Alliance of Pittsburgh building owners slashes carbon emissions by 45%

The Pittsburgh 2030 District, an alliance of building owners in the Pittsburgh area, says that it has reduced carbon emissions by 44.8% below baseline.

Begun in 2012 under the guidance of the Green Building Alliance (GBA), the Pittsburgh 2030 District encompasses more than 86 million sf of space within 556 buildings.

The project has created a savings of $205.8 million in energy and water costs, and 1.85 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions avoided since 2012, according to its 2022 Progress Report.

GBA provides participants with education, training, and guidance to further their progress, covering topics such as:

Conducting deep carbon retrofits on existing buildings to dramatically improve efficiency
Case studies of net zero carbon retrofits
Examples of whole building life cycle analysis
Embodied carbon
Facilitating building electrification to eliminate fossil fuel use, including replacing furnaces and boilers that run on natural gas with ground- or air-source heat pumps.
Thermal energy storage

Pittsburgh is the North American leader in amount of square footage committed to 2030 District goals. There are 22 international 2030 Districts in total.

One of the hardest decisions multifamily developers and their design teams have to make is what mix of amenities they’re going to put into each project. A lot of squiggly factors go into that decision: the type of community, the geographic market, local recreation preferences, climate/weather conditions, physical parameters, and of course the budget. The permutations are mind-boggling.

A post-pandemic ‘new normal’ for apartments, Grimm + Parker, Building Design+Construction 2021 Exercise area

Multifamily Housing | Jun 30, 2021

A post-pandemic ‘new normal’ for apartment buildings

Grimm + Parker’s vision foresees buildings with rentable offices and refrigerated package storage.

Resiliency | Jun 24, 2021

Oceanographer John Englander talks resiliency and buildings [new on HorizonTV]

New on HorizonTV, oceanographer John Englander discusses his latest book, which warns that, regardless of resilience efforts, sea levels will rise by meters in the coming decades. Adaptation, he says, is the key to future building design and construction.