Green ArchiTEXT

Data Centers Aiming for Net Zero

By Michael Welton

"The cloud” gives a lighter-than-air spin to all our connectivity and data sifting. In reality, they consume energy like there’s no tomorrow. Next-generation data centers aim to fix that.

Data centers are changing. And that can’t happen too soon. “These buildings use an enormous amount of power,” says Gensler’s Bernie Woytek. “We’re talking millions of kilowatts per year—it really adds up.” After one data center client recently consolidated into a single new facility, its firstyear savings in electrical power was $14 million. The trends for future data centers are clear, says Woytek’s colleague Joe Lauro: “Smaller, more compact, and aggressively energy-efficient.”

So how do you get there? READ MORE >>

via Gensler Dialogue

A Manifesto for Rejuvenative Technology: Sustainable Stewardship, Nature Mimicking Designs

By Joss Tantram

Rejuvenative technologies are behaviours and technologies that support, borrow from, utilise, work alongside or benefit from the Earth’s natural productive capacity. They may include recognised sustainable stewardship and production techniques, nature mimicking design, sustainable and net positive biological production, or the as yet emerging “lifelike” natural manufacture.

Our economy, our engineering and our technology must become both explicitly and inherently rejuvenative, to make a manifest contribution to the abundance, vitality and productive capacity of natural capital upon which they rely. Such an approach has a number of obvious benefits: READ MORE>>

via www.sustainablebrands.com

Work (As) Performance: Gensler's LEED Platinum L.A. Office Shines (VIDEO)

WORK (AS) PERFORMANCE from Gensler LA on Vimeo.

Nice video of Gensler's downtown Los Angeles office, a LEED Platinum showplace of sustainable design that completely rethinks the workplace environment. The new space features daylighting and high-efficiency lighting, chilled beams and sails for heating and cooling, sun shades, displacement ventilation and much more.

Australia's National Awards for Sustainable Architecture Sets a New Benchmark for High-Rise Development

1 Bligh Street, Sydney — architectus + ingenhoven architects

The jury said:

"The office development at 1 Bligh Street, Sydney was designed to achieve a 6 Star Green Star rating and a 5-star National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) rating, incorporating a number of innovative environmental strategies. It sets a new benchmark for sustainable high-rise commercial developments in Australia.

The proposal was developed with four critical considerations: view, public space, work environment and green building status.

Designed around the principles of flexibility, efficiency and communication, the building features a naturally ventilated glass atrium that runs the full height of the building, enhancing workplace connectivity while introducing natural light and ventilation.

The fully glazed double-skin facade is a major contributor to the Green Star rating and has been specifically developed to optimise amenity for the occupants, maintaining views while providing optimum daylight levels and solar control. The facade system includes an inner skin of performance glass, automated ventilated blinds and an outer skin of clear glass that is separated by a naturally ventilated accessible cavity. In addition to the facade and atrium, the development includes recycled concrete, steel with 50 percent recycled content, recycled timber, solar cooling, tri-generation systems, black water treatment, rainwater harvesting and sewer mining." READ MORE >>

via www.architectureanddesign.com.au

Autodesk's Dawn Danby on Life-Cycle Thinking (VIDEO)

Designer Dawn Danby of Autodesk explores life-cycles thinking as a design principle (via The Designers Accord)

Adding creativity to the engineering mix

By Philip King

How do you think the rest of the world perceives engineers? Are we seen as imaginative, dynamic or creative? I fear not. Rather, we are seen as decidedly unexciting characters, uninspiring even and, perhaps, most distressing considering our combined and collective achievements over hundreds of years, as nerdy and dull. Is this the fault of the media or the scientific, mathematical bent of our work?

So many words in our language which describe the intelligent and dedicated carry a whiff of the derogatory — boffin, egghead, and so on. Engineering is a fact-and-figure-based subject which demands patience and perseverance. It is also wide ranging, covering anything from fixing washing machines to enabling space travel. So unless Hollywood casts an engineer as the next action hero, we are unlikely to change our reputation in the imminent future.

Fame is not everything, but what does worry me is that our public image is a deterrent to a vast reserve of potential talent. We are not attracting those more creative, free-thinking minds that I believe our industry needs, and it seems there is little we can do to tackle that situation. So instead, we need to teach all those wonderful young mathematicians and scientists how to engage the right side of the brain — the creative side — and bring imagination and lateral thinking to the future of engineering.

But why do we need creativity, when our work requires the full command of digits and angles? Sustainability is the answer. For the last 10 years, we have been designing new buildings to perform better environmentally than ever before. The problem is that new buildings make up such a tiny proportion of the built environment and deliver only marginal improvements. We need to focus on the 99% of our buildings which are existing, old stock, and where making improvements is much more challenging. READ MORE >>

via www.modbs.co.uk

GreenSource: The Nutritional Life of Buildings

The ongoing dialogue about the environmental and health impacts of building products – an important new addition to the push for transparency from BuildingGreen, Inc.

By Alex Wilson

When you buy a box of Cheerios at the supermarket, you know exactly what's in it: each ingredient; the number of calories in a serving; grams of sugar, fat, and protein; milligrams of sodium; and so forth. You also get some sense of what this means for your health—from those "percent daily values" in the nutrition facts box.

Why isn't this sort of information available for the products going into our buildings? We live or work with those building products for years or decades, spending an average of 90 percent of our time indoors. We're not literally eating our building materials, of course, but we would like to know if there's something in the paint, carpeting, or composite countertop that might harm us or the environment. Why can't we get that information?

We can, and we should. The move toward transparency is all about making this information readily available, to help everyone in the industry make more informed choices.

A growing piece of the movement toward "nutrition labels" for building products are environmental product declarations (EPDs), which are designed to inform us about the life-cycle environmental characteristics of products. READ MORE >>

via greensource.construction.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

Rutgers professor uses lichen to help cities go green

Elizabeth Demaray, an associate professor of fine arts, is cultivating lichen on the sides of New York City skyscrapers to counteract the lack of native vegetation found in the city. Her "Lichen for Skyscrapers Project" was featured as part of New York's Art in Odd Places Festival from Oct. 1-10 and is currently on view as a site-specific installation on 14th Street between Union Square Park and the Hudson River.

"Metropolitan centers figure into local temperatures in an interesting way," Demaray says. "They are sometimes referred to as 'urban heat islands' because they create heat and they trap heat. A large part of this process is due to the materials that we build with and the actual architecture of the buildings that we create."

Demaray says one of the ways to reduce heat in these cities is to cultivate lichen, which forms a protective barrier, insulating its supporting building from harmful elements. It can lower cumulative temperatures by absorbing sunlight and reflecting heat due to its light color palate while making oxygen and creating green space on the sides of buildings. READ MORE >>

via www.physorg.com