Since the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 1800’s, there has been an uneasy relationship between good design and mass-production. In recent years, another concern has crept into the dialogue: sustainability. And for most buyers, inexpensive, easily-obtained — and disposable — furniture seems to carry the day.

But Seattle-based furniture design company Meyer Wells is interested in bringing craftsmanship and sustainability to the fore once again, and is making furniture that is anything but mass-produced: they do commissioned pieces, constructed from salvaged urban trees. Furniture designer John Wells and master craftsman Seth Meyer obtain trees which have been cut due to disease, damage, or development, and 99% of all their materials come from within 10 miles of the shop.

Meyer Wells is a triple bottom line business, and the company is addressing a wide range of social responsibility issues, from providing competitive salaries and health insurance for its employees to using the most durable and environmentally safe solvents, glues and finishes in their work. According to the company, “This is recycling taken to the next level.”

Image courtesy of Parsons Public Relations
 

Last spring, Green Building Elements writer Philip Proefrock called attention to the fact that the building industry has, so far, been slow to marry sustainability with good design.  (See his discussion of Green Architecture Versus Great Architecture.) But in the last several months, it has become increasingly common for LEED certification and other green building performance measures to move away from their headline status and be relegated to the footnotes. This shift is, in fact, a good thing, since it implies that a significant number of new construction projects are simply expected to incorporate sustainable features.

In September, the American Institute of Architects Montana chapter recognized the Bozeman Public Library with an Award of Merit.  According to the jury, “With its grand civic spaces and filtered light, the building celebrates the act of reading. The building honors its context relating to both the town and rugged mountains beyond.” The library fulfills its function as a cultural and civic center for the town of Bozeman partly by leveraging architectural features, as high design has always done.

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Designed by NBBJ and built by Sellen Construction, the campus is targeting LEED Gold. Campus office buildings will include such sustainable features as:

• an energy efficient, under-floor ventilation system
• heating and cooling systems that utilize natural air cooling and thermal energy storage, and
• a rainwater collection and storage system that will provide water for most of the campus’ non-potable applications, including irrigation of the landscaping

The headquarters’ parking garage (owned by the Seattle Center) has already been completed, and features a green roof that covers more than an acre, making it the city’s largest. Rainwater irrigation will also be used for this roof.

The campus is scheduled to open in late 2010.

Image Credit: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

To read more about green office buildings, see:

• Green Building Tour: Genzyme Center on Green Building Elements
• Platinum LEED 19th Century Building on Green Building Elements
• LEED Double Platinum for Construction Offices on Green Building Elements

The Tacoma Housing Authority (THA) in Tacoma, Washington, is in the conceptual design phase with its 110-unit modular housing community known as Hillsdale Heights. The complex will be located on a 7.3 acre site formerly occupied by the Hillsdale Lumber sawmill; 60 of the units will be low-income rentals, and the remaining 50 will be affordable townhomes. The project was designed by Seattle firm GGLO, who has experience in creating mixed-use, multi-family, sustainable developments.

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The Cascadia Region Green Building Council will host a tour of green buildings on September 25th, 26th, and 28th in the Victoria, Vancouver, and Okanagan regions of British Columbia. British Columbia is the Canadian province with the most LEED-certified buildings per capita, and Cascadia’s Green Skyline tour will include over 25 green buildings. Both residential and commercial tours will be included. They will emphasize what constitutes green design and offer ways to incorporate it into a project, as well as detailing the costs and benefits of building green.

The tours are designed to be walkable, bikeable, and accessible by public transit. Several organized bike tours will also be offered. See the CRGBC website to register.

Photo: The University of Victoria Medical Sciences Building; provided by the University of Victoria

To read about green tours which will come to you, see:

• Sustainable Living Road Show: Be the Change Tour on EcoLocalizer
• See Sustainable Oregon… On a Bike on Sustainablog
• Green Road Tours Bring the Fun to You on Green Options

Two of the prototype models were put on display on the base of Unico’s Rainier Tower last fall. But inhabit’s first permanent installation, at Dexter Avenue North (in West Lake Union), will consist of 62 units that will be manufactured in Idaho, shipped to Seattle, and stacked in groups of 3 and 4 atop a concrete base. The base will also accommodate parking and live-work units. Each prefabricated module will be either a 450 sq. ft. studio apartment, or a 525 sq. ft. one-bedroom unit. It is hoped that the first tenants will move in by May.

