gb&d Issue 40: July/August 2016

G R E E N B U I L D I N G J U LY+AU G U S T 2 016

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D E S I G N

In Conversation: The Rockefeller Foundation’s resilience guru Samuel Carter on collaborating across disciplines and geographies to position ourselves for strength, p. 12

S AV I N G O U R PEOPLE & PLANET Six experts on the critical resilient designs we must adopt now, p.54

Want to know how this Living Building Challenge environmental center’s rainwater harvesting and treatment system will keep operating even if the municipal water system fails? Turn to p. 64

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GREEN BUILDING & DESIGN

In This Issue July+August 2016 Volume 7, Issue 40

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24

36

We profile three winners from the Earth category of BOMA’s annual TOBY Awards to learn how the best building managers and owners save energy and money

Featuring innovations and updates from Fabcon, Evaporcool, Vectorworks, ClimaCool, and Excel Dryer

PHOTO: COURTESY OF LEXUS INTERNATIONAL

Typology

gb&d

Trendsetters

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Six experts offer up solutions for how we will save our people and planet from the effects of climate change and natural disasters

A plastic-free future brought to you by the winners of the 2016 Lexus Design Award

Resiliency Roundtable

AMAM for Agar Plasticity

102

Guest Columns

B+H Architects principal Lisa Bate, PHIUS executive director Katrin Klingenberg, and Dr. Chris Pyke, CEO of the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark

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GREEN BUILDING & DESIGN

Table of Contents July+August 2016 Volume 7, Issue 40

Up Front

Punch List

12

In Conversation Samuel Carter

96 Software Solution

Ecosia

14

Editor’s Picks Curated by gb&d staff

105 On the Spot

Samuel Carter

16 In Profile

GivePower Foundation

19

Event Preview Intersolar North America

20

20 Defined Design

THAT House

Spaces 74

Cabins In The Woods

80

Whatever Floats Your Boat

84

Inventing The Future

A group of students built a cluster of prefab dorms on a budget in the snowy Colorado forest

84

PHOTOS: (CLOCKWISE) TESS KELLY, TIM GRIFFITH, JESSE KUROIWA

In this case, an incredibly green biomorphic home that blends organic design with technological sophistication A new addition to the UC Berkley campus fosters the creators of tomorrow and eliminated AC in nearly half of its rooms

90 Sustainable Stimuli The University of

Wisconsin—Milwaukee’s

new “Innovation Campus”

blends green design,

engineering inspiration,

and cross-discipline

collaboration

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62

PHOTO: ANTON GRASSL

UP FRONT

When Katrina hit, hospital patients couldn’t be evacuated due to the flood, and staff had to break hospital windows with furniture because of rising temperatures. How did Perkins+Will design around these challenges? Turn to p. 62

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GREEN BUILDING & DESIGN

Editor’s Note Chris Howe

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So, our intentions for this issue aren’t to harp on the serious degrees to which people around the globe will all be in very big trouble if we don’t act and act soon, but to inspire those working in the built environment to do what they can and use their knowledge and expertise for the betterment of our planet. Resilience is defined as the ability to spring back into shape or the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, or as one of our guest columnists, executive director at the Passive House Institute of the United States Katrin Klingenberg says, “Resiliency is the ability to go beyond energy security to achieve comfort, quality of life, and affordable livability.” No matter how you specifically define it, it’s one of the most important concepts of our time, and we hope this issue inspires you to help fight for the future.

Sincerely,

Chris Howe, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief

ON THE COVER Designed to withstand hurricane-force winds and short surges that will become increasingly common at this site on the Chesapeake Bay, The Brock Environmental Center of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation is so well insulated that the solar and wind systems provide more than 100% of its energy needs.

PHOTO: DAVE CHANCE PHOTOGRAPHY (BOTTOM RIGHT)

Toward the end of this issue, the subject of our In Conversation interview, The Rockefeller Foundation’s resiliency guru Samuel Carter, says, “While it feels like we live in a scarier world than ever before, we really just know more. The question is what to do with that knowledge.” No one sentence could better sum up the theme of this issue—resiliency—and how we decided to tackle it across the next 100 pages.

gb&d managing editor Amanda Koellner gathered up six experts—a designer and urban planner at Perkins+Will, Berkeley professor, resiliency director at ARUP, San Francisco Foundation program director, AECOM senior VP, and the founder of The Resilient Design Institute—and asked them, “What critical resilient designs must the built environment adopt now, and what are the best solutions for implementing those designs?” The results varied as much as the participants’ assorted professions, as the feature touches on designing purposefully floodable developments, the importance of “passive survivability” (or ensuring that livable conditions will be maintained in a building that loses power), and of course the necessity to design for the inevitability of rising sea levels and earthquakes. But they all had one key thing in common: these people know exactly what they want to do with their knowledge; they want to come together to save our people and our planet.

As Kristen Hall of Perkins+Will says on p. 56, “As keepers of the vision of what cities can become, designers also have an opportunity to help move the public conversation away from doom and gloom, and refocus on the possibilities for positive change.” Considering that the doom and gloom aspect of our planet’s current state of affairs is very real—as Carter says on p.

105, there are native communities in coastal Alaska whose land is literally eroding away as a result of rising sea levels and melting permafrost—we are, as he also says, reaching “a moment where we as a society have to reorient ourselves to the future in some very tangible ways.”

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Look for the sFc seal to support the companies that are making a difference today.

www.sustainablefurnishings.org Sustaining Healthy Environments, Inside & Outside

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GREEN BUILDING & DESIGN

Editor’s Note Laura Heidenreich

gb&d Green Building & Design gbdmagazine.com EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Christopher Howe chris@gbdmagazine.com ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

Laura Heidenreich laura@gbdmagazine.com MANAGING EDITOR

The heart of this issue belongs to the importance of resilient design, but the pages of our July/August edition of gb&d also feature a myriad of pieces focusing on how designers, architects, building owners, and building managers are fighting the good fight toward updating and improving existing buildings to make them more sustainable through retrofits, new HVAC systems, waste diversion, and more.

We partnered with The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA), an international alliance of professionals working to advance the agenda of a vibrant, prosperous, and sustainable commercial real estate industry, to highlight a handful of winners of this year’s annual TOBY Awards (The Outstanding Building of the Year). The section specifically highlights winners from the “Earth” category, where applicants are judged on criteria such as energy and water conservation, green purchasing, indoor air quality, managing environmental risk, and tenant outreach.

The work that’s been happening at these properties is truly astounding. The man-

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agers at The Tampa City Center have set a minimum benchmark of lopping off 1% of energy use each year, which they’ve more than reached since they first tracked baseline data in 2008. After establishing a baseline in 2010, energy use at The Millennium Building in D.C. nosedived by 27%—well ahead of the established 20% goal by 2020.

And Chicago’s 71 South Wacker recently realized savings of over 3.5 million kWh due to a plethora of energy savings initiatives. And these stats don’t even cover what these building owners and managers have been doing in terms of waste diversion, lighting retrofits, and water conservation.

This issue also switches gears to highlight some incredible philanthropy happening across the industry. SolarCity, taking note of the fact that 1.4 billion people have no access to electricity, has decided that for every megawatt of solar power that it installs in 2016, it will donate a solar power system and battery to a school without power via its GivePower Foundation (p. 16). Along those same lines, we feature Ecosia, a search engine that generates its income through ads and uses 80% of its profits to plant trees; since it’s founding, it’s resulted in the planting of more than 4 million of them around the world, mostly in West Africa.

Sincerely,

Laura Heidenreich, Associate Publisher

Amanda Koellner amanda@gbdmagazine.com ART DIRECTOR

Ravi Sathia ravi@gbdmagazine.com MARKETING COORDINATOR

Christina Wiedbusch christina@gbdmagazine.com ACCOUNT MANAGERS

Reid Bogert, Audrey Steinbach, Erika Weir, Brianna Wynsma CONTRIBUTORS

Brian Barth, Lisa Bate, Vincent Caruso, Jeff Link, Russ Klettke, Katrin Klingenberg, Dr. Chris Pyke, Margaret Poe, Emily Torem EDITORIAL INTERN

Alex Nates-Perez DESIGN INTERN

Alec Majerchin MAIL

Green Building & Design 1765 N. Elston Ave. Suite 202B Chicago, IL 60642 The Green Building & Design logo is a registered trademark of Green Advocacy Partners, LLC Green Building & Design (gb&d) magazine is printed in the United States using only soy-based inks. Please recycle this magazine.

The magazine is also available in digital formats for free on the Apple App Store and Google Play (tablet and mobile), at issuu.com/greenbuildingdesign.

Green Building & Design is a certified B Corp.

B Corp is to business what Fair Trade certification is to coffee or USDA Organic certification is to milk.

B Corps are certified by the nonprofit BLab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.

