Green ArchiTEXT

House of the Rising Sun: In New Orleans, Solar Power Gives Poor Families a Boost

By Brentin Mock

The headquarters of the solar-energy company Sustainable Environmental Enterprises is a green oddity in this rough part of New Orleans’ Central City neighborhood. The butterfly-winged roof and lopsided, Lego building design, complete with a money green paint job, fits anything but neatly in this residential neighborhood where run-down shotgun-style houses are strewn amidst blighted properties.

Economic development and political power may have overlooked this community in favor of tourist magnets like the French Quarter, but SEE CEO Lea Keal, 32, and board chairman Stacey Danner, 37, see only opportunity in helping develop this community and others like it by providing access to solar power.

SEE provides financing to low-income residents to lease and eventually purchase solar energy equipment that is otherwise cost-prohibitive. Though they're getting cheaper, solar panels and mounts can still cost as much as $25,000, and that’s before you get to installation and maintenance. For that price, you’re not going to find too many solar customers in a city like New Orleans, where there are almost as many households with incomes below $75,000 (76 percent, according to 2010 Census figures) as homes that were submerged below floodlines after Katrina (80 percent).

Only a small percentage of wealthy families can afford to buy or get a loan for solar. “Before this, people needed either equity in their homes or sparkling credit to get solar,” says Darren Davis, 53, SEE's executive director of business development. Thanks in part to a $1 million loan from California-based Adam Capital this past fall, SEE is changing that equation.

Homeowners using solar power reap huge savings from cheap, clean energy—savings that poor families desperately need. “It’s expensive to be poor, and nowhere is that truer than in energy,” says John Moore, a former energy policy analyst under Mayor Ray Nagin who now does consulting work for SEE. “[If you are poor], you likely live in an energy-inefficient home, and your energy bills are higher than normal.” READ MORE >>

via www.good.is

RMI: Transforming America’s Built Environment (Video)

Slick new video from the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) promoting its Reinventing Fire initiative:

By Rebecca Cole

Reinventing Fire identifies how America’s buildings could use 19 percent less energy in 2050—despite 70 percent more floorspace—simply by aggressively adopting today’s building efficiency techniques and design strategies.

Watch now, and learn:

• How savvy building owners and entrepreneurs can capture a $1.4 trillion opportunity by building efficiency into their core business.
• How integrative design makes big saving cheaper by revealing smarter ways to design an entire building and all its interacting systems together—further raising energy savings to over two-thirds of buildings’ officially projected 2050 energy use.
• How smart policies, standards and codes to accelerate energy efficiency deliver many benefits that can make business operations easier and unlock more opportunity.
• How a successful energy efficiency revolution could revitalize the real-estate sector, create jobs, and help to rejuvenate the national economy.

via blog.rmi.org

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