnesota economic researcher Steve Polasky is building on ideas first presented in the field of applied economics back in the 1960s. The idea is kind of a merger of ecology and economics to identify services that nature provides, and assign a monetary value to those services.

Polasky's approach, which he calls "full-cost accounting," involves tracking all the consequences of a particular activity, not just the intended results.

The way he looks at it, nature has assets — he calls it "natural capital" — like minerals and timber. But Polasky said it's time to focus on something less obvious: the processes inherent in nature that provide benefits for people. READ MORE >>

via minnesota.publicradio.org

Fast Company: Portland, Seattle Duke It Out For World's Most Nature-Inspired Building

By Christopher Mims

Ever since the invention of the skyscraper, the contest between cities to see who could be home to the tallest building has had a symbolic potency on par with the space race. Now two of America's "greenest" cities are engaged in a whole new sort of architectural cage match, and in the process they're inverting the dated priorities of the profligate, fossil-fuel soaked 20th century and instead designing buildings based on the harmonious functioning of ecosystems.

Within weeks of each other, groups in both Seattle and Oregon announced that they were building the world's "greenest" office building. These structures go way beyond the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Gold standard, aiming instead for the much more stringent and results-oriented Living Building Standard.

The defining feature of the Living Building standard is that, true to its name, a building must behave like a living organism. And not just a wasteful, unsustainable individual, but an entire, self-contained ecosystem. A Living Building must produce all of the electricity it uses, and collect 100 percent of the water it consumes. Both requirements mean that a living building must be extremely efficient with both energy and water in addition to being especially good at collecting both.

So far only three buildings in the world have attained Living Building certification, in part because a structure's performance must be measured for a full year to establish its bona fides. So it will be some time until we know whether--and by what measure--Seattle or Oregon is home to the "world's greenest building."

Here are the contenders:

The Cascadia Center for Sustainable Design in Seattle will be six stories tall and include 50,000 square feet of usable space.

The Oregon Sustainability Center will include four different kinds of solar panels, including ones embedded in its windows that allow visible light to pass through while also generating electricity. READ MORE >>

via www.fastcompany.com

Inhabitat: Gensler's Irwin Miller on Sustainable Architecture and Opportunity Green

By Evelyn Lee

INHABITAT: We’ve covered several Gensler projects in the past on Inhabitat. As one of the largest architectural and design firms in the world, how does Gensler prioritize sustainability not only in their buildings but in the everyday operations of your offices.

Irwin: We think of great design as having four equally important parts: ethical practice, experiential design, thoughtful impact, and excellent delivery. Included in ethical practice is sustainability and the idea that you can’t create great design without it. This translates into our everyday office operations in many big and small ways. The really exciting sustainable operations are yet to come in our new office! We’ve worked closely with Glumac to get our energy usage as low as possible through the use of natural light, task lighting, and daylight sensors for overhead lights. We are using chilled beam technology for cooling instead of conventional forced air. All of our plumbing fixtures are very low-flow, and we’ve built showers to encourage the use of alternative transportation, and we offer a great rideshare incentive program. In fact, a key factor in our ultimate decision to relocate to downtown Los Angeles was the proximity of our new office a broader range of public transportation options. We also have recycling, green cleaning products, and paper with high recycled content. All of the vendors that visit our office are asked to share what’s green about their product, and we host weekly presentations that always include sustainable building materials, products, or technology. I could go on, but the bottom line is that we definitely practice what we preach when it comes to sustainability. READ FULL INTERVIEW>>

via inhabitat.com

Perkins+Will Research Journal looks at evidence-based design, information content of BIM & more

The latest issue of the excellent Perkins+Will Research Journal (Vol. 03.02) explores five diverse, thought-provoking topics: evidence-based design in healthcare; design of a modular student housing unit; analysis of information content in BIM; relationships between digital design and fabrication; and network challenges associated with BIM data sharing. Articles include:

“A Design-Based Approach to Collecting Evidence” – Diana Davis, Bowman Davis

Evidence Based Design (EBD) research analyzes the built environment through a very rigorous lens, one that takes its methodology from scientific protocol. Most environmental designers are not well versed in the utility of scientific methodology for demonstrating design efficacy, even though they employ a similar method of questioning.