RETRACTION: On p. 106 of our May/June issue, the name of the company Constellation was printed as Constellation Energy. We regret this error.

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GREEN BUILDING & DESIGN

Up Front Typology Trendsetters Features Spaces Punch List

gb&d

12 In Conversation

Samuel Carter

14 Editor’s Picks Curated by gb&d staff

16 In Profile

GivePower Foundation

19 Event Preview

Intersolar North America

20 Defined Design

THAT House

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UP FRONT

In Conversation Samuel Carter

IN CONVERSATION with Samuel Carter

By Brian Barth

PHOTO: COURTESY OF SAMUEL CARTER/THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION

On June 2, 2014, Shaun Donovan, the Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, announced the winners of Rebuild by Design, an international competition formed in response to the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy in the New York area. As one of the largest and most ambitious design competitions ever held, most people in the design world—especially those with an interest in green infrastructure—probably remember seeing the images of the winning designs as they flooded across the internet.

The central theme of Rebuild by Design, fittingly, was “resilience,” a concept that the competition helped cement in the mainstream consciousness as a broad framework for how society can better adapt to a rapidly changing world and better recover from unexpected upheavals when they occur. The Rockefeller Foundation was the lead funding partner for the competition and took a central role in supporting the unusually rigorous design process, which was structured as an iterative, collaborative progression with a high degree of public input. And the man who spearheaded the effort on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation was Samuel Carter, a managing director of the foundation who oversees much of their resilience portfolio.

“I think this second anniversary of Rebuild by Design is an important moment for everyone in the region to reflect on the progress we’ve made, of what more we need to do, and to really celebrate the moment,” Carter says. This month, gb&d celebrates the achievement of the resilience movement by inviting Carter to share some of the lessons he’s learned over the last 10 years as one of the nation’s foremost resilience experts—he formerly coordinated and led the day to day operations of the SSRC Katrina Task Force, an international consortium of scientists and policymakers formed in the wake of the disaster in New Orleans—as well as his vision for “Resilience, version 2.0.” gb&d

ABOVE Samuel Carter also answered our questionnaire; turn to p. 105 to read the results.

PART 1 ROOTS OF THE RESILIENCE MOVEMENT gb&d: What were some of the formative experiences that led to your career path as a thought leader in the resilience movement?

Samuel Carter: I started getting interested in what we now call the field of resilience back in undergrad in the early 2000s when I studied something called media ecology.

This is a weird discipline that was pioneered

by Neil Postman at New York University, which thinks about ecology not in the exclusive sense of the environment, but as a way of thinking about communications and media studies as a complete ecosystem with many different actors and many different forces—essentially thinking about it as a holistic system. gb&d: How did the focus on media studies transform into a career focused on the environment, in an ecological sense?

Carter: Along the way, I took a lot of environmental studies courses and I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which really transformed my thinking about not just the environment as a holistic system, but about the entire urban environment as a system, and even larger systems as well. All that very much informed my decision to pursue public policy and urban planning in graduate school. I wanted to approach the planning public policy lens because it was important to me to be able to influence the actual structure of decision-making and the rules within which things were happening. gb&d: And you found yourself in the midst of a very exciting environment after graduate school, which was seminal in the resilience movement. Tell us about that.

Carter: I was actually still in grad school when I took a position at an outfit called the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), a think tank established by The Rockefeller This conversation continues on p. 17

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Editor’s Picks

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MATERIAL KAYNEMAILE

ORGANIZATION GREEN WARRIOR SOCIETY

PRODUCT LED VIBE LAMP

PROJECT HYBRID ELECTRIC BUILDINGS

GADGET NATURE REMO

BOOK DESIGNED FOR THE FUTURE

(pictured above) Protective armor is only for knights, right?

Wrong. Kaynemaile has created the largest kinetic mesh “armor” facade in the southern hemisphere for the Pacific Fair Shopping Centre in the Gold Coast, Australia. This facade is made up of 10 million 28mm polycarbonate rings that change with the movement the wind and sun, is produced with no waste, and is fully recyclable. kaynemaile.com

Sustainability can be difficult to achieve, especially in lower income, low resource areas. That’s why Green Warrior Society helps non-profit organizations find planning experts to assist with their green projects all over the world. They do this for free or at a reduced cost in order to see sustainability spread across the globe. greenwarriorsociety.org

Vibrant Energy’s new lightbulb brings any event to the next level.

This device connects to Bluetooth and plays crystal clear music while emitting bright LED lights. It can be remote controlled to adjust sound and switch between three different vibrant colors of light. vibrantresidential.com

Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) has come up with an ingenious energy storage system to lower energy costs and provide clean electric utilities. AMS can shift an entire fleet of buildings from grid power to battery power by deploying large networks of battery systems to buildings needing grid support. advmicrogrid.com

Nature Remo has officially brought energy- and moneyguzzling dinosaur window AC units into the 21st century. Just plug this little device into a wall outlet and then plug your AC unit into Nature Remo for immediate control in the palm of your hand.

No more wasted energy cooling empty rooms, and no more wasted money. nature.global

Jarred Green writes a book about the future of sustainable design titled Designed for the Future: 80 Practical Ideas for a Sustainable World that covers some amazing sustainable cities around the world to inspire designers everywhere to design more sustainably and consciously for a future where most of the world’s population will live in cities. amazon.com

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PHOTO: COURTESY OF KAYNEMAILE

Curated by gb&d staff

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2016

women in sustainability leadership awards

THE WOMEN IN SUSTAINABILITY LEADERSHIP AWARDS WAS CREATED TO HONOR POWERFUL WOMEN THAT ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD BY IMPLEMENTING LASTING CHANGE. Visit WLSAawards.com to learn more.

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In Profile GivePower Foundation

ing end of the GivePower Foundation’s charity have spent a lifetime struggling to develop.

When did SolarCity launch the GivePower foundation and what was its impetus?

By Vincent Caruso

In our imperfect world, there is no shortage of charitable causes that demand our attention. One component that seems consistently absent from our compassion, however, is consideration of factors that might elevate these impaired communities to a state of self-sufficiency, thus empowering them continue autonomously on a trend of growth.

It’s a complex puzzle, but one that SolarCity’s GivePower Foundation has begun attempting to solve. By supplying schools in developing nations with solar power installations and batteries, SolarCity hopes to provide a firm foundation from which struggling communities can build themselves upward. We caught up with Barrett Raftery, executive director for the GivePower Foundation, to learn more. gb&d: Countries on the receiv-

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gb&d: When we think of the urgent remedies of poverty, food and clothing are the two that most reflexively come to mind. How do you make a compelling case for the importance of renewable energy?

Raftery: My experience thus far has been that most people, because of the way that billing for electricity is handled in the developed world, don’t understand that the vast majority of the energy that they consume is not just residential consumption in their house but throughgbdmagazine.com

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF SOLARCITY

A leading solar power purveyor extends their reach globally in an aim to illuminate schools in need

Raftery: GivePower is about two-and-a-half years old, we formally launched in late 2014.

Everyone in the solar space to some degree has a connection to the transformative aspects of solar, which is giving electricity to people for the first time.

GivePower was an expression of SolarCity’s collective desire to figure out how to help people most with solar. I know there are an immense amount of personal experiences from different people in the organization that went into that process of forming the GivePower Foundation, but I think it was ultimately a collective motion.

When we launched GivePower, we said, “Okay, for every megawatt of power that SolarCity deploys in America, we will donate a solar power system to a school without electricity in the developing world.”

UP FRONT

IN CONVERSATION with Samuel Carter Continued from p. 13

THIS SPREAD 1.4 billion people have no access to electricity, so for every megawatt of solar power that SolarCity installs in 2016, the GivePower Foundation will donate a solar power system and battery to a school without electricity.

out the city or town they live in. Electricity is what enables the infrastructure we have and allows us to live at the standard that we are used to. So if you don’t have access to energy, your health care, food security, water security, education, and ability to earn income will all be severely degraded.

ly cheaper and faster to put in than working with a massive, centralized infrastructure that totally exceeds the power supply necessary by those communities at this point in history.

gb&d: “Energy poverty” is virtually always linked to poverty in the broader sense. How can nations use solar energy to spark the domino effect of enriching their quality of life in other respects?

Raftery: Infrastructure, education, which I consider part of infrastructure, and health care as well. I don’t only mean it in roads, plumbing, and power lines. You don’t think about the fact that every time you buy a vegetable at the grocery store, that there were inherent energy costs to create that opportunity: refrigerating it, transporting it to you, or transporting it back to your house. Everything we buy includes an energy component, and if that energy component can’t be facilitated, then that good is not available to you.

Raftery: Think of it this way: right now, solar power is a much more low-cost and quick way to provide power to people than trying to expand centralized infrastructure. So if I’m working in rural villages and trying to expand the grid to connect to a village of a hundred households, I’m going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and more time extending those transmission lines, then putting in distribution lines and putting in meters and doing that whole process.

