Building Alive, Designing to Thrive

Well, although this blog tries not to encourage you to buy, buy, buy. Particularly during the holidays I've compiled a list to get you through the holiday season. Many of which will require only things you already have around the house- so there are some REUSE options in here too! 1) Homemade cookies/ treats on a reusable.recyclable plate. Maybe you have an old family recipe, or maybe you always wanted to try your hand at a fancy maple butter cookie. Maybe your only talent is buying the pre-made dough and using a nifty cookie cutter- whatever the result, the love and time will be evident in this delicious token of holiday cheer! 2) A hand- knit/sewn stocking. You can steady your hand with knitting needles, get the pattern to make these on a knitting loom, or even just cut out patches of old clothing in stocking form and stitch them together. Then stuff the bottom with a little newspaper to hold the shape, and fill to the brim with little candies, your homemade cookies, or some of t...

What an honor it was to be invited to a film premiere! On Tuesday Night, I muddled through the rain and crowds of New York City to the Village 7 theaters to attend Green Building Professionals Night of "The Big Fix" film showing. "The Big Fix" is a documentary film created by a husband and wife film team venture to the Gulf after the BP Oil Spill almost a year and a half ago. Here's some quick highlights of things I did not know about the oil spill that YOU should really note- 1) It is still leaking, BP confirmed within the past week that the oil plug was not a cure-all, and the Deepwater Horizon disaster continues. 2) The tax quarter after the oil spill, BP still had $16 billion in profits. But because it was not their expected $32 billion, the US government shot them a tax break for over 10 billion dollars. 3) Corexit, the dispersant used to break up the oil slicks we saw on the surface of the water. Is completely toxic to humans and animals. It can cause misc...

A few weeks ago, I was able to sneak my way into a meeting of the Roselle Park Environmental Committee. A sub committee that advises and informs the Town Council, the Environmental Committee is in dire need of funding, and staff- but certainly not spirit. The agenda, currently lead by councilman Mike Yakubov, included updates on development ideas for several vacant lots in town, an idea for a community garden, recycling discussion, and some neighborly complaints. I was intrigued by the interest and excitement the few members who were able to make the Friday Night meeting had, and saw only possibilities for the possible influence the committee could have. Until now, the major topic the committee has tackled is in town recycling. While this is important, I firstly felt that this should be a simple conversation. We provide an easy way for residents to recycle, and recycle as many products as possible. The residents, in turn, will not have trash taken away if handlers observe recyclables i...

Well, as if there isn't enough to learn within the context of designing a school building and curriculum, I have taken on another position at a new restaurant set to open at the end of October in Union, NJ that will be Farm to Table. The restaurant is called Ursino, paying homage to it's historic neighbor, Liberty Hall Museum, that originally used that name. It is being constructed within some vacant space in the STEM building of Kean University. Although I am not a sustainability consultant within the context of Ursino, my position as a Hostess is giving me incredible insight on restaurant operations, union county food systems, and the cost effectiveness of balancing local, organic and sustainable. I have not yet been able to narrow in anyone who can knowledgeably speak to the sustainable design aspects of the physical restaurant; but, being food people, I have learned a lot about the sustainable food aspect. Under the guidance of executive chef Peter Turso, the restaurant is ...

Good Morning all, and TGIF! It has been a little while since I discussed my current work, there's so many other things going on around the world I found valuable to share! But since the initial intent of this blog was to speak through some of the points of the predesign, design and so on for the Willow School- let's catch everyone up! The Health Wellness, and Nutrition Center will still be within the 20,000 square foot range. The owner is requiring daylight autonomy during school hours- this means that the building needs to be designed to use no artificial light during the average school day. In order to decrease the size of our heating and air conditioning systems- the team and owners agreed to allow a larger range of thermal comfort. Basically, the air won't come on to make the building stay at 72 degrees, it will wait until it's almost 80. Before that, occupants will be encouraged to open the windows. On the other side of the spectrum, the building will be s...

Good Morning Readers. Maybe it's the gloom of the impending Hurricane, but I've got a beef to pick with USGBC and GBCI (Green Building Certification Institute)! As some of you may know, LEED AP professional certification is a valuable tool to have as a green building field worker. I have worked within two LEED project teams now and purchased $90 worth of study materials from USGBC and gave myself 2 months to prepare for a combined exam- which allows me to test for a Green Associates' designation and then a LEED AP, Building Design and Construction specialization. The whole exam takes about 4.5 hours and separate test is 100 questions. After studying the USGBC-published study guide, the LEED 2009 manual, and over 500 pages of supplementary reading- I went to a computerized testing center last week to finally take my LEED exam. Before I even submitted my exam, I knew I had failed. More than half of the questions were not anything similar to the study questions, and they...