“Performance-Driven Design and Prototyping” – Ming Tang, Ajla Aksamija, Michael Hodge, Jonathon Anderson

Discusses performance-driven design and fabrication as one of the emerging approaches in architectural design, where computational tools are used for integrated design exploration, analysis and fabrication.

“The Information Content of BIM” – Mario Guttman

The application of general information theory to pragmatic problems within the architecture, engineering, construction, owner and operator (AECOO) industry is explored in this article. Some basic principles about the nature of information and how it provides value are defined and applied to current issues in the use of building information modeling (BIM) and integrated project delivery (IPD) in design and construction.

To download the full issue, or individual articles, go here.

GreenTown Joplin: Sustainable and Healthy Disaster Recovery

By Nora DePalma

Nearly five years after a massive tornado leveled 95% of Greensburg, KS,  the town has become a living laboratory and a proving ground for emerging environmental technologies.

The non-profit  Greensburg GreenTown has been the educational resource for the community,  working side-by-side with city and county officials, business owners and local residents to incorporate sustainable principles into their rebuilding process, while also serving as a conduit through which donations can be distributed.

...

Now GreenTown is now taking its award-winning blueprint for natural disaster rebuilding to help an even larger city, Joplin Missouri, which suffered a similarly hideous EF5 tornado this past May.  The Green Earth PR Network has made a contribution to help  GreenTown Joplin in its efforts to:

• construct a series of eco-demonstration homes,
• establish eco-lodging for people that want to visit Joplin, and
• author a handbook to help guide future victims of natural disasters embrace a sustainable approach to recovery. READ MORE >>

via blog.greenearthpr.net

Architectural Record: Green Schools to Be Built With Donated Materials, Volunteers

By Scott Blair

An audacious plan is under way to build as many as 24 new schools in key markets across the U.S. solely through corporate funding, donated materials and volunteer labor.

Dubbed the Green Schoolhouse Series, the idea sprung from father-and-son team Marshall and Jeff Zotara, co-founders of Cause and Effect Evolutions, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based firm acting as organizer, project manager and public relations firm representing corporations and construction industry firms that have pledged financial or in-kind support for the school construction, estimated to cost more than $200 million in total.

Contractors broke ground this month on the inaugural $4-million schoolhouse, dubbed Safari, in west Phoenix. The 6,291-sq-ft building is being built for Roadrunner Elementary School, which serves 800 students and is—like the other schools to follow—an existing Title 1, low-income, public school campus. Future projects will range from 6,000 to 15,000 sq ft.

The schools are designed to achieve LEED-Platinum certification. "There are only two LEED-Platinum schools in the entire country, and they are both in wealthy communities," Jeff Zotara says. "We wanted to give something at the highest levels of sustainability to an underserved community." READ FULL ARTICLE>>

via archrecord.construction.com

The latest shade of green – zero energy use at TD Bank

PHOTO: Globe and Mail

By Erica Ruth Kelly

Since 1990, the Friends of the Environment Foundation at Toronto-Dominion Bank has helped fund more than 19,000 environmental projects with the aim of helping Canadian communities to reduce, reuse and recycle. Recently, TD added another “r” to this list: renovation.

In October, the bank unveiled a newly renovated branch in London, Ont., that is designed to produce as much energy as it uses. The solar panels at the retrofitted building will generate more than 100,000 kilowatt-hours of green electricity, the bank says.

The renovation follows TD’s construction of a new branch in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., which it says is the first ever “net-zero energy” building of its size in the retail world. Developing this branch, which has been open for five months, was an easy decision, says Roger Johnson, TD’s senior vice-president of enterprise real estate, since the bank had sufficient land to put the solar array on, and the state gets plenty of sunshine.