Using solar, it’s just fabulous-

gb&d: What is usually standing in between impoverished nations and wealth?

gb&d: While developed nations work to transform our energy structures, poorer countries are merely vying for access to power. The communities that have been reached by GivePow-

Foundation in the 1920s, which at that time was focused on getting America out of the Depression, and acted as an advisor to Congress about the type of social safety nets that were needed. Flash forward almost 100 years, and the SSRC was focused on coordinating the various social science fields to get people working on priority agendas. They brought me in specifically for a very large project focused on Katrina—in particular documenting displaced populations from that storm. The job of coordinating multiple teams of social science researchers that were out in the field working with communities that had faced this major natural disaster, people whose lives had been organized around all these different social and ecological systems, was when things really started to click for me around resilience as a conceptual framework for doing my work. gb&d: What were your initial impressions?

Carter: What I noticed as I talked to these people that were displaced and as I worked in the city of New Orleans itself was that most people were still thinking through a very narrow lens—of housing, or of policies to attract people back, or how to restore the coastline, how to rebuild the levees. It was actually very hard to find a productive discourse in which people could combine all these things and think holistically about the city and what it needed. As I went through that process and began to engage in the literature around resilience, which was starting to percolate at that time—this was 2006 and 2007, a time when some seminal books like [B. H. Walker’s] Resilience Thinking came out—that was the discourse that resonated most with what I was seeing on the ground with these incredibly complicated situations.

PART 2 RESILIENCE ON THE GROUND gb&d: What is your opinion of the United States’ national resilience policy framework at this point?

Carter: I would say there are multiple frameworks. There is a lot of really good work being led by the [federal] Council on Environmental Quality, and in the Obama administration more broadly, that is advancing the resilience agenda in productive ways for people around the country. There is great work that has been done by NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which has a disaster recovery This conversation continues on p. 18

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UP FRONT

IN CONVERSATION with Samuel Carter Continued from p. 17

framework around resilience. And there has been great work done at HUD with the National Disaster Resilience Competition, which provides a way for communities to engage with resilience thinking. What’s exciting is how much we’re seeing cities and states pick these concepts up and run with them. Communities with vastly different challenges and vastly different political environments are finding a lot of traction with the concept.

Carter: That’s been a big part of my work for the last year and a half or so—it’s the next version of Rebuild by Design. When Congress allocated those funds for disaster recovery, they didn’t exclusively make them available to the Sandy region, they made them available to any place in the country that had a nationally declared disaster between 2011 and 2013. There were 67 different communities around the country that were eligible to participate. In January of this year, proposals from eight states and five municipalities were announced as winners. The project in Louisiana to relocate the community of Isle de Jean Charles was one of those selected. gb&d: How was this competition similar or different than Rebuild by Design?

Carter: We knew we couldn’t follow a Rebuild by Design model where we asked international teams to form, because the number of communities that were eligible to compete was simply so great, but we wanted to find a way to make that kind of a process accessible to the entire country.

We created something called a Resilience Academy, which is a sequence of short, intense moments of collaborative work where we would bring a network of experts into each geographic region and enable the competing jurisdictions to come learn from each other, using resilience as a framework. It was a real delight to see that through to execution, because what we heard from all the jurisdictions that went through that process was that the academies were a real departure from their normal way of working. It’s similar to what I was describing in the early days around Katrina when everyone was still working in their silos. Everyone was on a single path with a single mission, hitting their own targets. What the Academy This conversation continues on p. 21

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er Foundation are starting in the lane we’re meanwhile trying to merge to. What are the advantages to beginning green?

Raftery: There is a huge obstacle to the deployment of new infrastructure in America: the investment in existing infrastructure. We can’t change everything overnight because we already spent huge amounts of money and time creating the power grid in that way. But, in most of the communities where we work, there is no existing infrastructure, and there is no historical investment that will become nullified if we switch to renewables. There is no coal power plant going out of business when everyone switches over to solar in developing communities. And right now in the U.S., one of the biggest obstacles is the battle between utilities, who typically favor old infrastructure, and those trying to modernize the grid such as solar providers. Most everything we see happening in the domestic market is trying to balance and transition an incumbent system to a modern, forward-looking system, while I do believe we’ll see a leapfrogging effect in the developing world because they never invested in that incumbent system. Our biggest obstacles they don’t have, because they’re not there to get rid of, and this presents a great opportunity gb&d: Why did you guys decide to focus on schools initially?

Raftery: Why we started with schools is manifold. You kind of get a double-win with schools.

You provide better education

to kids because the school has better ability to remain open in the early morning and evening and attract top teachers and talent. In schools, you also expose people to the idea of renewables early, and in many cases it’s the first way they have ever accessed power, which is incredibly valuable. I think that level of tactile, experiential learning is fundamentally important for children. The schools often serve as community centers and gathering places for the villages we provide light too as well, so even adults in the community can take advantage of night classes or simply a building with light in evenings. gb&d: What are some of your proudest examples of GivePower making a positive impact on a struggling community?

Raftery: I think Nepal will always touch me. Nepal was racked by a double earthquake.

I was there for the second of them; it was quite bad. Unfortunately, potentially millions of dollars have been raised for assistance and very little has been used on the ground. In the absence of a functional, larger, NGO community, we were able to provide power to a number of displaced communities. When you look at the transformative effect of letting displaced peoples know that they are not forgotten, and in spite of massive tragedy and loss, that good things can still happen, you can be surprised by generosity the same way you can tragedy. gb&d

“When we launched GivePower, we said, ‘Okay, for every megawatt of power that SolarCity deploys in America, we will donate a solar power system to a school without electricity in the developing world.’”

BARRETT RAFTERY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GIVEPOWER FOUNDATION

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF SOLARCITY

gb&d: Tell us about the National Disaster Resilience Competition.

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UP FRONT

Event Preview Intersolar North America

Conference on Advanced Building Skins

10-11 October 2016, Bern, Switzerland

By Alex Nates-Perez

Intersolar North America

DETAILS

Since 2008, Intersolar North AmerWhen July 12-14 Where San Francisco, CA ica has been the most attended solar Web intersolar.us exhibition in the U.S., as manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, service providers, and partners of the solar industry gather annually to learn about solar markets, PV technologies, reliability and monitoring, smart renewable energy, and finance from 200 executives and industry experts.

Solar is booming and is projected to get even bigger, as The National Solar Job Census found a 20.2% increase in employment in the industry in just one year. This burgeoning group can attend panels from industry leaders to learn about how new technologies and financing options will make national solar energy and energy storage markets soar. Some confirmed programs include: Markets: “Emerging Markets Across the Americas: Mexico/Chile/Brazil”, “A Sustained Boom Across North America?”, “Asia’s Support Policies”, “Net Meeting: Present and Future.”

PV Technologies: “Crystalline Silicon PV: Addressing the Future”, “PV plants: Design, Reliability and Monitoring”, “Balance of Systems: Inverter—the Pacemaker of PV Power Plants”, “The Future of PV: Executive Panel.”

INTERNATIONAL PLATFORM FOR ARCHITECTS, ENGINEERS, SCIENTISTS AND THE BUILDING INDUSTRY Topics: • Smart Materials for Intelligent Building Skins • Adaptive and Kinetic Building Skins • Design of Sustainable Building Skins • Green Walls: Performance of Living Building Envelopes • New Materials for High-Performing Building Skins • Integrating Photovoltaics into Façades • 3D Printing & Additive Manufacturing of Building Envelopes • Models, Tools and Simulations for Sustainable Buildings • Performance-based Retrofit of the Building Envelope

Smart Renewable Energy: “Building a Smarter Grid”, “Grid Structure & Big Data”, “State Approaches to Distributed Energy Sources.”

Finance: Improving the Bankability and Investability of Solar”, “Smart Energy Asset Management”, “Advanced Topics for New Business Models and Operations.”

Due to popular demand, the exhibition has expanded the number of its special events and site tours, including the chance for a private tour of a Tesla factory, a visit to San Francisco solar sites, a sailing trip on SF Bay, and a visit to a solar powered winery. This year’s conference will also feature the Sol Systems Run for the Sun—a 5k benefiting the California Solar Energy Industries Association (CALSEIA). Register for any of these events on Intersolar North America’s website. gb&d

The registration fee of € 680 includes the conference proceedings, two lunches and coffee breaks.

Advanced Building Skins GmbH, Switzerland www.abs.green • info@abs.green

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UP FRONT

Defined Design THAT House

By Alex Nates-Perez

Austin Maynard Architects (AMA) created THAT House to provide Australians with what they want—space and privacy—without the environmental burden of the country’s ever-popular mansion-sized homes. THAT House isn’t small by any means, but at 2,744 square feet, it’s still about half the size of those that surround it, designed for its residents to be “alone, together.” The modest sized home feels abundant in space thanks to its adaptable walls, which allow the homeowners to section off parts of rooms for more privacy or open them up for a different configuration.