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The Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield, Oregon, which opened in August 2008, features many of the amenities that newer hospitals are becoming known for. The building is over 1,000,000 sq. ft in size, is set amidst 181 riverfront acres, and blends hospitality design with health care design. In fact, the design architect for the building was WATG, a firm that specializes in destination design and hospitality. Anshen+Allen was the architect of record, and focused on health care design.

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All of the materials necessary to build a wood frame house must be shipped into subarctic regions. Once built, a house in the far north must be able to withstand frequent high winds, and be extremely well insulted. Often, the fuel necessary to heat the home must also be shipped in. With fuel costs spiraling ever upward, the worsening of an already severe housing shortage is causing subarctic communities to explore alternative housing forms.

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Author’s Note: While I usually report on green building developments in the Pacific Northwest, today I am examining green building trends in my own geographic region, Southeast Ohio. The architect for the LEED project discussed below is my husband, Don Dispenza.

Nationwide, there are currently more than 12,000 building projects pursuing LEED certification. But in economically depressed regions, there are still only a handful. For example, in Southeast Ohio, defined as an eight-county region in the Appalachian foothills, there are only two registered projects on the USGBC website. In areas such as this, which have a minimal amount of new construction overall, increasing a project’s cost by building green is rarely considered.

An exception is the Chamberlain Office Building in Athens, Ohio. The building’s owner, Russell Chamberlain, is a local real estate agent whose desire to build green stems from his own personal value system, and also from the belief that that investing in LEED certification will differentiate his company as being a progressive one. The project is expected to achieve a LEED Silver rating.

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The project obtaining the most LEED points (for new construction) has, until recently, been the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center in Wisconsin, which received 61 points. But last week, Phase I of the Dockside Green development in Victoria, British Columbia, set a new point record. (Green Building Elements first covered the Dockside Green project in February.)

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The contest recognized affordable home designs that achieve sustainability in creative ways.  Juror Robert M. Rogers, FAIA, of Roger Marvel Architects states in a press release on the AIA website, “We were especially intrigued with projects that executed beautiful design ideas and were inherently green by concept. From small ideas for the kitchen, to a way of life, the winners embodied these principles.”

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In 1993, the sorority purchased an abandoned service station and, using volunteer labor, made it into a functional gathering space. Expanding the building will create additional meeting rooms, as well as areas for after school programs and daytime programming for senior citizens. The community center will serve as a demonstration project, using 50-70% recycled materials. In addition to using salvaged and recycled materials obtained from companies and businesses, the building will incorporate surplus metal cargo shipping containers into its structure. The Portland Office of Sustainable Development explains, “Once products are shipped across the ocean, the steel containers that keep materials safe are usually left behind at the port to be recycled or reused for other applications.” And according to literature made available from the sorority, “Metal cargo shipping containers are an international salvage source that can be used for environmentally sensible building materials.”

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According to Wikipedia, workforce housing has four defining elements:

• Affordability
• Home Ownership
• Key Workforce (in other words, composed of critical members of a community’s workforce such as police officers and teachers), and
• Proximity (to employment centers)

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For Seattle in the spring of 1950, that meant the opening of the country’s first mall. According to HistoryLink, Northgate Mall, located on 62 acres outside the city limits, was built to accommodate a total of 80 stores clustered around a “wide shopping walkway,” although it was not fully enclosed and climate-controlled until 1974. (Confused shoppers reportedly parked in the mall space itself when the center first opened.) By 1968, 50,000 cars a day were using Northgate.

In the face of global warming and climate change, however, planners and designers are redefining ‘progressive’. The Northgate neighborhood is currently at the center of a major revitalization effort which was set in motion in 2003 by Mayor Nickels and the Seattle City Council. A major portion of the project, Thornton Place, is scheduled for completion next spring (with condominium sales beginning as early as September of this year). Created by real estate development and management company Lorig, this will be a sustainable, mixed-use village which will combine retail and residential zones with parks and green space.

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Drive through Seattle and this term will begin to seem synonymous with plain woodframe structures that crowd the streets like like weeds.

According to an article in the Seattle P-I,

Townhomes don’t have to be ugly and dampen the human spirit. But so many of them are eyesores that townhomes have become a lighting rod in the local debate over housing. They’ve been blamed for the decline of community and called a threat to single-family neighborhoods. Their rapid proliferation has even prompted recent City Council-led community forums… [But] townhomes aren’t the problem. … Bad design and laziness are the real problem.

There is also growing concern that the new crop of townhomes is not sustainable (for a discussion of this, as well as a thourough recounting of Seattle’s recent forum on townhomes, see Smarter Neighbors: Seattle Land Use Blog, Seattle Channel’s Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee, and the West Seattle Blog).