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The zero-energy principle is becoming more practical as traditional fossil fuels become more expensive, says architect Paul Dowsett, a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) accredited principal at Sustainable.TO, a Toronto firm dedicated to green design. The renovation should protect the building from the future rising costs of energy, he says. READ MORE >>

via www.theglobeandmail.com

New Information Curriculum Embodied in Building Design

Nice piece in Environmental Design + Construction on merging digital and information technology within Goody Clancy's design of the new Center for Informatics at Northern Kentucky University (NKU) outside Cincinnati.

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Griffin Hall is the new physical home of the College of Informatics and the centerpiece of Vision 2015, the northern Kentucky’s region’s 15-year strategic plan to bring together business and academia to strengthen the regional economy. 

The driving force of the program is the emerging integration of digital and information technology throughout the curriculum at NKU. Recognizing that business informatics and medical informatics are changing the very nature of human interaction, the program called for extracting traditional areas of study from their distinct academic “silos” and aggregating them in a central crossroads on campus.

The sustainable building solution, built for approximately $255 per square foot, features innovative materials and intelligent building systems (IBS) that align with the mission of integration and collaboration. The project was designed utilizing BIM (Building Information Modeling) across the entire team to represent the design and construction process in on-going and real-time three-dimensional representation.

“A sustainable building approach is part of NKU’s commitment to environmental stewardship,” said Rob Chandler, principal in charge of the project for Goody Clancy. “As architects and planners, we are committed to delivering highly responsive buildings with the very best tools and technologies available to us. NKU recognized that part of its ground-breaking approach to integrating information extended to the building itself. As a result, the building truly communicates with its systems and achieves higher efficiencies, lowers utility use, and reduces the University’s carbon footprint. ”

The George and Ellen Rieveschl Digitorium is the figural heart of Griffin Hall, comprising a two-story hall, embraced by the layered transparent skin of the Commons. The sweeping form acts as a forecourt to an L-shaped classroom and administrative wing. The Commons and the exterior of the Digitorium are illuminated by a dynamic assemblage of RGB LED lighting that is visible from the interior campus and west quad.  On the interior, the digitorium can be transformed into a reception space, high technology classroom, digital movie theater, recital hall, computer simulation center (for gaming, security, finances and other simulations), distance learning center, or a place for many other performance and teaching experiences. Eight “digital opera boxes” surrounding the central core also function as small breakout rooms. They feature computational equipment that allows for active, simultaneous engagement with building events and simultaneous display from all eight opera boxes on the 13’ x 25’ microtile wall. READ MORE >>

via www.edcmag.com

Living Buildings: Cladding buildings to help combat effects of climate change

The Earth Times reports on a different kind of 'living building': one that uses protocells to create a protective cladding for buildings:

By Michael Evans

As bizarre as it may seem, the University of Greenwich School of Architecture and Construction is poised to use ethical synthetic biology to create 'living' materials that could be used to clad buildings and help combat the effects of climate change.

Researchers from the University of Greenwich are collaborating with others at the University of Southern Denmark, the University of Glasgow and University College London to develop materials that could eventually produce water in desert environments or harvest sunlight to produce bio fuels.

Working with an architectural practice and a building materials manufacturer, research is taking place using protocells to fix carbon from the atmosphere or to create a coral-like skin, which could protect buildings. For those not in the know, protocells are made from droplets of oil in water that allow soluble chemicals to be exchanged between the drops and their surrounding solution.

Professor Neil Spiller, the new head of the University of Greenwich School of Architecture and Construction and himself a professional architect, is most enthusiastic about the use of protocells. Previously Vice Dean and graduate programme director at the University College London's Bartlett School of Architecture, he has been investigating their use for some time.