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The home isn’t short of green designs, either, as the facades were built to maximize solar gain, solar panels have been installed on the roof, passive ventilation reduces mechanical heating and cooling, and rainwater is captured and reused to flush toilets and water the garden. AMA describes the house as defiant in a neighborhood of poorly planned, large houses, however the sustainable aspects of the house are not limited to size. These green innovations help counter balance the effects of urban sprawl in Australia, while boasting a beautiful design, too. gb&d

Passive Ventilation /pas-iv ven-tə-ˈlā-shən/ (noun) When convective airflows are used that result from the tendency of warm air to rise and cool air to sink to maintain climate. Knowing that warm air rises making cool air sink, THAT House uses warm air created by large, north facing windows to circulate air from the top of the house to the bottom. Strategically placed plants provide shade for the house, too—cooling air and promoting further circulation.

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UP FRONT

IN CONVERSATION with Samuel Carter Continued from p. 18

enabled people to do, even if it was only over the course of a few three-day sprints, was to step out of their comfort zones and think big about what was possible. gb&d: What are some of the most important projects on the ground?

Carter: I think there are two really key test cases that are going on right now with respect to climate adaptation where entire communities are having to relocate. One is the native communities in coastal Alaska, where their land is literally eroding away as a result of rising sea levels and melting permafrost. The other is in Louisiana, where the Isle de Jean Charles is in a similar situation. We are in a bit of a new paradigm. This is a moment where we as a society have to reorient ourselves to the future in some very tangible ways.

Food Belt /ˈfüdˈbelt/ (noun) An area of fertile land and abundant resources in Australia.

Until recently, most people lived within the Food Belt of Australia.

However, contractors are now building in more arid places. This puts a huge strain on communities because the energy required to move water and other resources to more rural homes is so great. THAT House removes the need to move away from the Food Belt by exemplifying how elegant and spacious a smaller house can be.

gb&d: What are the first steps for these communities to relocate and start building new and different infrastructure?

Topographical Boundary /tuh-pog-ruh-fi-kəl bau̇n-d(ə-)rē/ (noun) Clearly marked boundaries on a map. Due to Australia’s stable economy, aspirational culture, and relatively flat topography, Australians have spread their urban centers across topographical boundaries, moving so they can build bigger, more private houses. The space they need to do this is outside most settled areas and requires a lot of energy to reach. THAT house provides an alternative to crossing boundaries to build a house with privacy and space by maximizing space usage through brilliant design.

Carter: The communities going through this transformative process have some initial hurdles to face because our policy environment is not necessarily set up to deal with these kinds of challenges. There are folks in the federal government who are trying to navigate this maze of policies, which is actually the ground-breaking work that is going to make it easier to make these adjustments moving forward. It is completely expected that there would be these kinds of challenges. The question is how do we organize ourselves to realign policies with the realities that we now face?

I think it’s important that there is a vision for how things need to go, and a lot of the work that The Rockefeller Foundation does is to try to articulate that vision, and express in actionable ways what is possible.

PART 3 RESILIENCE V2 gb&d: What’s next for you now that the National Disaster Resilience Competition has wrapped up?

PHOTOS: TESS KELLY

Carter: Now the Foundation is pivoting and wondering, where else can the Resilience Academy be useful? So our work moving forward is to think about where, globally, we could use the Resilience Academy format to help communities make transformative leaps in their thinking around

This conversation continues on p. 97

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UP School FRONT Bertschi Science Wing Seattle, WA | Photo: KMD Architects

2016 Catalyzing the future of zero net energy buildings

October 12–14, 2016 | Denver, CO Join leading designers, owners, operators, commercial real estate professionals, policymakers and others to share perspectives on the growth of zero net energy (ZNE), discuss the policies driving new projects, engage in best practices for successful projects and collaborate on opportunities for ZNE to transform the built environment.

The Getting to Zero Forum brought together a wonderful mix of passionate, knowledgeable people from a broad diversity of sectors, though with a common purpose.

The feeling of urgency and also of positive momentum was infectious . . . I learned more and made better connections than at other green building conferences. I will definitely participate in a future GTZ conference.

—James Gray-Donald, VP Sustainability, Bentall Kennedy

Register today! gettingtozeroforum.org MOUN KY

IN

IN TA

ROC

Co-Hosts

STIT UTE

SPONSORSHIPS ARE AVAILABLE For more information: Stacey Hobart, stacey@newbuildings.org or Tim Shea, tim@arch-products.com

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FRONT GREEN BUILDING UP & DESIGN

Up Front Typology Trendsetters Features Spaces Punch List

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BOMA’S 2016 TOBY EARTH AWARDS

26 Tampa City Center

Tampa, FL

28 The Millennium Building

Washington, D.C.

32 71 South Wacker Drive Chicago, IL

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71 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL

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PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE IRVINE COMPANY

TYPOLOGY BOMA'S 2016 TOBY EARTH AWARDS

rising

TYPOLOGY

Three office towers

' to meet the industrys greatest challenge

The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) International, is a global alliance of professionals working to advance the agenda of a vibrant, prosperous, and sustainable commercial real estate industry. Founded over a century ago, BOMA represents more than 10 billion square feet of office space in the U.S. The organization advocates on behalf of the industry with national, state, and local governments and publishes best practices and measurement standards, among a host of other activities. BOMA also promotes leadership in the field, with its annual TOBY Awards (The Outstanding Building of the Year), which for the last several years has included an “Earth” category, where applicants are judged on criteria such as energy and water conservation, green purchasing, indoor air quality, managing environmental risk, and tenant outreach.

Here, Brian Barth profiles three of the regional 2016 TOBY Earth Award winners, which will compete for the international TOBY Earth award to be announced at the BOMA International Conference and Expo on June 28, 2016, in Washington, D.C., after this issue goes to print. In suspense about who won this year’s international TOBY Earth Award? Visit www.boma.org to see the full list of TOBY winners and learn more about the TOBY program.

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TYPOLOGY BOMA'S 2016 TOBY EARTH AWARDS

By the numbers 5,000 The number of gallons of condensate that’s recovered from the building’s air handlers each day during the heat of the summer and fed back into the system, where formerly fresh potable water was used

Tampa City Center Owned by 201 North Franklin, LLC, an affiliate of Alliance HSP, LLC and Managed by Cushman and Wakefield Tampa, FL One trait common among TOBY winners is having pushed sustainability measures forward long before it was trendy to do so. It shows that it’s part of the organization’s culture, not just a publicity stunt. The 39-story Tampa City Center was the tallest building in the state when it joined the skyline of this balmy Gulf of Mexico port in 1981. Probably less reported in the media was that it was the first multitenant office building in the city to adopt a whole building recycling program—not earth-shattering news today, but the staff was quite proud when they pulled that off in 1992.

“Other corporate offices could do that when they had only one tenant, but for a multitenant office building, it was pretty unique in the early '90s to find a program in place for tenants to do desk-side recycling,” says Sandy Ballestra, the general manager at Tampa City Center for Cushman and Wakefield, who joined the staff during that period. “Long before LEED, we always had very innovative staff that wanted to do things that were good for the environment, good for the building, and reduced operating expenses.”

Tampa City Center achieved LEED Gold for operations and maintenance in 2010, a push that Ballestra herself helped to organize after becoming a LEED Accredited Professional in 2008,

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but she says the difference between “where we were and what we would need to do to achieve certification was minimal.” For example, the building’s engineers reconfigured the HVAC system to recycle condensate water nearly 30 years ago. During the heat of the summer, 5,000 gallons of condensate is recovered from the air handlers each day and fed back into the system, where formerly fresh potable water was used.

Then, about 12 years ago, a drought provoked the idea of capturing water from the French drain system around the building’s foundation to irrigate the landscaping, which is comprised of mostly native Floridian plants. Two 500 gallon

“Long before LEED, we always had very innovative staff that wanted to do things that were good for the environment, good for the building and reduced operating expenses.”

SANDY BALLESTRA, GENERAL MANAGER, TAMPA BAY CITY CENTER FOR CUSHMAN AND WAKEFIELD

hot water tanks were being replaced at the time, which were handily repurposed as cisterns.

Today, the system collects more than 4 million gallons annually, supplying 100% of the site’s irrigation water. Only a portion of the water collected is needed for irrigation, so the rest is returned to the aquifer beneath the city.

“It just shows what forward thinkers the engineers at this building are,” Ballestra says.

Even though massive upgrades weren’t required to achieve LEED Gold, she certainly appreciates the rigorous documentation required by the LEED application. “We’d been doing some of these things for a long time but didn’t have the written policy that LEED requires. So we learned a lot about the building in the process. It’s easy to operate your building in a sustainable manner; it just makes sense to do it that way.”

