Green ArchiTEXT

Bob Berkebile: On a Changing Climate & the Next Big Thing(s) in Green Architecture

By Martin C. Pedersen

The green building movement doesn’t have one founder—it has several. One of them, without question, is Bob Berkebile, a founding principal at BNIM in Kansas City. In the 1990s Berkebile was part of the small circle of architects, designers and businesspeople who helped create the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program. He served as a delegate at the Earth Summit in Rio. Later, he took certification a step further and created (with Jason McLennan) the Living Building Challenge, a vigorous standard that exceeds LEED Platinum and serves as both aspiration and model. 

My conversation with Berkebile is the second installment in The Next Building Environment Today series, a collaboration between Metropolis magazine and Architecture 2030. Each month I interview an internationally recognized leader in the green building movement. Here Berkebile talks about the recent Bank of America controversy, his new concept of Urban Acupuncture, early efforts in China, and the Architecture 2030 Palette:

Martin C. Pedersen: You followed the controversy surrounding the Bank of America building in New York. What was your take on the New Republic article accusing the building of being an energy hog?

Bob Berkebile: I don’t know all the facts, but the early responses suggest that it’s being compared unfavorably to the Empire State, but that’s still relatively empty and Bank of America is full. Again, I don’t know the facts. What I do know is, when a system is undergoing change—and I would argue that LEED has created more change in our industry than any other single thing in my professional career—when that amount of change occurs, there are always pushbacks. Several months ago US Today did two feature articles, saying that LEED is broken. When you look at the overall energy numbers, buildings have improved significantly. But the LEED system, as it has matured, is a like a natural system. Are you familiar with the S-curve that defines the vitality over time of a natural system?

MCP: No.

BB: It’s a very interesting. Let’s take, for example, an oak forest. You have an X- and Y-axis. The vertical is vitality; the horizontal is time. You plant an acorn, and initially that s-curve is below the line, because it’s taking nutrients, taking resources from the soil, water and sun, and not producing anything. As it becomes a tree, then it starts being productive. It’s sequestering carbon, managing water, sharing nutrients with other plant systems.  As time goes forward that S turns up and becomes a steep incline as it increases its contribution and vitality. Then as the forest matures and gets to the climax phase, the line starts bending down again. So the graph looks like an S on its side. Then what happens in a natural system is something modifies it, like fire, and that regenerates the forest, and restarts the S-curve. That might be where we’re at in the green building movement. READ MORE >>

via www.metropolismag.com

Picturing Failure, Sketching Dreams: Liz Diller's Creative Process

By Ellen Gamerman

When coming up with the design for the High Line, an urban park on an abandoned section of elevated railroad in New York, architect Elizabeth Diller and her colleagues started with a question: What would failure look like?

The architects realized they'd fall short if they ignored the weeds and other wild plantings that had taken root around the tracks, brought there from seeds swept off passing cars and scattered by the wind. The mix of concrete and greenery is now the centerpiece of the park, a collaboration with the design firm James Corner Field Operations.

Thanks to their vision for the High Line and other projects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the firm Ms. Diller founded with her fellow architect and husband Ricardo Scofidio, is shouldering a new spate of high-profile jobs. This summer, it won the international competition to design billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad's new museum in downtown Los Angeles. Ms. Diller and her team are also working on the "Bubble," an inflatable temporary event space that will bulge over the top of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., like a giant souffle. READ MORE >>

via online.wsj.com

John Maeda: Laws of Simplicity for Design and Business

Peter Busby: Green to the Core

By Graham Livesey

Since the publication of his project "A House for the 1980s" in the October 1980 issue of The Canadian Architect, Peter Busby--then still working in Norman Foster's office in London--has made his mark on Canadian architecture, pursuing his architectural vision with singular determination. The house, influenced by Foster, Buckminster Fuller, and Charles and Ray Eames, was a work inspired by High-Tech Modernism with a strong emphasis on prefabrication and environmental responsiveness. In 2009, Peter Busby celebrated 25 years of practice, during which he transitioned from a small office to join forces with the fourth-largest architectural practice in North America. Some may see his joining the US firm Perkins + Will as a questionable move, but it is in fact a natural progression, one that demonstrates Busby's evolving skills and his response to expanding opportunities, and also reflects significant changes occurring across the industry.

...

