Green ArchiTEXT

Quest for Zero: A Big Marin County Home Creates as Much Energy as it Consumes

Can JUST label bring social justice to building materials? | GreenBiz.com

By Molly Miller

What is the human toll for our purchases? Do the organizations we support care about their employees? Do they support the local community? How is their money invested?

These are some unanswered questions leaders in green building design say we have not addressed as we have developed ways of evaluating green buildings through certifications, such as the International Living Future Institute's Living Building Challenge (LBC) and the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification.

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At the Living Future's annual conference last week in Seattle, Jason McLennan and BNIM founder Bob Berkebile launched the JUST label, an extension of the Declare label that addresses social justice and equity issues, such as as diversity, worker rights, health care and employee happiness, occupational safety and stewardship practices, including investments and community involvement.

Both Declare and JUST are part of a push for greater transparency for products materials in green buildings. READ MORE >>

via www.greenbiz.com

Zygote Quarterly: Why Don't Solar Panels Look Like Trees?

Gensler's CAPACITY Imagines a More Sustainable Future for LA's Infrastructure (VIDEO)

CAPACITY, the Gensler Los Angeles led academic studio at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, was created with the intent to survey, understand and visualize the dynamic set of infrastructure constraints impacting and contributing to Downtown Los Angeles’ capacity to evolve. The video above highlights the documentation and synthesizing done by the SLO_GenLA ’13 Professional studio which shows the capacity of Los Angeles’ infrastructure and demonstrates how the limits of each system may physically impact the future built form of the city.

One Planet Living's Grow Community Bainbridge Welcomes First Residents

The first One Planet Living residents in the U.S. have moved in to the Grow Community near Seattle, endorsed as a One Planet Community by BioRegional only last year. A young couple and their two dogs are living in the first Net Zero Home, working closely with developer Asani to monitor their progress toward Zero Carbon living in the home. READ MORE >>



via growbainbridge.com

 

Recycled Resource Systems Help Build Sustainable Cities [My Ideal City]

Engineers and architects are rethinking the current design of architectural and environmental infrastructure, in favor of regenerative systems that are capable of harnessing wasted energy and resources and redistributing them where needed. Whether converting the kinetic energy from foot traffic into electricity or recycling grey water for other residential uses, these closed-loop recycled resource systems help deliver greater efficiencies that lower resource consumption and cut back on costs.

Gary Hack, a celebrated urban planner with experience directing large-scale revitalization projects like NYC’s West Side highway and Rockefeller Park at Battery Park City in lower Manhattan, has most recently lent his expertise to a crowdsourced plan in Bogota, Colombia called MyIdealCity. He believes that the future of urban planning is in recycled resource systems:

The term ‘waste’ is a social label. Waste only exists when we don’t know what to do with resources. Finding new ways to use every bit of energy and resources that find their way into the city can lead to a new economy.

READ MORE >>

via www.psfk.com

The Evolution of Biomimicry | ARCADE

By Allison Kudla

Bio Design by William Meyers surveys recent design and art projects that harness living materials and processes, presenting bio-integrated approaches to achieving sustainability, innovations enabled by biotechnology, and provocative experiments that deliberately illustrate the dangers and opportunities of manipulating life for human ends. 

Bio-light. Gas chambers filled with bioluminescent bacteria. Part of Microbial Home—a prototype design project by Jack Mama, Clive van Heerdan and Phillips Design, Netherlands. The design concept is for a series of biodevices for the home aimed at creating an ecosystem for filtering, processing and recycling wastewater, sewage and garbage. Image courtesy of Philips Design.

As the first publication to focus on this new phenomenon and closely examine how it fits into the history of architecture, art and industrial design, this volume surveys this shift and contextualizes it through comparisons to previous historic transitions in art and design practices, clarifying its implications for the future.

What inspired you to write Bio Design: Art + Science + Creativity?

I was inspired through studying the history of architecture and design at the School of Visual Arts in the master’s program in design criticism. My thesis project, which I developed with the help of the faculty and with the input of fellow students, became the basis for the book. Also, I was inspired by my own discoveries while becoming an amateur brewer and baker, in learning how to utilize yeast to make my own bread and mead.

One could say that human beings have been altering nature for centuries. However, biodesign brings to the forefront the idea that now is a unique time in human history for these types of interactions. What reasons might there be for a paradigm shift in this direction at this moment in time?

I think there are two factors driving this shift that are most important: The first is that frequent and fundamental advancements are occurring in the field of biology. READ MORE >>

via arcadenw.org

Andrew Oswald on the Economics of Happiness

Popular Mechanics: How to Build a Greener Office Building - Seattle's Bullitt Center

By Tim Newcomb

Seattle's new Bullitt Center—which will house eco-conscious tenants such as the International Living Future Institute and the University of Washington Integrated Design Lab—is the brainchild of Bullitt Foundation president Denis Hayes. He's the guy who coordinated the first Earth Day, which, not surprisingly, will serve as the grand opening date for the center. Hayes spent more than two years sourcing materials for the office building as part of his attempt to build the largest structure to qualify for the Living Design Challenge.

The solar panels dangling over the downtown Seattle sidewalks and the composting toilets on the sixth floor have gotten most of the publicity as the Bullitt Center has grown skyward. But there's more to sustainability for a 50,000-square-foot structure than net-zero energy usage (check), onsite wastewater treatment (check, check), and harvesting rainwater (check, check, check): The builders have tried to filter out all toxic chemicals from the construction process. Here's how. READ MORE >>

via www.popularmechanics.com

Is This the Google of Green Building?

By Andrew Heaton

Once upon a time, the average office worker was able to find out whether or not his or her building was LEED certified and to what level (if they even understood what that meant), but finding out anything useful in plain English such as why it is or isn’t energy or water efficient and whether the daylight or indoor air quality is any good has been difficult.

Now, however, that is changing. Using a new tool developed by the US Green Building Council  (USGBC) referred to as the Green Building Information Gateway – essentially a search engine for green building – anyone will be able to find out what energy/water savings measures are in place, whether or not building materials have been obtained from sustainable sources, what aspects of the building make air quality and cleanliness excellent or not so good as the case may be, and lots more. READ MORE >>

via designbuildsource.ca