Tampa City Center was already fairly energy efficient, but each year they chip away at their usage, replacing light fixtures with LED, adding additional variable speed drives, or upgrading outdated HVAC equipment with more energy efficient options. They’ve set a minimum benchmark of lopping off 1% of energy use each year, which they’ve more than reached since they first tracked baseline data in 2008.

But the pride of the building continues to be its recycling program. What started with desk-side bins to recycle office paper in 1992 has expanded to a multi-faceted program where tenants can recycle everything from bottles and cans to cell phones and computers to furniture and light bulbs. Green

4m The number of gallons collected annually by the site’s French drain system, which then supplies 100% of the site’s irrigation water

1%

They’ve set a minimum benchmark of lopping off 1% of energy use each year, which they’ve more than reached since they first tracked baseline data in 2008

51%

Percentage of the waste stream at Tampa City Center that is diverted from the landfill

waste from the outdoors is composted onsite to create rich compost for the plantings. Several years ago, management made a simple, but high impact change to those desk-side recycling bins: no more plastic liners. The change resulted in more than doubling the annual recycling total from 54 tons diverted up to 136 tons each year.

In total, 51% of the waste stream at Tampa City Center is diverted from the landfill.

After all those years of hard work, the staff certainly deserves some credit. They achieved the BOMA 360 designation in 2010 and have won several TOBY awards in other categories before, but last year they won regionally in the Earth category. And now they are up for the International TOBY Earth award. “We thought it would be reasonable to pursue that,” says Ballestra with characteristic humility. gbdmagazine.com

TYPOLOGY

PHOTO: MARK GALL

Tampa City Center was already fairly energy efficient, but each year they chip away at their usage, replacing light fixtures with LED, adding additional variable speed drives, or upgrading outdated HVAC equipment with more energy efficient options.

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TYPOLOGY BOMA'S 2016 TOBY EARTH AWARDS

The Millennium Building Owned and Managed by The Tower Companies Washington, D.C.

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TYPOLOGY

PHOTO: RON BLUNT

At 1909 K Street in Washington, D.C.’s bustling Golden Triangle district stands a gleaming example of what dedicated and mindful long-term management can bring to the sustainability movement in corporate real estate. The 33-year old Millennium Building, owned and operated by D.C.based The Tower Companies, is 235,000 square feet of class A commercial office space. The property first earned LEED Certification in 2009 and later re-certified to achieve LEED Gold under Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance (EBOM).

In addition, the team has earned ENERGY STAR certification each year since 2010 and is also BOMA 360 certified.

The Tower Companies’ focus on sustainability at The Millennium Building and across its portfolio goes back much further than their first green building certification. Since 2005, Tower has made a commitment to purchase renewable energy and carbon credits to offset 100% of their energy usage across the entire portfolio. In 1997, The Millennium Building completed a major renovation and added four floors without increasing its energy footprint. In 2014, the building team flipped the switch on a 30 kW roof-mounted solar array, the first PV installation on a D.C.-area building of its type. The 40,000 kWh produced annually are enough to power three elevators.

“In everything we do, we ask the question, is it sustainable?” says Debbie Webb, vice president of property management at The Tower Companies. “How do we connect the building and the clients to the environment? How do we connect all three in a unified way?”

Webb says that she finds the answers to those questions arise through continual communication between the building’s tenants, management staff, and engineers.

Real-time energy monitoring has provided a basis for many small improvements that have added up to big savings. After establishing a baseline in 2010, energy use decreased 27% by 2014, well ahead of the established goal of 20% by 2020. Improvements in water use efficiency were even more dramatic, dropping by a whopping gb&d

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50% by 2014 over the 2010 baseline. They’ve also diverted waste from landfills by about 50% in recent years.

The Tower building staff has also organized a “Green Team” in the building, which consists of representatives from each tenant suite that meet for brainstorming sessions that often produce out-of-the-box ideas that lead to practical improvements and sustainability best practices. “We talk about building sustainability metrics and get feedback from tenants to understand how we can be

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ABOVE The building includes a top-notch bike room with showers, lockers, tools, and maps of the city’s bike routes. The room is also equipped with air conditioning, which in some cases may go unnoticed, but allows for a good start and end to a commute.

a resource to help their of- amenities for their clients. For fice with sustainability goals," example, in addition to the MilWebb says. lennium Building’s electric car There is also a lot of what charging stations, they’ve built Webb calls “extras”—little a top-notch bike room with things that The Tower Compa- lockers, tools, interactive maps nies chooses to do to encourage of the city’s bike routes, and, a healthy culture in the work- “not of minor importance,” adds place for their “clients,” the Webb: air conditioning. “That companies preferred way of re- way, at the start and end of your ferring to their tenants. Most of ride, you’re in a good place.” the “extras” don’t come with a On the roof, employees are financial incentive for the com- welcome to harvest from the pany, but many of them create organic herb garden, should positive impacts on the environ- they need a bit of rosemary ment, as well as the communi- or oregano for their dinner ty and are considered building plans. The building team has gbdmagazine.com

PHOTO: JIM LEWIS (BIKE ROOM & SOLAR PANEL ARRAY)

TYPOLOGY BOMA'S 2016 TOBY EARTH AWARDS

TYPOLOGY

PHOTOS: RON BLUNT (FITNESS CENTER)

By the numbers also partnered with a local company to provide another convenient option to clients— weekly farm-share bags delivered right to their office door.

It’s those small things that often signify a true leader in the eyes of TOBY judges, who seem to appreciate The Tower Companies’ approach, handing them a regional Earth award in 2015. “As a small company with almost 100 people, that was a huge honor for us,” Webb says.

“We’ve been building up to this for a long time and the team earned it.” gb&d

27%

After establishing a baseline in 2010, energy use nosedived by 27% in 2014, well ahead of the established 20% goal by 2020.

50%

The whopping drop in water use efficiency over the 2010 baseline

30kW

The solar array size that is located on the roof of the building. It produces 40,000kWh annually, which is equivalent to running 3 elevators for one year.

50%

The amount the building has managed to ratchet down their waste stream in recent years

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TYPOLOGY BOMA'S 2016 TOBY EARTH AWARDS

71 South Wacker Drive

PHOTO: DAVID B. SEIDE: DEFINED SPACE, CHICAGO VIA THE IRVINE COMPANY

Owned by The Irvine Company and Managed by Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) Chicago, IL

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TYPOLOGY

By the numbers 89% It’s fitting that in Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, the next generation of skyscrapers, which are decidedly leaner and greener than those of the past, is taking shape. Located in the prestigious West Loop area of the Windy City’s central business district, The Irvine Company’s 71 South Wacker is a glass-clad futurist jewel; it also happens to be the largest multi-tenant LEED Platinum building in Chicago and one of the largest LEED Platinum buildings of its type anywhere in the world. Additionally, it's an IREM Certified Sustainable Property and has a BOMA 360 designation.

Interestingly, 71 South Wacker was not originally designed to LEED standards, says David Hopwood, the building’s general manager with JLL. Originally developed by the Pritzker Realty Group in 2004, the building was sold to The Irvine Company in 2010, just as a major sustainability effort was completed. “In 2009, we established a sustainability steering committee with the four largest tenants and began to consider what sustainable opportunities existed,” says Hopwood. “We needed their buy-in to make it happen.”

Initial changes to the 49-story, 1.5-million-square-foot tower included strategically revising temperature settings throughout the building to reduce energy use and improve tenant comfort. Weekend HVAC use shifted to an “on request” format; lobby fans shifted to “as necessary” use, rather than run 24-7, as they had previously; and the building’s static set-point was reduced from 1” gb&d

The energy use reduction after replacing incandescent fixtures in elevators with LED strips (the investment was paid off just three years later)

1,200 The number of fixtures that were converted with more energy efficient products, resulting in an investment recoup time of only five months

3.5m kWh The building recently realized savings of over 3.5 million kWh due to additional completed energy savings initiatives, including VFD's on the chiller and chilled/condenser water pumps, creating an all variable-speed central plant, and a system-wide HVAC optimization platform that adjusts setpoints on chilled water, condenser water, static pressure, and supply air temperature based on the actual building load.

to .8”, an easy fix that resulted in savings on annual energy costs. Incandescent fixtures in elevators were replaced with LED strips, cutting energy use by 89%—with the utility rebate, the investment was paid off just three years later. Another utility rebate enabled the conversion of over 1,200 fixtures with more energy efficient products; in this case, the investment was recouped in only five months.

71 South Wacker recently realized savings of over 3.5 million kWh due to additional completed energy savings initiatives, including VFD's on the chiller and chilled/condenser water pumps, creating an all variable-speed central plant, and a system-wide HVAC optimization platform that adjusts set-points on chilled water, condenser water, static pressure, and supply air temperature based on the actual building load.