Busby has always sought to achieve innovation, and has had a longstanding commitment to research (including 4% of the bottom line invested in research) in his practice. Today, the firm's research group comprises six members of his staff and is growing, providing internal services to the firm in terms of researching products, materials and systems. They also act as a semi-independent consulting group providing expertise to a range of clients. Kathy Wardle, an Associate Principal at Busby Perkins + Will and the Director of Research, has been with the Busby practice since 2002. Trained in environmental and resource management, she directs the research efforts of the firm, and is a co-chair of the SDI program. With increasing demands to understand biology, ecology, chemistry and mechanics, the research group provides vital expertise and is reminiscent of the interdisciplinary "environmental design" model pioneered in the 1960s. Again, the investment in research is something that needs to be more widely spread thoughout the architecture, development and construction industries. Interdisciplinarity is key to the Busby Perkins + Will approach, particularly the integration of advanced engineering into the projects' designs from initial conception.

 

via www.canadianarchitect.com

Bob Berkebile: On Responsible Design, LIving Buildings and Restorative Communities

The latest issue of Cascadia's terrific Trim Tab magazine features an interview with Bob Berkebile of BNIM. See "Bob Berkebile: A true pioneer in the sustainability movement".

Bruce Mau's Massive Change: A Design Manifesto

From Bilt Magazine:

Too often we ignore homegrown heroes for those who were born further afield, reared on fairy dust and magical fruit and who must have something better.

BILT doesn’t believe in fairies and so is giving a whoop-whoop where it’s due, to Bruce Mau, a northern Ontario boy who’s is talking revitalization of his hometown of Sudbury, while dabbling in a little redesign of Mecca and changing the face of the planet one visionary project at a time.

From Mau's 1998 “Incomplete Manifesto to Growth”:

1. Allow events to change you.
2. Forget about good.
3. Process is more important than outcome.

...and 40 more tips...

via avnerd.tv

Toward an Architecture of Place

By Fred Kent, President, Project for Public Spaces

Good design involves much more than making bold and innovative aesthetic impressions; design should help people find solutions to the major urban issues confronting the world today – from environmental destruction to economic decline to social alienation. The current economic slump provides opportunities to emerge armed with bold design innovations that can be used to strengthen local communities and economies and establish a new kind of architecture rooted in a sense of place and the mission to help improve people’s lives.

The most successful cities are being defined by their public destinations, which presents a major challenge and opportunity for design today. Examples of these public destinations are Bryant Park and Central Park in New York City and Lower Downtown in Denver, and are found in cities like Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Melbourne.

The best public destinations are defined by the local community. Nearly every city can point to at least one success story in which determined residents, guided by the principles of place making or creating great places, have made a difference in their hometowns.

via www.pps.org

Malcolm Wells, an architect ahead of his time, dies

Malcolm Wells, the visionary Cherry Hill architect who died Nov. 27 at 83, was considered a crackpot in 1964 when he gave up lucrative commissions for the RCA Corp., and began advocating underground buildings with earth-friendly sod roofs. But he lived long enough to see some of his most radical ideas become standard practice.

via www.philly.com

Art Like Earth Like Architecture: Biomimicry on a Grander Scale?

CREDIT: ALOS/ESA                                         CREDIT: Aqua/MODIS/NASA
CREDIT: EO-1/NASA

Amazing photos found on guardian.co.uk taken by the European Space Agency and NASA. Gives new meaning to the ideas of "Earth Architecture". (top left) The Tanezrouft basin, in the Sahara desert, south-central Algeria, (top right) Fires burned along the coast of Queensland, Australia, and (above) Caldera on the southern end of Onekotan Island, located off the southern tip of Russia's Kamchatka peninsula.

See all 19 photos at “Satellite eye on Earth: October”.

Return to IslandWood

I was pleasantly surprised to come across a “Virtual Tour of IslandWood” posted recently on Mithun Inc.’s blog. This may be one of the greenest, restorative, 255 acres on the planet. IslandWood is more than just an environmental education center; it’s an experience in design: integrated, biophilic, educational, transformational. The slideshow recaps the visit made by a group of ‘Mithunees’ in July, from IslandWood’s ‘entrance sequence’ out front and throughout the heavily-wooded site.

Even after seven years, IslandWood stands out as one of our best examples of green design, a place I was privileged to visit for nearly a full day while writing Integrated Design: Mithun. As described in "IslandWood, A Light in the Forest", the center’s very concept was experimental, with Mithun’s design process a mix equally of exploration and collaboration. Overarching goals for the project included:

• Protection of the entire property through environmentally-intelligent design
• Best practices in environmental education for a state-of-the-art facility
• Buildings that function as interactive learning tools
• Connections to nature

Located only a few miles from downtown Seattle on Bainbridge Island, IslandWood is both a return to another time and a glimpse of a possible future. In addition to the six-acre campus of buildings (3 of them LEED Gold), the site features a solar meadow, living machine, tree house, PV arrays, and healthy use of sustainable design strategies for daylighting, rainwater collection, natural ventilation, recycled materials, and more.

For more on IslandWood, see Mithun’s IslandWood and “A Light in the Forest”.