Last week at Greenbuild 2009, Perkins + Will unveiled its new Precautionary List, which tracks 25 of the most common dangerous chemicals found in commonly used building materials. The list provides an explanation of the properties of the chemicals with suggested alternatives. Some of the chemicals on the list include: arsenic, lead, urea formaldehyde, and cadmium, just to name a few.
This is a beautiful LEED Platinum building located at the corner of East Burnside Street and 11th Avenue in Portland, Oregon. Dubbed Burnside Rocket, the building is probably most recognizable not for its red dress but for the twenty-four operable art panels -- each of which was painted by a different emerging artist -- that shade the interior spaces. Since completion on April 2007, the popular building has been fully occupied.
According to a new study by Booz Allen Hamilton and the USGBC, green building will support 7.9 million jobs and pour $554 billion into the American economy over the next four years. Of that, $396 billion will be attributable to wage growth in green building jobs. Green construction spending currently supports 2 million American jobs, so we're talking about growth of nearly 400%!
The visitor center at the Bernheim Arboretum in Clairmont, Kentucky, which was completed in 2005, continues to garner attention. In 2007, it was awarded LEED Platinum certification. Most recently, the visitor center has received the EPA's prestigious Lifecycle Building Challenge Award. This is the third year that the EPA has held the challenge where entrants are judged on their building's ability to minimize waste, reduce energy consumption, and be disassembled for material reuse. The visitor center took an award in the Building--Professional Built category and an Outstanding Achievement Award for Best Greenhouse Gas Reduction.
Leave it to Jerry Yudelson to write what is probably the clearest articulation of the business case for green buildings you could ever read. Jerry Yudelson is the author of several books that we've given away in the past, including Green Building A to Z, The Green Building Revolution, Choosing Green, and Green Building Trends: Europe, as well as about six others worth reading, too. He was a board member of the USGBC and chaired Greenbuild for about five years; he now heads Yudelson Associates, a consulting firm that is dedicated to "growing the business of green building." Most recently, Yudelson authored The Business Case for Green Buildings, and this is his conclusion:
Scottsdale, Arizona is one of a growing number of American cities that have inserted LEED into their building code. Scottsdale set the bar quite high with a LEED Gold requirement, but that wasn't going to limit these architects. When father-and-son architects Lawrence and Lance Enyart of LEA Architects were chosen in 2005 to design the 14,350 square-foot firehouse, they decided to shoot for LEED Platinum. Lance Enyart said, "Gold was the mandate, but for us it wasn't about points that we could achieve, it was about implementing strategies that were project appropriate."
The portable classroom is just about as ubiquitous as the mobile home, so our ears perked when Toby Long, principal of Clever Homes and Toby Long Design, mentioned these first-generation, prefab, green portable classrooms. Working with the Chartwell School in Seaside, California -- itself the first LEED Platinum campus in the country -- Toby Long Design designed, fabricated, and installed two relocatable classroom structures on the Chartwell campus. Almost incredibly, the on-site work only took about four weeks.
Turner Construction is substantially finished with New York City's largest green roof. The company, one of the largest green builders in the country, installed plants, grasses, and fourteen benches made of FSC certified lumber for the United States Postal Service (USPS). The 2.5-acre green roof sits on the Morgan Mail Processing Facility on West 28th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues.
It's expected to reduce storm water runoff and save ~$30,000 each year in heating and cooling costs.
We've all heard the numbers before, but here's a nice little chart with a helpful breakdown of information. Buildings account for roughly 40% of all U.S. energy use. Or stated with more particularity, residential buildings account for 22% of all U.S. energy use and commercial buildings account for 18% of all U.S. energy use. When you parse the numbers out, here's where that energy is used:
About four years ago, Indiana based audio and music equipment supplier Sweetwater Sound Inc. began running out of space and started looking for other options. After ruling out the ability to add to their existing facility, they decided to build something new.
The goal was to create something special for Fort Wayne and have the building resonate with the employees, almost all of whom are musicians and have an interest in the environment. The architecture firm MSKTD suggested that they pursue LEED certification, and after a visit to Herman Miller's LEED Gold facility in Holland Michigan, they were sold.
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