He said that the research team at Greenwich was currently looking at methods of using responsive protocells to clad cities in an ethical, green and sustainable way. A key feature was the desire to use ethical synthetic biology to create large scale, real world applications for buildings. READ MORE >>

via www.earthtimes.org

CNN's greenest buildings of 2011

Photos: CNN.com

Nice recap of some of the year's greenest buildings - receiving RIBA, Green Good Design and AIA COTE Top Ten Green Award recognition worldwide.

(CNN) -- Some house important corporate meetings; others are family homes. Some are gearing up to welcome top athletes while others open their doors to school children each day.

But all these buildings have one thing in common: This year they have won coveted architecture awards for innovative design and construction methods and for promoting sustainability.

CNN puts the global spotlight on a handful of buildings that have been recognized not only for their good looks but for their green credentials too.

Casa Locarno -- Locarno, Switzerland

Overlooking Lago Maggiore in Switzerland, Casa Locarno was designed by Designyougo and insulated to low energy standards. Instead of using conventional heating, solar collectors on the roof provide energy for the low temperature under-floor heating, as well as for hot water during most months of the year. READ MORE >>

Award: Green Good Design 2011

via edition.cnn.com

Coming Into the Country: Living Buildings in Alaska's Aleutian Islands

Teams from cities ranging from Hong Kong to Budapest, Brooklyn to Sarajevo, have accepted Cascadia Green Building Council’s challenge to design – and build – an affordable, energy-efficient home in one of the world’s most challenging environments.

Nearly 200 teams have signed up to design a small home on the Aleutian Islands that just might revolutionize how we build affordable housing. 

The winning design will be used to create a new home for Jimmy Prokopeuff, a 32-year-old Aleut man living in Atka, Alaska, whose current house is badly in need of replacement. But the true goal of the project is to re-envision sustainable, affordable housing in one of the world’s harshest locales.

The Living Aleutian Home Design Competition, hosted by Cascadia Green Building Council in partnership with the Aleutian Housing Authority, aims to inspire teams to bring the tenets and principles of the Living Building Challenge 2.0 ™, to Atka, an Aleutian Island that has been continuously occupied for more than 2,000 years.  Currently, Atka has a population of 61 people.

The Living Building Challenge dares the building industry and all inhabitants of the built environment to rethink how buildings are designed, how materials are sourced and how people interact with the built environment. The Aleutian Islands, often called ”the birthplace of the winds,” encompasses a 1,050-mile archipelago that is a treeless, windswept land of steep, high volcanoes, flower-strewn, moss-covered meadows and long, wide beaches.

Prokopeuff is an Alaska native, and more fortunate than many of his classmates, he found a good job in his hometown and is happy to remain. He is the production manager at the Atka Pride Seafood Plant, the community’s largest employer. He says he’s hopeful the plant will continue to thrive, with plans in the works for additional processing lines. Prokopeuff’s love for family and a passion for hunting and fishing make Atka the perfect place for him. Almost.

His living conditions are less than optimal. His small, ranch-style home was built by his father and grandfather shortly before he was born.  It is typical of any house built during that time – where comfort depended on cheap fossil fuel.  But heating oil shipped to Atka is no longer cheap. Given today’s prices of $6 to $8 a gallon, that can mean monthly heating bills of $600 in the heart of winter, which can last anywhere from four to six months.

“It is so expensive,” Prokopeuff says. “I am so excited for my new home. Everyone here is. It could change things.”

It could change things everywhere. The Living Aleutian Home Design contest challenges teams to create a prototype for affordable, sustainable residences in a rural community confronted with sky-high construction costs, an extreme climate and a pressing need for adopting alternative fuel strategies.

When it’s over, the Aleutian Housing Authority (AHA) will have a replicable design it can use in all 10 villages where the authority builds homes.  And it will help demonstrate to others, in rural areas everywhere, that there are ways to radically reduce energy consumption and make the switch to renewable energy, in safe, healthy, affordable homes, explains Mark Masteller, Alaska director for Cascadia.