Though they didn’t build to LEED specifications, green was definitely on the minds of Pei Cobb Freed and Partners, the esteemed international architecture firm who designed the building. They were just thinking of green in the more literal sense of the word: there’s a green roof, an interior bamboo forest, and significantly-sized exterior landscape for an urban office tower, which was designed by the late Chicago landscape architect Peter Lindsay Schaudt. The eloquent words of lead designer Henry Cobb in his original project narrative published in 2005 give a sense of how he hoped the site would enrich Chicago’s concrete jungle with a bit of soft greenness.

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to cut energy use by at least 20%—they were already more than a third of the way there at the end of 2015—over the next five years and volunteering to work with other commercial buildings in their district to help realize the mayor’s vision for the future of the city: “In the 19th century, Chicago built the world’s first modern skyscraper.

In the 20th century, we created a world-renowned skyline. And today, Chicago aspires to make that skyline the most efficient on the planet.” gb&d

ABOVE A block-long garden shaped by the tower offers an oasis of green to the thousands of commuters who walk by twice daily along Monroe Street on their way between the railroad station and the Loop.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE IRVINE COMPANY

distinctive civic presence not only in the form of its tower— with curved surfaces of stainless steel and glass terminating in the dramatic verticality of bifurcated end walls—but also in the block-long garden shaped by the tower so as to offer an oasis of green to the thousands of commuters who walk by twice daily along Monroe Street on their way between the railroad station and the Loop,” Cobb wrote.

More than 10 years later as 71 South Wacker seeks the TOBY Awards’ highest honor in the Earth Category, its management has already racked up a host of recognition for their ongoing work. It was picked as the Chicago Commercial Real Estate Development of the year when it opened in 2005; then won local and regional TOBY Awards in the over 1 Million Square Feet Category in 2007, and 2009, as well as an International TOBY Award in the same category in 2012. Following the sustainability efforts, it won the city of Chicago’s Green Office Challenge Award and was named a Sustainability Grand Champion when it again won the award in 2015, in addition to local and regional TOBY Earth Awards in 2015 and 2016.

When Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel launched Retrofit Chicago in 2012, 71 South Wacker was honored to be a founding participant in its Commercial Buildings Initiative, pledging

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GREEN BUILDINGTYPOLOGY & DESIGN

Up Front Typology Trendsetters Features Spaces Punch List

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36 Fabcon

A huge pharmaceutical supply warehouse on a brownfield site in Detroit went up faster and has better climate controls thanks to its pre-fabricated panels

42 Evaporcool

Engineers at Evaporcool have a seductively simple way to cool off blazing hot air as it enters any HVAC unit

45 Vectorworks

The future of design software has arrived

48 ClimaCool

A modular chiller solution leads to major savings for a downtown Toledo building

50 Excel Dryer

LEED Fellow Penny Bonda discusses how high velocity hand dryers blew her away

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TRENDSETTERS

PRECAST CONCRETE CONNOISSEURS

Fabcon

A huge pharmaceutical supply warehouse on a brownfield site in Detroit went up faster and has better climate controls thanks to its engineered, pre-fabricated panels

By Russ Klettke

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PHOTOS: COURTESY OF KIRCO MANIX CONSTRUCTION

TRENDSETTERS

No brownfield remediation project is easy. And any development that attempts to bring back Detroit is no simple matter. But a team comprised of a developer-builder, a precast concrete wall panel manufacturer, and a healthcare client refused to cede to the concept of “impossible.” So they got it done.

“It” is the new Cardinal Health Distribution Center that sits in an otherwise blighted section of Detroit.

The 300,000-square-foot warehouse was built to satisfy stringent Food & Drug Administration criteria for storing and distributing pharmaceuticals and other medical products that serve the six-hospital Henry Ford Health System.

It’s one of a new generation of warehouses that are taller (36 feet high) and operate with greater automated efficiencies in temperature-controlled conditions.

But just five years ago, before developer-contractor Kirco Manix began a threeyear remediation process, the 18-acre, multi-owner site was a mess. “This was the largest preconstruction project we’ve ever done,” says Dave Endres, Kirco’s project manager. “Taking ownership of the parcels was a challenge, as there were a host of title defects. All buildings had lead and asbestos contaminants. It was a dumping ground with 4,000 tires. There had been a paint factory in this block, 11 larger underground storage tanks, and almost all of the houses had fuel oil tanks.”

It didn’t help that at mid-project, Detroit itself gb&d

went into Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Kirco subcontracted much of the remediation work (AKT Peerless) that engaged more than 100 environmental engineers of one type or another. Even with best management practices, a vapor barrier subfloor had to be installed in the new building to ensure no residual gases would work their way inside.

What Matters is What’s Inside the Walls Removal of contaminants, as well as pavement from streets and alleys (which was recycled), took three years.

Actual construction went much more quickly—due in part to the nature of the facility, but also because prefabricated walls were used.

In fact, the erection of

93,000 square feet (2,600 lineal feet) of walls took just three weeks on site—as compared to masonry construction and insulation that would require up to five months. Just as important, the selection of precast concrete over masonry and metal construction proved to be efficient in all kinds of green ways.

“The product we used was VersaCore+Green,” explains David Stanton, sales engineer for Fabcon, which produces the panels. The Grove City, Ohio-based company manufactured the patented product using recycled concrete aggregate and insulated billets (sandwiched between the concrete layers) that is also largely made of recycled material. The 8-inch thick walls provide R-12 insulation for this particular structure

and can add LEED points and tax credits to a project due to the combination of recycled material and insulation value—plus it was manufactured within 500 miles of the building site. This R-value is three points higher than standard precast wall panels because of the insulation.

Precast also enables a greater use of a building's footprint, explains Stanton.

“Companies like Amazon push the envelope on warehouse heights,” he says. “This height was not possible with masonry block construction. And that would be more expensive because additional interior insulation would be required.”

Additional sustainability features of the VersaCore+Green product are weight and sizing. The nature of the porous materials used

RIGHT Five years ago, before Kirco Manix's three-year remediation process began, the 18-acre future site of Cardinal Health was a mess—complete with contaminants, 4,000 tires, and 11 underground storage tanks, among other issues.

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TRENDSETTERS

The 300,000-square-foot warehouse was built to satisfy stringent Food & Drug Administration criteria for storing and distributing pharmaceuticals and other medical products that serve the six-hospital Henry Ford Health System. It’s one of a new generation of warehouses that are taller (36 feet high) and operate with greater, automated efficiencies in temperature-controlled conditions.

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PHOTO: COURTESY OF KIRCO MANIX CONSTRUCTION

TRENDSETTERS

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TRENDSETTERS

3x more

93,000 square feet (2,600 lineal feet) of walls took just three weeks on site—as compared to masonry construction and insulation that would require up to five months.

in the panels makes for a lighter shipping load. And when shipping 8-foot-wide panels (a 12-foot-wide version is also available), three-times more can be loaded onto truck beds within transportation authorities’ regulations, effectively reducing the number of trips from factory to site by more than half.

Additional sustainability features of the VersaCore+Green product are weight and sizing. The nature of the porous materials used in the panels makes for a lighter shipping load. And when shipping 8-foot-wide panels (a 12-foot-wide version is also available), threetimes more can be loaded onto truck beds within transportation authorities’ regulations, effectively reducing the number of trips from factory to site by more than half.

There are Jobs Inside Those Walls Stanton explains the prefabricated walls are made to order as each job has variations. “No two buildings are alike,” he says. “We create a diaphragm for the building, with steel joists to connect the walls to the roof.” To produce load-bearing structural panels, pre-stressed tendons of steel cable are embedded in the concrete. The panels then can be cut to size to accommodate doors and windows as needed.

Meanwhile, as Detroit digs itself out of decades of decline, this building serves as a bright spot. Approximately 150 construction tradespeople were employed in the fouryear, $32 million project. Even better, another 150 permanent warehousing jobs now serve an important hospital system from where refuse and abandoned buildings once stood. Without an ability to build a structure that meets FDA standards on a cost-effective schedule—after a lengthy site remediation—those jobs in this neighborhood might never have been possible.

Which makes it a local economic remediation story, too. gb&d

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150

150 permanent warehousing jobs now serve an important hospital system from where refuse and abandoned buildings once stood.

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TRENDSETTERS

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF FABCON

R-12 insulation

8-inch thick walls provide R-12 insulation for this particular structure and can add LEED points and tax credits to a project due to the combination of recycled material and insulation value— plus it was manufactured within 500 miles of the building site. This R-value is three points higher than standard precast wall panels because of the insulation.

Walls That Hold Music There is a lot that architects can do with boxes that isn’t boring. Using prefabricated wall panels to build those boxes helps.

Case in point is the Venice Island Performing Arts and Recreation Center near Philadelphia. Situated alongside the city’s beloved Schuylkill River, designers at Buell Kratzer Powell (BKP) had to manage the difficulties of a tight site and the program needs of its occupant, a 250-seat performance space, which includes having good acoustics.