My title is inspired by Larry Forcier, a UVM Professor whom used this a part of his definition for an ecosystem in his Natural Resources and Field Ecology Intro course. As one of 200 or so freshmen taking the class, I didn't think how impactful the statement really was at the time. Because knowing or defining humans as a part of an ecosystem, is not common thought. And it ought to be. Last summer, as I convinced my mother to begin composting some of our food waste, she began to voice her concerns. "Compost isn't sanitary" "How does it become dirt" "won't the dirt smell like food and attract animals". And I realized that she did not know that something as simple, vital, and magical as making dirt was not just an ability of people- but a moral responsibility. Humans are the ones who exploited the soils in the name of monoculture and 'progress'. Now we have so many toxics in our landfills that when you throw something 'away' it goe...

Here is book number one from My list of books I need to read: Hungry City- How Food Shapes Our Lives by Carolyn Steel. I really wanted to read this book after hearing her speak at the Willow School's Food For Thought event in April 2011. As a speaker, she has an amazing combination of enthusiasm, sarcasm, fact-based-knowledge, vision, and optimism. Her book reflects much the same. This book began to ring even truer after my very first trip to Whole Foods about a month ago. Needless to say, I was in love with the store. And while I've always actually enjoyed grocery shopping, this was Heaven. However, when I brought the $400 bill home to my mother, I was back to reality. Like Carolyn discusses in her book, modern society is spending less and less of their money on food- when it is the most important thing we need to sustain life, culture and community. The $400 of groceries lasted my family of four almost 3 weeks- which equals out to less than $50 per mouth per week. And this wa...

Yes, sorry mom. Here is yet another thing I am insisting we change in the house. Here's a couple Did-you-knows to help start proving my point (via Greenseal) : 40% of trash in landfills is paper products 30% of the timber harvested annually in the US is used to make paper products And yes mom, I hear your first argument " But when it gets to a landfill, it breaks down eventually. AND it still has to go to a landfill after it's used- recycled or not " First of all, nothing breaks down in landfills anymore. Since the 1960's the US has invested in something called sanitary landfills. Sounds nice, right? Well it means that be basically lead-line all of our landfills so nothing can seep into the soil and contaminate it because of all the toxins inside of things we use everyday: mercury, formaldehyde, BPA, etc. Things that, if they did leak into the soil could reach the water table and make a lot of people very very sick. So they are necessary. However, without...

Aristotle once said, "The energy of the mind is the essence to life". Too bad for him and us, buildings and modern society as we know it can't survive on the stuff. Buildings consume about 40% of the energy and 75% of the electricity produced annually in the United States. (usgbc), which means they are the largest demanders for power, heat, air and electric. So, for obvious reasons, these are the most important places to focus our energies (pun intended) in reduction and reuse. Reduction is probably the more obvious of the two, creating better buildings that don't leak heat and air conditioning, that are so well insulated the heat from the bodies of it's occupants actually warms the building. This will create a lower energy demand to control thermal comfort within the space. Reuse is the more challenging and yet I'd argue the more exciting way to increase efficiency in a home, building... or wherever. Something like using the wastewater from the toilets to co...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KeGhPZtF0c If you can't see the video directly below, click the link up there ^^^

It's a silly time to learn to swim on the way down Well why am I quoting this fabulous Tegan and Sarah song? It came on during my morning commute and it had me thinking- yeah! I bet a lot of society feels the same way about climate change. It is beyond me how people can deny that climate change exists- or say they 'don't believe in it'. It's not a religion, cult movement, theoretical ideal or ideas spun by your average street-corner crazy. It is a scientifically documented, million researcher strong, thousands of pages-per-volume fact. But- it would be so much easier to get by day to day if you didn't feel like the world around you was closing in and smothering you. We don't know how to swim through all this information- and with the policy makers in their later years, they have some trouble understanding what to do and think if they just ignore it, deny it, or drag their feet they can just tread water instead of swimming forward. I totally see how that gets...