“The Living Building Challenge deals with far more than energy, of course, but that’s the big driver in rural Alaska,” Masteller says. “With this competition, the AHA will be able to help scores of families, and it will stimulate progress among other builders, here and hopefully across the globe.”

Judging the contest are:

Dan Duame, Director at Aleutian Housing Authority
Sebastian Eckmann, Builder at Nordic Constructors
Jack Hebert, President/CEO at Cold Climate Housing Research Center
Bryan Mackay-Lyons, Principal at Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects
Jason McLennan, Architect and CEO at International Living Future Institute
Lauri Straus, Architect at kpb architects
Susan Szenasy, Editor-in-Chief at Metropolis Magazine

The first prize submission will receive a $35,000 cash prize and have the option to work with the AHA to bring the design to completion. The second-place winning entry will receive a $15,000 prize. Winners will be announced at Living Future 2012, Cascadia Green Building Council’s annual unConference, May 2-4 in Portland.

TED Prize Winner for 2012: The City 2.0

For the first time in the history of the prize, it is being awarded not to an individual, but to an idea. It is an idea upon which our planet’s future depends.

The 2012 TED Prize is awarded to….the City 2.0.

The City 2.0 is the city of the future… a future in which more than ten billion people on planet Earth must somehow live sustainably.

The City 2.0 is not a sterile utopian dream, but a real-world upgrade tapping into humanity’s collective wisdom.

The City 2.0 promotes innovation, education, culture, and economic opportunity.

The City 2.0 reduces the carbon footprint of its occupants, facilitates smaller families, and eases the environmental pressure on the world’s rural areas.

The City 2.0 is a place of beauty, wonder, excitement, inclusion, diversity, life.

The City 2.0 is the city that works.

The TED Prize grants its winner $100,000 and “one wish to change the world.”   How will this prize be accepted on behalf of the City 2.0? Through visionary individuals around the world who are advocating on its behalf. READ MORE >>

via www.tedprize.org

Edaphic Effects: Using geo-cells for stormwater capture and treatment

By Damian Holmes

A prevalent problem facing cities and regions is inadequate stormwater infrastructure. Sixteen billion gallons of raw sewage get dumped into Philadelphia’s rivers and streams each year after rain events. Because wet-weather flow is a dispersed problem, it has become increasingly clear that it requires a dispersed solution. Consequently, cities have started to explore alternatives for stormwater capture and treatment that are decentralized and incremental, rather than a system-wide upgrade. Individual lots in aggregate can have a significant impact on water quality. With funds being directed towards infrastructure rather than recreational or public space per se, we must explore creative ways to use infrastructural improvements as open space amenities.

This project explores the efficacy of customized substrates to develop alternatives to conventional on-site stormwater collection. Utilizing digital modeling and computer-controlled fabrication, we were testing whether or not manipulating geo-cells (three dimensional in-grade structures filled with gravel, soil or plants) can produce innovative infiltration features that combine their functional requirements with a visibly expressive surface that can add color, pattern and texture to vacant sites. Geo-cell configurations are currently limited by their uniform geometry. By varying the cellular shape, density and profile, we can fabricate them to produce a greater degree of variety and thus be more responsive to the opportunities of small urban sites. READ MORE >>

PHOTOS: World Landscape Architecture

via www.worldlandscapearchitect.com

Yale's Sustainable Food Project Links Cities with Farms

By Dorie Baker

“Cities can’t exist without farms,” says Mark Bomford, the newly appointed director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project.

A Canadian transplant, Bomford comes to Yale from the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he honed his vision of making a university the standard-bearer for raising the food consciousness of a growing population of city dwellers — an experience that should serve him well as he leads Yale’s comprehensive food program into its second decade.

At UBC, Bomford founded and managed the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems, a far-reaching and multi-faceted organization that includes a 60-acre “learning and research” farm — the last working farm in the city of Vancouver — and 150 academic and community programs linking people to their source of food and, through food, to each other.

