Archives For LEED

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The Evolving Sustainable Building Standard

Well building standard[Editor’s Note: Below is a guest post from Jessica Glicker. Currently a Brooklyn resident, Jessica is the Special Projects Coordinator at COOKFOX Architects and a LEED Accredited Professional.]

As environmental standards for the built environment continue to become increasingly relevant and more frequently pursued, the once small pool of available building certifications has grown into a plethora of tools each with slightly different goals and degrees of intensity. This surge in options can help broaden the lens of sustainability and allow many different groups of professionals to simultaneously research, pursue and refine criteria for sustainable improvement. At the same time, a growing breadth of acronyms, ratings, points and authorities can run the risk of confusing potential participants from understanding the benefit of such certifications and also keeping the pool of programs transparent and legitimate. The tempering of market recognition with innovation is a careful yet important balance that needs to be explored with new systems that help keep our methods on pace with our capability. Continue Reading…

Cultural 
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Don’t Plan to Affect Performance, Mandate Performance

international green construction codeIf the goal is to limit the overcrowding of cars on the street, is it a better solution to dilute density in order to spread people out or to foster the ability for more people to carry out more of their day via alternative transit? Is the best way to avoid excessive signage and light pollution to forcibly segregate all commercial program or might it be easier to simply regulate sizes for signage and candlepower for lighting? In an effort to limit the amount of cooking odors disturbing nearby residences, would it make more sense to remove proximity of all retail business or to set standards for the design and location of cooking exhaust?

Questions like these draw into focus the difference between two mindsets for planning and design, prescriptively restrictive vs. performative. The deeper question is whether it makes more sense to guide design and development by prescribing solutions with an (educated) guess as to how they may perform over time or by simply setting standards for testing how things should actually perform? While the former has proven to be easier for governing bodies in many cases, the latter can be built on what we actually have rather than an idea of what could occur. Continue Reading…

Political 
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Is LEED v4 Better or just Newer?

USGBC version 4Although the latest incarnation of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system has been around for almost a year, projects have still be able to enjoy the more familiar likeness of LEED 2009. However, the window of time for the grace period of the system transition continues to close with all new projects needing to apply for LEED v4 after June 2015. As designers and engineers begin to focus more on the effects of the imminent change ahead, it begs the question as to whether or not the system is simply changing or actually improving. Continue Reading…

Political 
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Transforming the D.C. Navy Yards with Transit Oriented Development

Existing Navy Yard BuildingAs one of the country’s oldest cities Washington has a lot to see and, as a result, a lot one can miss. Amidst the migrating swarms of people milling around for the 4th of July festivities, the nation’s capital recently provided me with some top quality dining, refreshing beverages, art museums, monuments and even some transit oriented development complete with dash of adaptive reuse. I was fortunate enough to walk around the evolving landscape of the D.C. Navy Yard. This post-industrial area continues to undergo a series of remarkable changes that have been in the works for over two decades and will hopefully make it a great example of maximizing transit-oriented sites for a new generation of walkable urban streetscapes. Continue Reading…

Architectural Urban Planning 
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Don’t Reduce Sustainability to Just Energy Efficiency

series of power metersOur migration to more sustainable buildings is an evolving process that requires a consistent combination of goals, results and critiques. Without any one of these components, we run the risk of stagnation and dampening our progress towards more ecological responsibility in our buildings. However, it is important that the level of effort and investigation put into criticism is commensurate with the amount contributed to the process of designing the results in the first place. When sustainability is critiqued (and it should be) it has to be weighed as a series of components and relationships rather than being boiled-down into one or two metrics to make its retention more palatable.

Sam Roudman’s recent New Republic article condemning Bank of America’s Tower at One Bryant Park that sped through the blogosphere is indicative of one of the largest hurdles that our culture faces for sustainability: the propensity we have to shrink its definition down to fit into sound bites and online rants at the expense of removing large portions of its meaning and resulting importance. Not only does this diminish the progress we have made, but it perpetuates an inaccurate idea of what we are striving for in the first place.

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Architectural 
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Why LEED Doesn’t Work in Rural Africa and What Will

Community Architecture in AfricaThis is a guest post by friend and former classmate, Charles Newman. Charlie has committed his architectural practice to helping communities in places around the world. He is currently working for International Rescue Committee in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo as the Community Driven Reconstruction Manager and he keeps a great blog on his architectural travels in Africa. Aside from being a LEED AP, his work consistently seeks to integrate sustainability.   

While in a small southern town of the Democratic Republic of Congo in mid 2012, a colleague of mine approached me for some guidance on a large health proposal he was putting together. A portion of the grant would be earmarked for the construction of hundreds of clinics across the DR Congo, and he mentioned that the donor would be very interested in “green” building standards. Knowing that I was a LEED Accredited Professional, he began asking how we might be able to incorporate such building standards into the designs for the pending projects. I rattled off some general guidelines such as using local materials – recycled ones if available, incorporating existing infrastructure, natural ventilation, etc. He jotted down a few notes, then began to pry a little deeper. “What about the LEED point system? Could we incorporate that into our strategy?”

My response was frank: “No, not really. LEED doesn’t work here in rural Africa.” Continue Reading…

Architectural 
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Building Sustainable Metrics

keep calm metricsWith some exceptions, the learned, hard-working professionals of any industry usually wish that the American populace knew more about what they do and why they do it. Artists long for a time when a greater portion of the population to be schooled enough in art to join the larger discourse. Farmers and factory workers would take pride in more people having a first hand knowledge of what their daily routines require in order to arrive at the fruits of their labor that we all use. And architects, consistently claiming that few people understand what it is they actually do, struggle to communicate effectively with the vast majority of Americans.

Metrics provide a means of packaging and conveying professional, industry-specific knowledge to a non-professional public. I recently reflected on sustainability’s need for reassessing its means of communication and finding new ways to reach a broader audience in a positive way. Part of that transition can include further development of more sustainable metrics that condense large quantities of complicated information and inform a larger portion of our daily decisions. Continue Reading…

Economic 
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Surprised Professionals Become LEED Believers

collaborative designFor those who often take part in sustainable buildings, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) can seem like a mature system that has become a notable part of the industry. At the same time, immersion can make it easy to forget that most of the building industry has yet to do a LEED project. Without a doubt, LEED is still a debated issue in the design and building world, but instead of taking part in the hype the best way to form an educated opinion is by actually taking part in a LEED project. Being on a project team can be illuminating the positive qualities of LEED and how their criteria can be refreshing quality control for our work,  even for seasoned professionals. Continue Reading…

Architectural 
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Is the Right Thing for the Wrong Reasons Close Enough?

ulterior motivesSustainability has unquestionably achieved a stronger place in cultural exchange over the course of the past decade. What began as a conversation mostly lead by environmentalists has branched out to include proponents from all walks of life. As the topic dances in between the realms of a cultural movement and political correctness its growing traction allows “green” and “eco” to appear on more products, agendas, powerpoint presentations and even buildings. Undoubtedly, a meaningful portion of sustainability’s frontage is realized for reasons other than actually following its mindset, but is that okay? Does having individuals and corporations pitching “green” if they don’t really subscribe to the mantra help the movement enough to justify a thin sell?

Continue Reading…

Economic