This may be even more the case when a concert is taking place inside while the Center’s

outdoor recreation areas host energetic children. Fabcon’s precast concrete walls were used to fit the building’s industrial aesthetic—echoing the site’s industrial past—and to help baffle sounds coming in and going out. The wall panels have a 50 Sound Transmission Coefficient (STC), sufficient to keep loud voices out and most of the music in.

Because the building is backed up directly to the river—making the outside unfeasible for traditional masonry construction—the prefabricated walls erected from the inside were a pragmatic solution in the construction phase. The building was also completed faster because Fabcon precast panels go up in mere days as opposed to the weeks required for interlocking brick or building block construction.

Because the building backed up directly to the river—making the outside unfeasible for traditional masonry construction—the prefabricated walls erected from the inside were a pragmatic solution in the construction phase.

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TRENDSETTERS

E VA P O R AT I V E C O O L I N G E X P E R T S

Evaporcool

Engineers at Evaporcool have a seductively simple way to cool blazing hot air as it enters any HVAC unit

The concept of evaporative cooling has been around for centuries. Anyone who has felt the cool breeze coming in across a lake has at least a rudimentary understanding of this physical law, one which has profound implications in the effort to reduce the energy needed to cool our indoor environments. “Swamp coolers” based on the principles of evaporative cooling served as early air conditioning units a century ago, but Memphis-based Evaporcool has elevated this timeless technology into a new and inspiring form: an externally mounted filter that fits over the air intake of any commercial air cooled HVAC unit, no matter the size or configuration.

This low-cost, easy-to-install approach typically cuts energy consumption of the HVAC unit by 20% or more, simply by dampening the incoming airstream of the HVAC unit, which often sits on urban rooftops and parking lots where air temperatures routinely soar into the triple digits.

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Evaporcool's low cost, easy-to-install externally mounted filter cuts HVAC unit energy consumption by 20% or more.

E va p o rc o o l ’ s l i g h t we i g h t p o ly mer-framed filters house a series of tiny misters, which mist the air in short bursts of water (hooked up to standard city water and using as little as .9 gallons per day, per ton) as it is pulled through the condenser intake. One thing to note is that the water/ mist doesn’t get onto the fins or coils to cause corrosion. Their proprietary technology goes much further than previous evaporative cooling systems by using a “smart controller” to sense eight different parameters, including temperature, humidity, and the electrical demand of the air compressor, to make minute-by-minute adjustments to the volume of water applied.

Ben Taube, senior vice president for cor-

porate and strategic development at Evaporcool, describes the controller as if it’s a little robotic engineer living in a box on the side of the HVAC unit, crunching the numbers day and night to achieve the greatest efficiency. “The controller is constantly calculating the optimal conditions for the water to be 100 percent evaporated, which is what results in the greatest reduction in temperature from the outside air,” he says.

The controller includes a wireless transmitter that connects it to a cloud-based server, which is easily integrated with an existing building control system, to provide building operators real-time information on the unit’s efficiency, as well as the ability to conduct fault diagnostic tests. “If we see components that are not working correctly, we can send a signal to the controller and adjust those specific parameters,” Taube says.

Any moisture that is not immediately evaporated—or as Taube says, “flash evaporated”—collects on a thin filter media, which further cools the air entering the unit. But the filter media serves other important functions, as well. Dust and debris are prevented from entering through the air intake, so not only do building operators find that energy use plummets, but they are also freed from the time-intensive maintenance of cleaning the condenser coils. Plus, the harsh chemicals typically used for the job are no longer needed. By keeping the unit from working as hard to cool the air, and by keeping it cleaner, HVAC systems with Evaporcool technology typically have a longer lifespan.

Taube says the payback on the investment is typically in the one-to-three-year range, depending on the climate, availability of incentives (e.g., government or utility), and other factors. “By reducing the air temperature going into those units, they have a better load profile and the capacity for the unit increases,” Taube says. “So there are both operational savings and energy benefits.” Plus, installation is a breeze: Evaporcool custom builds each filter to fit the size of the air intake and uses industrial strength magnets to hold them in posigbdmagazine.com

RENDERING: COURTESY OF EVAPORCOOL; ICONS: MARCO OLGIO, JOÃO PAULO FERNANDES, STEFANO VETERE

By Brian Barth

TRENDSETTERS

THIS PAGE In addition to the 30% reduction in power consumption of the HVAC units at the NRG data center, a 26.75 kW photovoltaic array provides a portion of the power to the office space, while wind energy offsets account for the rest.

Best suited project for the Evaporcool system: Commercial installations with HVAC units over 20 tons.

Evaporating Costs at the NRG Skybox Data Center

The standard return on the investment can happen in: One to three years.

20-30 degree drop in air temperature entering HVAC units equipped with Evaporcool filters

30% PHOTOS: COURTESY OF EVAPORCOOL (TOP MIDDLE); ERIC MELZER PHOTOGRAPHY (FAR RIGHT)

typical percentage of reduction in energy use on HVAC units equipped with Evaporcool filters

1-3 years number of years in which the investment in Evaporcool technology pays for itself in energy savings

100% renewable energy used at NRG-Reliant’s 10,000 Skybox Data Center

1.3 PUE the projected PUE (power utilization effectiveness) ratio at full load of NRG-Reliant’s Skybox Data Center

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TRENDSETTERS

RIGHT Ben Taube describes the controller as "a little robotic engineer living in a box on the side of the HVAC unit, crunching the numbers for the greatest efficiency."

tion on the metal frames of the HVAC unit, eliminating the need for invasive drilling and screws—making it easy to access the HVAC system.

Evaporcool Technology in Practice

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How Evaporcool Filters Save Water NRG is on track to achieve a PUE rating—which stands for power utilization effectiveness, the ratio of watts used by the actual IT equipment in a data center versus the total watts needed to power the data center (including lighting, HVAC, UPS, etc.)—of 1.3 at full load, which is pretty impressive, given that a PUE of 2 was considered standard in the industry in the not distant past. In other words, for every watt used by the servers, only .3 watts is used for ancillary systems, including cooling.

“If you could ever get to 1.0, that would be Nirvana, but of course there’s always going to be something that needs to run the IT support equipment,” Furr says. “But in the big picture this is an extremely energy-efficient data center, and the Evaporcool solution is one of the major components facilitating that efficiency.” gb&d

The Evaporcool system uses approximately 1.9 gallons of water for each kWh saved, saving approximately 90% of water usage while also saving electricity.

Based on national averages, on a 75-ton HVAC unit, the Evaporcool system will use $78 of water in a year, while saving more than $7,000 annually in electricity.

The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) reports that “U.S. electricity production consumes more than 20 gallons of water per KWH created."

Other studies confirm this water usage and state that depending upon the power plant type, the water usage can range from 10 gallons to 25 gallons of water consumed per kWh created.

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RENDERING: COURTESY OF EVAPORCOOL

Evaporcool’s pre-cooling system protects the HVAC equipment of some very high profile clients. NRG Energy, Inc., a company with the largest independent power producer and one of the largest solar power developers in the nation, recently cut the ribbon on a new data center in Katy, Texas, a hot and humid suburb of Houston, where the company houses some of its most critical IT infrastructure.

Their arrangement with Skybox, the owner of the data center, which leases a 10,000 square foot space to NRG, allowed them to customize the build out of their “data hall” with the types of energy conservation features they like to include on all their facilities.

A 26.75 kW photovoltaic array provides a portion of the power to the office space—wind energy offsets account for the rest. Evaporcool’s pre-cooling filters, which NRG is a strategic partner, can be found on the twin 400-ton Trane air chillers outside the building.

Pat Furr, director of IT infrastructure at NRG, says they’re seeing a 20-to-30-degree drop in the temperature of the air entering the data center chillers as a result of the Evaporcool filters, leading to an estimated 30% reduction in power consumption of the HVAC units. Combined with the other energy efficiency features at their Skybox data center,

TRENDSETTERS

ARCHITEC TUR AL SOF T WARE PURVE YORS

Vectorworks

The future of design software has arrived

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF VECTORWORKS, INC.

By Amanda Koellner and Alex Nates-Perez

The conference hall pulsed with energy from the many design professionals flooding in at Chicago’s Fairmont hotel as the attendees of the second annual Vectorworks Design Summit, held at the end of April, settled in for the first keynote. At the gathering, Vectorworks, a leading global provider of cross-platform CAD and BIM design software, announced a sampling of the software suite’s upcoming features for 2017 and beyond. Additionally, the conference gave an opportunity to introduce the company’s new CEO, Dr. Biplab Sarkar.