...

Bomford sees land-based programs such as the one he created in Vancouver as providing a catalyst for change, in effect empowering people at the ground level to take control of their own food supply.

He is particularly interested in the phenomenon of urban agriculture, which he defines broadly to include “farms under the influence of urban growth, urban politics, and urban land values” — i.e., an interdependent network of farms and cities.

The irony of urban-influenced agriculture is that cities all over the world grew up where farmland was richest, and as those cities grew, they began to encroach on the very land that fed them, he says. “If you want to feed people in a dense city where there are more than 100 people living on every hectare [2.2 acres], you can’t escape the fact that on average it takes a half hectare of farmland to feed each person. … It’s pretty simple math. Cities can’t exist without farms.” READ MORE >>

via news.yale.edu

Redefining Sustainability at the MUSE School | Metropolis POV

By Sherin Wing

What is sustainable?  More to the point, what does the word mean when applied to a school? The MUSE school, founded by Suzy Cameron, offers some insight. The new campus in the Malibu hills opened with the help from Ecovations, a design firm that has re-envisioned the possibilities, indeed the very definition of sustainability. This is not an “expensive” or “faddish” place. At the Muse school, sustainable means healthy, integrative, and economically self-sufficient. The mission, according to Cameron, is to combine culture with sustainability and language and its name, Muse, which was her husband’s idea, epitomizes the philosophy of the school: inspiration. READ MORE >>

Treehouse.  Photo: Sherin Wing

via www.metropolismag.com

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: The Something Out of Something Design Contest

You may have seen Jakub Szczęsny’s Keret House, which made headlines well ahead of its 2012 unveiling as the slimmest house in the world. Appropriate for Etgar Keret: most of his short stories could fit on a cocktail napkin. If these stories moved a Polish architect to create a four-foot-wide house, what else might they inspire?

The gauntlet has been thrown. FSG Originals and BOMB Magazine present the Etgar Keret Something Out of Something Design Contest. Twenty-five finalists will be selected in March by judges from Farrar, Straus and Giroux; BOMB Magazine staff; and Keret himself. Finalists’ work will then be sold in a silent auction on April 29, 2012, with proceeds to benefit the PEN American Center. The winner will receive $500 and a signed and personalized copy of Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, and the winning piece will be featured in a Keret story or film. READ MORE >>

via www.fsgworkinprogress.com

Amplifying Creative Communities 2011 Northwest Brooklyn: The Opposing Designs of Urban Activism

This is the first in a 3-part series from Cameron Tonkinwise, sharing learnings from a two-year project from the New School's Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab. Amplifying Creative Communities, works to research, promote and amplify community-based solutions for sustainability.

By Cameron Tonkinwise

Compared to the first year of the Amplifying Creative Communities project, which took place in the Lower East Side, this second year's exhibition pays more attention to the stories of individuals who are fighting to materialize their innovations in Northwest Brooklyn (neighborhoods that include Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick). As Lara Penin, Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons the New School for Design and Co-curator of the exhibition and its workshops this November, notes, the narratives of heroically creative people, if you can find and capture them, are inspirational, and more appropriate to the United States' approach to social innovation.

What emerges from these stories is a rich picture of what it means to attempt change in dense urban contexts. They provide lessons for what a networked approach to social change demands, as opposed to Gillette's total designs and the competitive market's nondesigns:

There's not much room /
There's always space somewhere

There are lots of different kinds of cities, with different horizontal and vertical scales and densities, and within each of those cities are lots of different kinds of conditions. But in cities like New York, the number of people keen to be there means that nearly every square foot is programmed, usually with something expensive enough to deliver a growing return on investment to the owner. Further, what is there is invariably set in concrete, either literally, or, in the case of property rights, metaphorically. This means that urban change is difficult. Since there is no room to add onto the existing systems or structures, the task is one of 'unbuilding cities' (to use the nice title of a book), which is very difficult.