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Even though the residential wind power sector has seen tremendous growth over the last decade, an article in The Arizona Republic estimates that there are still only 4,000 residential wind turbines nationwide. The primary reason that wind energy has been slow to take hold is that wind turbines are fairly visible, and therefore highly controversial, installations. According to the American Wind Energy Association, small wind systems (100 kilowatts or less) need to be at least 30 feet above barriers which might break the force of the air currents reaching the turbine. Right now, the industry recommends wind turbines only for sites that are at least one 1 acre in size. Consequently, wind turbines in urban areas are still quite rare. (In a September 2007 post, earth2tech featured a San Francisco home which sports a turbine, and pointed out that this may be the first urban wind turbine in the country.)

Unfortunately, individual efforts to experiment with wind power, even in outlying areas, have encountered a lot of roadblocks. Proposed turbine installations are usually evaluated by local governments on a case by case basis, since most city zoning laws have height restrictions which would implicitly prohibit turbines. Oftentimes, even if permission is granted and a turbine is erected, neighbors unite to fight the decision. (For individual turbine projects that have made news for seeking exceptions to local codes, see these articles on Wayne, New Jersey and Atlanta, Georgia).

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In April, the not-for-profit industry association Green Roofs for Healthy Cities released its 2007 lists of the Top Ten Cities for Green Roof Installations. The Top Ten cities in the U.S. are as follows:

1. Chicago IL
2. Wilmington DE
3. Baltimore MD
4. Brooklyn NY
5. Virginia Beach VA
6. Royersford PA
7. Washington DC
8. Philadelphia PA
9. Amery WI

For lists of 2007’s top ten cities in North America and Canada, see the Final Report of the Green Roof Industry Survey.

Pacific Northwest Needs to Get Back in the Running

While Vancouver made the list for the Top Ten Green Roof Cities in Canada, the Pacific Northwest was not represented in the Top Ten for the U.S. (Portland was 9th in 2006). Cities in the Pacific Northwest (Portland and Seattle, especially) are regularly included in ‘Top Ten Green Cities’ lists that are compiled using broader criteria.

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It’s a question often heard from sustainability devotees who have been keeping an eye on the growth of the green housing market, yet still find themselves priced out due to the amount of up-front investment that is required when building green.

LEED ND Addresses Affordability

But the subject of affordability has finally entered the green building dialogue. The LEED ND rating system, which will go public early next year, has established a definition of sustainability that goes beyond energy savings. In addition to awarding points based on urban planning criteria such as utilization of infill sites and proximity to public transit, LEED ND also awards points based on affordability. Its Pilot Version Rating System awards 1-2 points (out of a possible 106 total points) for making “Affordable For-Sale Housing,” and offers three options for obtaining those points:

• Option 1: At least 10% of for-sale housing is priced for households up to 80% of the area median income (1 point),
• Option 2: At least 20% of for-sale housing is priced for households up to 120% of the area median income (1 point), or
• Option 3: At least 10% of for-sale housing is priced for households up to 80% of the area median income and an additional 10% of for-sale housing is priced for households at up to 120% of the area median income (2 points).

A Portland Neighborhood Earns Points for Affordability

Helensview Homes in Portland, OR, which recently received LEED ND Gold certification, is an example of a neighborhood that earned points for being affordable. The Helensview neighborhood was created by non-profit developer Home Ownership a Street at a Time (HOST); HOST’s homes are marketed to low- to moderate-income families, with the intention of helping renters become first-time homeowners. HOST has built more than 300 affordable homes in the Portland area since 1991. The Helensview neighborhood is presently under construction, and the current price range for one of these 2, 3, or 4 bedroom houses is $189,000 - $244,000. According to a May 2008 article in Sustainable Life, the median price for a home price in Portland is $339,900.

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In spite of this, Lorraine Gauthier, co-founder of the socially-conscious Toronto design studio Work Worth Doing, has identified a housing type which offers a high degree of consistency across a large number of homes: post-war housing. Post-war homes, built to accommodate returning WWII veterans, are still a part of the landscape throughout Canada and the United States, and many of these aging homes have poor energy performance. By assembling a team of designers and other sustainable building experts to retrofit a single home in the Toronto area (as part of an undertaking known as the Now House™ project), it is hoped that a formula can be created and then applied to literally millions of homes.

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To augment the Living Building Challenge, Cascadia is developing a companion program known as Living Building Leader. This program will provide a venue for members of the building industry to share knowledge and develop green building skill sets. Living Building Leader is launching a series of sessions covering green building topics which will be taught by experts from fields relating to sustainable building; the sessions are intended for professionals who already have experience in green building.

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