Green Options

I happened to live in France back in 2002, and during my year there I noticed a pretty significant gap between sustainability as practiced in Europe in the US. In Europe, I was working with large public companies who were already integrating the implications of global warming and sustainbility into their businesses. In the US (and sadly still today), many companies were still arguing whether global warming even existed!

This difference was also evident in houshold products - from luxury hotels in Italy fully outfitted with CFLs to low-flow water fixtures and dual-flush toilets in many homes to small upright washers in even the most basic apartments, the kinds of products associated with our burgeoning US green movement today were already the norm in many parts of Europe back then.

On a recent trip overseas I happened to pick up a French architecture magazine for the flight home. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we had really caught up in the past six years - outside of being written in French, you would have been hard-pressed to distinguish this magazine from any of the leading US architecture magazines.

One article caught my eye, though, for it did point out a slight difference that needs to move across the pond. It was on a beautiful and practical prefab home, called the EvolutiV house by Olgga Architectes of Paris. The house itself is striking, made from two rectangular prefrabicated sections that can be rearranged to develop different floorplans and having exterior walls made from sections of wooden logs. The homes also come with the latest and greatest in eco-design: natural ventilation, rainwater collection, solar panels (both PV and thermal), green roof, radiant heating with an option for geothermal heating/cooling, and the typical eco-friendly materials throughout.

The most interesting piece of the story, though, is that the literature for the house and the articles written about it all refer to the home’s target energy usage: less than 48 kWh / m2 / year, which translates to about 4.4 kWh / ft2 / year. This is 70% less energy usage than the typical US home in similar climates.

It’s not the level of performance that makes this interesting, for many prefab options in the US can do as well. It’s that the media in France AND the architecture firm who designed the house feel compelled to advertise efficiency in terms of a single number that is easy to understand and can be used to compare this home to others one might choose. I’ve rarely if ever seen that in discussion of US prefab options (or other green homes) - outside of a LEED rating, we’re often left to guess exactly how eco-friendly that home is. We’d love to see this become more widespread in the US - information is power, and simple, objective numbers like this can help us separate the truly eco-friendly from innovative designs that are green in name (or advertising) only.

To see more photos of the Evolutiv house, click here to view the balance of this posting. (FYI, the EvolutiV house is about 800 square feet and is available in France for about $150,000.)

And click here to find great green prefab homes available in the US.

Green roofs are great - they’re very energy efficient, they capture and filter stormwater, they reduce the urban heat island effect, and they soften the harsh grays and blacks of our cities (at least from above!). We’ve written at length in the past about these benefits. If it works so well on roofs, why stop there?

Green building tours are becoming popular in many cities, and are an excellent means of introducing green construction options to professionals and laypeople alike.

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 [...]

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.

What does it look like to build a house with lots of green features? We see pictures of the finished buildings, and we read about the features that make them green. We know about the importance of good insulation and reducing electrical loads and choosing efficient equipment. But what does it look like while it all goes together?

A community in Canada has an unusual form of solar power that can provide over 90% of the annual heating and hot water needs for the homes, despite being situated in a cold Alberta location where winter temperatures can reach -33 degrees C (-27 F).

The Drake Landing Solar Community collects solar energy in a heat storage fluid through an array of solar panels on the roof of each home and covering all of the garages at the back of each home. The heated fluid is transferred to a neighborhood energy center, and then into the ground beneath an insulated layer, where the heat is stored in the earth.

Combined together, the 52 home community is able to collect and store enough energy from the sun during the summer that the ground storage temperatures reach 80 degrees C (176 F). This heat is sufficiently insulated beneath the ground that it can be drawn from throughout the winter to provide heat and hot water.

The headquarters of a construction firm in Michigan has the distinction of being the first building to achieve LEED “double platinum” certification. What is more, according to the company, the cost of construction was no greater than conventional building practices.

The Christman Construction offices in Lansing MI occupy roughly half of the 64,000 square foot building which was initially built in 1928. The project cost $12 million, and also benefited from brownfield credits as well as state and federal historic preservation tax credits.

In addition to being the first high-rise condominium in the country to achieve a LEED-Platinum rating, The Casey represents a partnership between the building’s developers, designers, and the local arts community.

In 2000, Gerding Edlen Development selected GBD Architects to renovate 5 blocks of historic brewery buildings located in a former industrial area of Portland, Oregon known as the Pearl District. The success of the Brewery Blocks project sparked a rebirth of the neighborhood; in 2005, The Sierra Club recognized the Pearl District as one of the nation’s best neighborhood redevelopment projects. Since that time, the district has continued to thrive; Gerding Eldlen’s latest building in the Pearl District, also designed by GBD Architects, is a 16-story condominium tower known as The Casey.

In San Francisco, some well financed and publicized condo projects like the Arterra spend big marketing dollars to push its LEED – NC status (wonder why they didn’t shoot for LEED on its other project the Hayes?) while the EcoCenter at Heron’s Head Park LEED certified facility opened in relative obscurity.

This landmark youth education facility and environmental center sits smack in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood right next to the former PG & E power plant. Of all the areas in SF this area truly needs the Green building support. We’re psyched to report that the EcoCenter marks the first 100% off-grid green building in San Francisco, and boasts features that set the bar high for green building.

Last week, in writing about this year’s AIA Committe on the Environment’s COTE Top Ten winners, representing the best “examples of sustainable architecture and green design solutions that protect and enhance the environment,” I asked “Are COTE Winners Too Much of the Same?” While I am certain I’m not alone in that viewpoint, I’ve come across some other perspectives on that question.

One of the jurors from the panel that selected this year’s COTE Top Ten wrote about her experience and some of the things that she saw in the jury. And the question of great architecture versus green architecture was also raised in the AIA weekly newsletter this past week as well. The COTE Top Ten showcases some very attractive buildings with some serious green building credentials (LEED Gold and Platinum buildings and a building that claims “carbon neutral opearations”, to name a few). But the larger question seems to be how much green building and good building design are, or can be, connected.

The winners of this year’s AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) Top Ten Green Buildings were announced this week, and there certainly are some very attractive buildings among the lot. Some of these buildings are certified, or in the process of becoming certified, to high LEED standards, in addition to their COTE Top Ten recognition.

But while I’m excited by some of the design presented in this year’s lineup, there are some troubling aspects of the roster as a whole that struck me almost immediately.