On the other hand, in a big city, there are often spaces that are neglected, either because the material is crumbling, or because they are between legal systems. These are often where motivated individuals site their experiments to change the city. This is the whole tradition of urban community gardens in New York City—that is where the Amplify Project began its research in the Lower East Side in 2010. In northwest Brooklyn, the waterways afford these kind of transition spaces: one story told in the Amplify exhibition is of an innovative photovoltaic system installer which operates from a series of boats set up as a co-working space by the marina owner interested in fostering the creative class.

via www.core77.com

Green Intelligence Forum: Creating the Sustainable City of the Future

The Atlantic is currently hosting the fourth-annual Green Intelligence Forum: Creating the Sustainable City of the Future, once again bringing together the world's leading authorities on energy and the environment for two days of dynamic conversation on the issues at the forefront of sustainable thought. On the first day, the Forum will explore macro trends in energy and the environment, including discussions on both national and global policy and sustainable business.  The following day, the event will examine green intelligence through the framework of sustainable cities. Expert panels will engage in key dialogue on topics including energy infrastructure, green building, and clean transportation

The Lexicon of Sustainability

The Lexicon of Sustainability is an amazing, creative website focused on multi-faceted issues of food and sustainability: food security, permaculture, urban gardening and more. Created by Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton, the site reflects their ongoing work on the Lexicon project "by illuminating the vocabulary of sustainable agriculture, and with it, the conversation about America’s rapidly evolving food culture...to educate, engage and activate people to pay closer attention to how they eat, what they buy, and their responsibility for creating a healthier, safer food system in America."

Alice Waters on edible schoolyards.  Wes Jackson on reinventing wheat farming.  Joel Salatin on embracing the value of saner farming practices.  Vandana Shiva on the global imperative of protecting seeds.  Paul Stamets on how mushrooms can save the world.  Will Allen on Food Security.  Temple Grandin on the humane slaughter of animals.  Farmer John on the revolutionary idea of community-supported agriculture.

Well worth a look!

Inside The Ecological Engineer: Glumac - Profile of Mercy Corps Headquarters

Inside my latest book, The Ecological Engineer: Glumac. An in-depth look at the LEED Platinum Mercy Corps Headquarters (Portland, OR) that highlights use of daylighting, natural ventilation, an energy-efficient facade and alternative energy technologies - one of a dozen short project profiles throughout this new monograph.

Open publication - Free publishing

A College Town Imagines a New Way of Life

By Scott Carlson

This northern Ohio college town is barely a blip on a map, far away from national centers of power. And yet people here are working on a plan that could make it a model for fundamentally reshaping the American economy and its society.

The architect of the plan is David W. Orr, a professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College. More than a decade ago, he helped inspire a "green building" trend when he dreamed up the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, which remains one of the greenest college buildings in the country.

Now he wants to expand that vision to Oberlin and its surrounding area. The Oberlin Project, as it's called, joins town and gown to create a resilient community for a post-fossil-fuel era. When asked to describe the project, Mr. Orr conjures a picture of life in Oberlin—a city of 8,000 residents and students, 40 miles outside of Cleveland—many years into the future: The town and the college would be powered by renewable energy, with a smattering of new and renovated green buildings at the town's core—the first among them paid for by the college. A "greenbelt" of farms would pump food, wood, and fiber into the city, while a steady stream of money from the college and small businesses, like restaurants and furniture manufacturers, would flow back out to the farms. The college, the local community college, the local vocational school, and the city's elementary and secondary schools would rejigger their programs to prepare students to live in the future: a world short on oil, wracked by unstable weather, relying increasingly on sustainable design, regional industries, and local know-how. The town itself would be a laboratory for a new way of life. READ MORE >>

via chronicle.com

Timelapse: Urban | Digital Urban

Cool video shot by cinematographer Chris Scarafile using a Bolex with intervalometer - via digitalurban.org.

