Kansas City MO architect Bob Berkebile is one of the key figures in establishing the importance of green building in this country. Berkebile was instrumental in the founding of both the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) as well as the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment (COTE).
Those once-radical ideas have started to go mainstream. In 1993, Berkebile helped create a new group that wasn’t confined to architects: the U.S. Green
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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.
Since 2000, the U.S. Green Building Council has been transforming the built environment through the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program. If you’re at all paying attention to green buildings, you are well aware of LEED. There are now over 10,000 projects, representing over 3.5 billion square feet of buildings, that have been registered with LEED. And today, a new draft version of LEED becomes available for public comment. [Ed note: The draft is now available; see link below.]
Many of my recent posts have touched upon the theme that the building industry cannot accomplish major advances in sustainability by itself; first its market must change.
But there is ample evidence that consumers are now driving a change in the market. The USGBC website has printed a report by CoStar Group which has found “that sustainable “green” buildings outperform their peer non-green assets in key areas such as occupancy, sale price and rental rates, sometimes by wide margins…. The results indicate a broader demand by property investors and tenants for buildings that have earned either LEED® certification or the Energy Star® label and strengthen the “business case” for green buildings, which proponents have increasingly cast as financially sound investments.” The report goes on to cite “constricted supply” as one reason for the premium prices associated with sustainable buildings, and many other experts have been making the case lately that consumers either cannot find the kind of sustainable housing that they are looking for, or cannot identify what makes a property sustainable.
Fortunately, The Cascadia Region Green Building Council and the Commercial Brokers Association (CBA) are about to provide a bridge between designers and consumers in the form of a new professional certification, Certified Green Broker®. Jason McLennan, CEO of Cascadia, says, “It is often the brokers and finance professionals, not the architects and builders, who directly interface with the end user: the owner, landlord, and/or tenant. Therefore they have great influence on how owners and users may perceive the affordability and overall value of green buildings.”
AltBuild, the Alternative Building Expo sponsored by the City of Santa Monica, CA, returns for its 5th year on April 25-26, 2008.
Designed to promote green building, alternative energy, and sustainable technologies and practices, the Expo brings together all members of the building and construction community. This includes architects, contractors, designers, government representatives, as well as the interested public. And really, aren’t we all interested these days?
Grand Rapids, Michigan is one of the greenest cities in the country, at least if you go by the number of LEED certified buildings it has. And now it adds to its distinction with the first LEED Gold certified art museum in the country.
Grand Rapids is tied with Pittsburgh and Washington at #5 on a list of cities with the most LEED certified buildings, surpassing even cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, New York. Grand Rapids also has embraced renewable energy for the city. A strong regional commitment to green building and support from philanthropist Peter Wege (who serves on the board of the designerly office furniture manufacturer Steelcase as well as the Grand Rapids Art Museum’s board) has helped Grand Rapids But Grand Rapids’ latest claim to green fame is that it is now the home to the first new construction LEED-certified art museum in the country.
Under the FAQs for LEED for Homes is a question on whether the US Green Building Council has a LEED program for remodeling. The response is that they are “in active consideration.” It seems they’ve done more than just consider. Last month at the Interiors 08 conference in New Orleans, the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) unveiled REGREEN, a joint program with the USGBC to provide guidelines for remodeling green. REGREEN will target residential designers, construction professionals, and homeowners. Though the USGBC was involved in its creation, REGREEN will be vastly different than LEED. Instead of assigning a point value to each green product or practice, REGREEN will be used more as a resource of what remodelers have done in the past to make homes more energy efficient, healthy, and sustainable.
The urban environment depicted in the cult classic film Blade Runner (intended to represent Los Angeles in the year 2019) has received its share of scholarly attention… and no wonder. Scenes in which flying cars zip through a maze of city “streets,” riding thousands of feet above ground level, are among the movie’s most captivating. And while the film is dystopian, depicting a distressingly dense and inhumane cityscape, it may nevertheless be prophetic: current explorations in neighborhood development are more Blade Runner than they are The Andy Griffith Show.
A new top-level LEED classification called Unobtanium is being proposed to replace the currently proposed Protactinium level, leading to a possible schism in the growing green building rating system. Whether Protactinium or Unobtanium becomes the new top-level of the LEED rating system…?
Earlier this year, officials proposed a new level of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) that is higher than the current top-end Platinum rating. The new Protactinium level introduces more stringent requirements to ensure the purity of the design team and to verify their worthiness to obtain such a noble rating for their building.
The city of Greensburg KS was nearly obliterated by an F5 tornado in May 2007. But turning the devestation into an opportunity, the city is looking to make its mark by rebuilding as a green community. The city has mandated that all city buildings larger than 4,000 sq. ft. must be built to LEED-Platinum level and must have an energy performance level at least 42% better than current building code requirements.
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If there’s a LEED rated building in your area, whoever built it probably wants you to know about it. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a green building standard developed by the United States Green Building Council
(USGBC.)
LEED is essentially a checklist for architects and builders to determine how green a building is. Factors that make a building green
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