Seems like some kind of oxymoron, doesn't it? But in order to create a new building lots of papers get signed, sent, edited, resent, negotiated, resent, signed, copied, and filed. Some standard papers that you'll see in any construction project include: permits, site plans, blueprints, contracts, and something called Masterspec- which I just became intimately acquainted with a couple of weeks ago. Masterspec is an 80-page booklet- just for the table of contents- titling all the different categories of stuff that are involved in building. So, it became a dandy little project when my boss asked me to take all of our researched materials and cross file them: First by contractor item then by Masterspec ID number. I didn't even know there was such an official book. So for example, now you see folders that say: Concrete, Grout, Steel, etc. Then when you pull out grout there is a label on the front that says: 03 60 00: Grouting. Beyond being helpful in specifically filing things-...

Well I'm glad you asked. The question should really be what are we doing. We, the design team; we, the environmentalists; we, the students; we, the community; and we, the pioneers. To bring about change you can listen to the inspirational quotes about how one person can make a difference, or how it is the efforts of only a few that change the world, yadda yadda yadda. Well, the problem is that those quotes don't mention scale. Because while the 'Environmental' building field is still considered small, I know that there are over 20,000 LEED certified buildings in the USA alone. Which means there are probably and equal number of projects that just couldn't afford to go through with the LEED certification process. And there are surely a few thousand buildings already living and communing off-grid. Then to think, when we had our last design team charette here at Willow, we hosted almost 40 people to work through design, production, philosophical, curriculum and...

Yesterday, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released an exciting report about the potential of Renewables and the world energy market. Over 120 world experts produced a scientific document over 1,000 pages long that provides a solution to 'business as usual' carbon emissions. They believe that we could meet the globe's energy needs with 80% renewable energies by mid-century . This would be a socially, politically, and physically strenuous task. If we eliminate all the complications and shift our paradigm, we still have issues like that which Ramon Pichs, Co-Chair of the Working Group III, added: “The report shows that it is not the availability of the resource, but the public policies that will either expand or constrain renewable energy development over the coming decades. Developing countries have an important stake in this future—this is where most of the 1.4 billion people without access to electricity live yet also where some of the best conditi...

Just because I'm an Environmental student does not mean I was born wanting to make my clothes out of hemp, live in a cobb house, and eat only raw/vegetarian friendly foods. I'm a Jersey girl at heart, who happened to spend her summers camping in the Northern part of the state canoeing, swimming, hiking and singing. I really grew to love spending time on the Appalachian Trail, the challenge of long, multi-day hikes, the danger of bears and other large animals, and the wonder of how life goes on despite everything happening in our cities. As I got older, I could feel the natural world around me start to change. Summers got hot- like 106 degrees hot. We couldn't hike the normal trails because water sources were dry, we couldn't swim in the lake because so much water evaporated the fecal count was unsafe, and something called the gypsy moth was plaguing the entire county, devouring everything green in its path. I realized then that maybe things don't continue on despit...

So, the first thing you should know. Is technically I'm not a complete laywoman. As you learned from my previous post I have spent all of my undergraduate career studying the 'Green Design' Stuff. There are tons of certification processes and awards just within the United States, but one of the most widely accepted and used is the LEED Certification Process with the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) . LEED stands for L eadership in E nergy and E nvironmental D esign. It is a point system, where you earn a credit for every determined area (for example" Sustainable Sites, Water Efficiency, and Material and Resources are categories of points). For more information and resources regarding the LEED process and USGBC's various projects, visit their site at: www.usgbc.org One of my responsibilities as Sustainability Intern will be to earn my LEED Accredited Professional certificate, because although I have had a bunch of experience with LEED projects througho...

Hi! Thanks for taking a look at my Blog. The short version of my story is that I am a 22 year New Jersey native. I went to Roselle Park High School in Union County, NJ. Then, in order to learn the most I possible could about the environment (and it's sciences) I went to school 300 miles away- where I attended classes at the University of Vermont. The Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources is an amazing melting pot of concepts, ideas and opportunities. The small school size allowed me to get close to professors and get super involved in the 'Greening of Aiken' projects during my time there. Although I started college intending to focus on conservation biology, I actually ended up becoming passionate about Ecological Design. Then to get some design background, I added a minor in Green Building and Community Design. Then, to boot- I realized how much opportunity actually lay ahead for me back in good ol' NJ and NYC- and how much I really tended to lean tow...