Chris Scarafile Time Lapse - Urban from Chris Scarafile on Vimeo.

Detroit: rejuvenation through urban farms, sustainable living and innovation | Guardian Sustainable Business

By Leon Kaye

After visiting Detroit for the first time in 17 years, my first jarring impression of the city was the silence. Wide boulevards approaching downtown Detroit were bereft of cars. Once stately neighbourhoods laden with enormous houses emitted no sounds except for my footsteps. What was once the roaring Motor City, it seemed to me, had been reduced to a mumble.

But that initial snapshot belies what is occurring at the grassroots as Detroit's people work hard not only to survive, but to revive their city and even thrive. The hurdles are enormous. Automakers will always be part Detroit's fabric, but not as the reliable economic and jobs engine that they had been for a century. And for a city that has lost more than one million residents since 1950, the leadership has decided that demolition and deconstruction are behind the city's survival. To that end, 10,000 homes are to be torn down in the coming years.

Nevertheless, there is more than just demolition in Detroit. Families who have lived there for generations, as well as recent transplants, are taking back their city with their own hands. Old Detroit still offers a stunning collection of art deco architecture, a museum with a billion-dollar art collection, and a solid manufacturing infrastructure.

Now, all of it will be embedded in an environment that offers both the urban and the rural. And it is the rural, built with those determined hands, that could change our conceptions of what a city is. Detroit will be model for ageing cities and towns looking for a redefinition. READ MORE >>

via www.guardian.co.uk

CIRS opens as North America’s greenest building

Green roof on other side of wall made of glass and solid panels which create light and shade for optimum climate.
Photo: Martin Dee

The University of British Columbia has opened the most sustainable building in North America, a $37-million “living laboratory” that will help to regenerate the environment and advance research and innovation on global sustainability challenges.

The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) is one of only a handful of buildings worldwide that will provide “net positive” benefits to the environment. It reduces UBC’s carbon emissions, powers itself and a neighboring building with renewable and waste energy, creates drinking water from rain and treats wastewater onsite.

CIRS will be an international centre for research, partnership and action on sustainability issues, including green building design and operations, environmental policy and community engagement. Researchers will study users’ interactions with the facility to improve building performance, maximize the happiness, health and productivity of its inhabitants and advance best green building practices at UBC and beyond.

CIRS inside and out
Photo: Don Erhardt   

Quick facts about CIRS:

• Natural lighting: CIRS’ U-shape design maximizes natural daylight and fresh air for inhabitants, who control their environment (light levels, temperature) with their computers.  
• Flexible workspaces: With power, data and ventilation under modular floorboards (instead of through walls or ceilings) at each workspace, offices can be reconfigured overnight.
• Green IT: CIRS has no desktop computers or servers guzzling energy. Inhabitants “remote access” into desktops, drives and servers, which are stored “in the cloud” instead.
• Psychology: One of many research projects is a study of CIRS’ influence on thoughts and behaviors and science-based methods for encouraging people to act sustainably. 

CIRS’ “net positive” environmental impacts:

• Energy: By capturing energy from the sun, the ground and the nearby Earth and Ocean Sciences (EOS) building, CIRS heats itself and returns 600 megawatt hours of surplus energy back to campus.
• Operational carbon: CIRS’ operations require no fossil fuel and the surplus energy CIRS returns to EOS removes an additional 150 tonnes of GHG emissions annually through reduced natural gas use.
• Structural carbon: CIRS’ wood structure locks in more than 500 tonnes of carbon, offsetting GHG emissions from non-renewable materials used in the building’s construction, including cement, steel and aluminum.
• Water: CIRS will satisfy the water needs of 200 inhabitants, plus hundreds of auditorium and café users, by capturing rain and treating it onsite. Water that can’t be used for drinking will recharge the local aquifer.

READ MORE >>

CIRS at UBC
Photo: Don Erhardt