Building Alive, Designing to Thrive

Chicago Cultural Center's Tiffany Dome My first trip to the Windy City did not disappoint; I was pleased overall with session content and have some takeaways from each below. Teslas vs: Duck Curve This session touched on something that we in the New York City Living Building Challenge Collaborative have been discussing . In California, high energy efficiency and solar PV requirements have lead to high renewables production mid day to the grid, and an exponentially higher demand on the grid towards late afternoon hours when everyone is heading home. At the same time, Electric vehicles could potentially charge mid day while people are at work, and 'sell' some of their battery charge to the grid in the early evening when people are home and won't need their full remaining capacity. The grid here on the east coast isn't well suited to accept power, I am curious to see this theory grow. Building the First LEED Platinum City Washington DC announced last year...

"Life creates situations conducive to life…we must strive to do that" -Paul Hawken I've discussed this before, but I think it's worth addressing again; what ever happened to the precautionary principle? Why doesn't it apply to building science?   Imagine a world where it is harder to create a building or product that hurts the Earth than one that heals it- I believe that was the original intention of Building codes, Material Safety Data Sheets, and EPA regulation. But instead, it has provided opportunity for companies to say their products are safe because no one can prove they are dangerous!   Modern humans spend about 90% of their time in buildings- but still we construct them and finish them off with products that aren't healthy to breathe, touch, or make.   An article was published early last week about the long term negative health effects of 9/11 victims , rescuers, and so on. This year, dozens have died from cancers that can'...

  A CSO in Brooklyn Source: Dontflush.me     The NYC+NJ Living Building Challenge Collaborative recently completed its first firm draft of a feasibility review on achieving Net Positive Water in New York City. Before I get into a NYC specific discussion, some of you may need a little background- PETAL INTENT (from the Living Future Institute) The intent of the Water Petal is to realign how people use water and to redefine ‘waste’ in the built environment, so that water is respected as a precious resource. Scarcity of potable water is quickly becoming a serious issue as many countries around the world face severe shortages and compromised water quality. Even regions that have avoided the majority of these problems to date due to a historical presence of abundant fresh water are at risk: the impacts of climate change, highly unsustainable water use patterns, and the continued drawdown of major aquifers portend significant problems ahead. IDEAL CO...

Zugunruhe is a German word that describes the unsettling feeling birds have that makes them want to migrate. They can sense change and they want to move ahead of it. This is a feeling that clearly the human species does not share with our avian brother. We live in places that have started to see storms beyond our imagining, drought, heat, extreme cold,etc. And yet we do not move. We dig in our feet and our oil wells and continue to 'prosper' International panels of scientists have overwhelmingly agreed that humans are affecting climate change. So, lets STOP arguing about whether it's real or not because it was cold this winter and START discussing solutions. This sculpture is called "Politicians Discussing Climate Change".  The 2 FEET of sea level rise expected to occur by 2050 can likely not be halted. So how can we create healthy, resilient places to live, now that we know?  I love the idea of green building and living infrastru...

MSDS stands for: Material Safety Data Sheet It is intended to provide workers with all vital information about a product they are handling: melting point, boiling point, toxicity, first aid, etc. Most final products (like a refrigerator) do not require an MSDS. Chemicals and products in liquid form usually do. A safety data sheet is not intended for the final consumer - more for the person installing or working with the product in an occupational setting. Every country has different standards for what must be explored and declared on an MSDS. The EU, for example requires more ecotoxicity information than the US. And Canada considers different chemicals mandatory for listing. Of course all nations permit proprietary withholding to protect a company’s recipe. In the US, OSHA oversees MSDS creation and so it is OSHA I pick a fight with now. In pursuing the Living Building Challenge, every product that we put in our structure needs to be vetted to ensure it incl...

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...

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...

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...