The green building movement is poised on the brink of a new, more mature stage of development. Net-zero energy, net-zero water, net-zero waste, even net-zero stormwater projects—once thought to be impossible to achieve—are popping up all over. The Living Building Challenge, deemed by many practitioners to be the most arduous certification standard to meet, is winning the hearts and minds of AEC supergreenies seeking a competitive edge for their firms. And the fourth iteration of LEED, while having missed its anticipated unveiling at Greenbuild this month, should be out sometime in mid-2013.
“Green building is not a curiosity anymore,” says Aditya Ranade, Senior Analyst with Lux Research, which predicts the sector will reach $280 billion globally by 2020.
The big buzz: disclosure and transparency, says Russell Perry, FAIA, LEED Fellow, Senior Vice President with design firm SmithGroupJJR. He points to the recent release of publicly disclosed building energy use in New York City as an example of “increased visibility” that will contribute to the knowledge base on building performance.
Building product manufacturers are responding to the call for disclosure and transparency by issuing environmental product declarations to differentiate their products from the competition’s. Perry says EPDs will play a greater role in Materials & Resources credits for LEED v4.
Most recently, the International Living Future Institute launched Declare, a database of green building products (http://www.declareproducts.com) that provides a kind of “nutrition label” of product ingredients—all in support of the Living Building Challenge’s “Red List” and “Appropriate Sourcing” imperatives.
Also in the works: the Health Product Declaration Open Standard, a new “product chemistry disclosure tool” that its developers—the Healthy Building Network and BuildingGreen—say will provide manufacturers with a consistent format for reporting product content and associated health information. The HPD, which went through a pilot phase with more than 30 building product makers earlier this year, will be launched at Greenbuild.
Finally, there’s the Honest Buildings Network (www.honestbuildings.com), an open-network database that seeks to connect stakeholders in the real estate industry to “drive demand for better buildings all over the world.” Founder Riggs Kobiak calls it “a cross between Yelp and LinkedIn for the built environment.”
In the following pages, the editors present numerous highly sustainable projects, along with trends and ideas from leading AEC green building firms. +
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| Oct 13, 2010
County building aims for the sun, shade
The 187,032-sf East County Hall of Justice in Dublin, Calif., will be oriented to take advantage of daylighting, with exterior sunshades preventing unwanted heat gain and glare. The building is targeting LEED Silver. Strong horizontal massing helps both buildings better match their low-rise and residential neighbors.
| Oct 12, 2010
Holton Career and Resource Center, Durham, N.C.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. Early in the current decade, violence within the community of Northeast Central Durham, N.C., escalated to the point where school safety officers at Holton Junior High School feared for their own safety. The school eventually closed and the property sat vacant for five years.
| Oct 12, 2010
Guardian Building, Detroit, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. The relocation and consolidation of hundreds of employees from seven departments of Wayne County, Mich., into the historic Guardian Building in downtown Detroit is a refreshing tale of smart government planning and clever financial management that will benefit taxpayers in the economically distressed region for years to come.
| Oct 12, 2010
Richmond CenterStage, Richmond, Va.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Bronze Award. The Richmond CenterStage opened in 1928 in the Virginia capital as a grand movie palace named Loew’s Theatre. It was reinvented in 1983 as a performing arts center known as Carpenter Theatre and hobbled along until 2004, when the crumbling venue was mercifully shuttered.
| Oct 12, 2010
University of Toledo, Memorial Field House
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Memorial Field House, once the lovely Collegiate Gothic (ca. 1933) centerpiece (along with neighboring University Hall) of the University of Toledo campus, took its share of abuse after a new athletic arena made it redundant, in 1976. The ultimate insult occurred when the ROTC used it as a paintball venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Owen Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Officials at Michigan State University’s East Lansing Campus were concerned that Owen Hall, a mid-20th-century residence facility, was no longer attracting much interest from its target audience, graduate and international students.
| Oct 12, 2010
Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Gartner Auditorium was originally designed by Marcel Breuer and completed, in 1971, as part of his Education Wing at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Despite that lofty provenance, the Gartner was never a perfect music venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cell and Genome Sciences Building, Farmington, Conn.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Administrators at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington didn’t think much of the 1970s building they planned to turn into the school’s Cell and Genome Sciences Building. It’s not that the former toxicology research facility was in such terrible shape, but the 117,800-sf structure had almost no windows and its interior was dark and chopped up.
| Oct 12, 2010
The Watch Factory, Waltham, Mass.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards — Gold Award. When the Boston Watch Company opened its factory in 1854 on the banks of the Charles River in Waltham, Mass., the area was far enough away from the dust, dirt, and grime of Boston to safely assemble delicate watch parts.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Cleveland, Ohio
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Gold Award. The Cuyahoga County Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument was dedicated on the Fourth of July, 1894, to honor the memory of the more than 9,000 Cuyahoga County veterans of the Civil War.
