Check out this bright, contemporary renovation of an old, 1960s nursing building.  The renovation was led by the design team of Lord, Aeck & Sargent and Gould Evans Associates; they’re anticipating LEED Silver certification and did it all with a $6 M budget.  Now complete, it will be used for Arizona State University's Global Institute of Sustainability and a newly formed School of Sustainability.  In terms of performance, the Institute is anticipated to save 18.7% on energy and 50.3% on water use compared with its baseline usage — plus, it's been outfitted with six, hard-to-miss, state-of-the-art AeroVironment parapet turbines. 

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The Cromley Lofts in Alexandria, Virginia have earned a Gold level certification making them the first condos in Virginia to become LEED certified.  These 8 beautiful units are located in The Old Town area of Alexandria in a vintage warehouse building circa 1910 — a fitting example of the environmental benefits of adaptive reuse. 

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The Chicago FBI Headquarters has become the world’s first LEED EBOM project to earn Platinum level certification.  Under the prior iteration for certifying existing buildings, what we refer to as LEED-EB, approximately 14 projects received LEED Platinum; however, FBI Chicago Headquarters is the first to receive the USGBC’s highest level of certification under LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance (EBOM).  To date, though, only about six projects have been certified under EBOM since its inception in early 2008. 

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Last month USGBC posted Green Buildings by the Numbers, a three-page, bite-size State of the Green Building Union that simply brings together some useful stats.  This palatable little report helps a person wrap their head around the realities and opportunities for green building.  The authors seem to have attempted a sort of realistic optimism with a series of facts and percentages that say ‘there’s been progress in gaining market share for green buildings and buildings stand to make huge gains in the struggle to create a more sustainable human existence, but we’re not there yet.’  Included are a couple of specific statements on the expectations for green building market penetration (see one of the more intriguing quotes below), but the authors shied away from detailing market penetration thus far.

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When we last brought news of BrightBuilt Barn in September, it was only partially constructed.  Now it's all built and looks quite good.  Its trademark feature is the exterior LED lightskirt, which was designed to change color depending on the home's energy use.  GREEN means the BrightBuilt Barn is generating more energy than it consumes; YELLOW indicates a borderline condition; and RED means the energy usage is higher than required to meet the yearly net energy goal.  And like the lightskirt, everything about this home has been planned with meticulous care to create a livable, sustainable, replicable, flexible, and educational net-zero energy home.

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