The keynote opened with former CEO Sean Flaherty , who spoke of Vectorworks’ ingenuity and forward-thinking developments, comparing these qualities to the newly appointgb&d

ABOVE Vectorworks 2016 recently won an American Package Design Award from Graphic Design USA in the Electronics and Computers category.

ed CEO. Sarkar, who has been with Vectorworks for the past 16 years, started as a manager of geometry and rendering before diligently working his way to the top. He presented his values and goals to keep tradition within the company while continuing to constantly push the boundaries of what can be accomplished in design software.

His inspiration, he says, is the company’s customers. gb&d managing editor Amanda Koellner sat down with him at this year’s Design Summit to talk about the future of Vectorworks and Sarkar’s goals as CEO.

Sarkar: The most exciting feature in my mind is the virtual reality export. If you have rendered a scene in Vectorworks and then you export it, you can just click on the link, and it’ll open up on your phone, your iPad, or any other device.

It will open in a browser like Google Chrome, or any other browser for that matter. You’d be able to walk through or fly over; you can even export a stereoscopic view, which you can then see in a device like Google Cardboard and things of that nature. And you’ll be able to be immersed and digitally walk through.

gb&d: Which of the new features that you talked about today are you most excited about for the coming year?

gb&d: Seems great for your customers.

Sarkar: That is our mission. In july–august 2016

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TRENDSETTERS

01

THE RESOURCE BROWSER

•

Enables direct browsing to Vectorworks software's resources Uses only one screen for easy searching

INSIDE

VECTORWORKS DESIGN TOOLS 2017: THE OF THE FUTURE 02

THE STRUCTURAL MEMBERS

• • • •

3D precision for architectural design Polyline modes for curved structural members Interactive 3D editing Enhanced 2D Top/Plan with manipulation of structural elements

“This tool can create giant curved trusses and is optimized for 3D design,” says Darick DeHart, Vectorworks’ newly appointment VP of product management.

04

• • • •

05

•

03

• • • •

Monitors product usage Tailors users’ experiences Informs Vectorworks of products that work and places for revision Manually controlled by Vectorworks user

• • •

Access to the cloud for all users, subscribers and nonsubscribers alike Allows easy access for customers to design concepts Connected to Vectorworks mobile app, Nomad—also accessible to anyone

06

• •

07

• •

46

The processing of sections and renderings created in the cloud will still be exclusive for Vectorworks Service Select members

july–august 2016

THE IRRIGATION TOOLS

Hails the coupling of landscape and architectural design Detailed catalog of major manufacturers Smart software picks out the best fit for any design from the catalog Runs pressure and water consumption analytics

“There was a time when irrigation was seen as the opposite of sustainable— wasteful,” DeHart says. “But it’s come full circle now, and we’re maximizing the water use."

VECTORWORKS ANALYTICS

VECTORWORKS CLOUD SERVICES FOR ALL

“For all these years, we have had all this content, and a great easy way to bring it into your drawing,” says Steve Johnson, the newly appointed VP of product development.

“But the management of it was a little cumbersome and tricky. Now we have a great ease of use.”

• • •

VECTORWORKS GRAPHICS MODULE (VGM) 2D TOP/PLAN

Enhanced graphics performance Faster, smoother, more accurate graphics enables faster interactive 2D drawing

WEB VIEW/VIRTUAL REALITY PLATFORM

Web-based interface works on almost every type of hardware Supports any web browser Realistic walkthrough of a 3D experience Virtual Reality capabilities to put the customer almost literally into the design

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TRENDSETTERS

LEFT Sarkar, who has been with Vectorworks for the past 16 years, started as a manager of geometry and rendering before diligently working his way to the top. He presented his values and goals to keep tradition within the company while continuing to constantly push the boundaries of what can be accomplished in design software.

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF VECTORWORKS, INC.

a few years from now, a larger percentage of architects will present to their clients with virtual reality. I think that our progression is virtual reality, and then we’ll have augmented reality and mixed reality. You’ll be able to grab things in the virtual world. gb&d: What else do you see for Vectorworks in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years? How do you see future technologies playing into your specific business?

Sarkar: These are all good— these visualizations, visual augmentations—but I think the main push that I see happening is the analytics part of it. We showed an example gb&d

this morning where we have a graph of all of our analytics tools: how many people are using them and how often they are accessing the tools. You can create a workspace that contains only the most used tools and get rid of all the features that might not be used by that customer. It leads to a simplification of your workspace. It’s like what Google does by storing your data and using it to show you related links. It’s the same here. You use the software, and it will learn and change your workspace. That, I think, is the next train coming—machine learning. It will adapt and learn, and the next time you start Vectorworks, it will invoke

that tool for you. Analytics and machine learning will merge, and then everything will be more automated. gb&d: Well, at least we’re aware of it! Switching gears, what do you feel Vectorworks is already doing to facilitate sustainability and design, and what do you hope to see more of along the lines of green?

Sarkar: Last year, we developed a feature for energy analysis built inside Vectorworks, with our feature set called Energos.

You just provide your location, you create the shell of the building, and it will run the possible analysis for potential energy consumption and show you how to design it better.

That is one of the areas we are trying to build upon.

We are also developing a new irrigation feature. It makes for much better water management. For example, imagine that you want to design a golf course or a soccer field, and you want to design your water lines in such a way that it reduces your water consumption and also keeps the flow powerful enough to water everything.

The program can help you maximize your water efficiency. We still have more we can do, and we will. Sustainability has a lot of different things like the construction of buildings and the materials you are using, what your carbon footprint is for bringing the materials, for example. I think this is the next direction we want to go with our sustainable design tools. I think we are still a couple of years away. gb&d july–august 2016

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TRENDSETTERS

HVAC EXPERTS

ClimaCool A modular chiller solution leads to major savings for a downtown Toledo building

By Margaret Poe

When it comes to boosting a building’s energy efficiency, it isn’t always about doing more with less. In fact, often the key is in using exactly the amount of energy that’s needed—and not a kilowatt-hour more.

That was the case for the PNC Bank Building in Toledo, Ohio. Originally opened in 1930, today it houses accounting firms, law offices, and a restaurant. The building’s HVAC equipment was efficient when it was running at full capacity, but it wasted re-

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ABOVE ClimaCool's modular chiller is powerful enough to cool this entire building on peak days, but can also be turned down to power just one or two units.

sources when the 29-story building was only partially occupied, or during off-peak times.

So when the 56-year-old centrifugal chiller system fell into disrepair in October 2014, it was the perfect opportunity to find a more flexible cooling solution. Building manager Richard Stiff worked with JDRM Engineering to conduct an energy study and evaluate options for a replacement chiller.

Stiff’s primary goals were twofold: ingbdmagazine.com

TRENDSETTERS

375,000kWh The number of kilowatt-hours annually saved thanks to only using the ClimaCool modular chiller when it’s actually needed

$42,000

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF CLIMACOOL

The amount of energy savings per year

creasing energy efficiency and cutting costs. By analyzing building usage and consumption needs, JDRM determined that the restaurant was the only area in need of cooling during off hours—nights and weekends. The old 350-ton system wasted energy outside business hours, as well as during the spring-summer start-up period and fall-winter changeover days. As Tim Sandys, co-owner of HVAC firm Sandys & Associates, puts it: “Why run 350 tons on nights and weekends when you only need 80 tons to get the job done?”

That central question led JDRM and Stiff to a solution in the form of a modular chiller from ClimaCool. Unlike conventional chillers, it has separate electric feeds for individual units, improving the turndown capacity. While the chiller functions as one piece of equipment, the five 85-ton units can be controlled separately. Thus, the 425ton machinery is powerful enough to cool the entire building on peak days, but it can also be turned down to power one or two units.

In other words, the modular chiller allows management to only use the energy that’s needed. And that flexibility has resulted in major savings: effective turndown has resulted in energy reduction of 375,000 kilowatt-hours annually, plus an annual savings of $42,000.

The modular nature also facilitates preventive maintenance, one of Stiff’s major priorities. Unlike some competitors’ chillers JDRM considered, which require operators to shut down the entire system to repair one module, ClimaCool elements can be isolated. “We chose this unit because it offered true redundancy,” Stiff says. “If we had to service one of [the modules], then the other modules could stay operational.”

This is a major benefit, Sandys adds, as “the owner’s tenants never have to be without cooling, even when the chiller requires service.” Not that the system requires extensive servicing. Once a year, Stiff’s team will clean out any debris that collected during the season. But when that happens, cooling isn’t interrupted.

“With the ClimaCool modular design gb&d

and individual power wiring, it is almost impossible to have the entire chiller system shut down,” Sandys says.

The system selects a different compressor to run each time, helping to equally balance the operating hours between the units. Stiff explains that his team can start the chillers from a remote point. “The Honeywell unit can identify how many compressors we need to have running. It reduces the demand and the capacity of the building, and the energy consumption over time,” he says. In addition, Stiff is able to maintain tight control over the chiller’s water temperature, keeping energy consumption very low, Sandys says.

The installation process, which was completed in the spring of 2015, was also facilitated by the chiller’s modular design. It fit easily into the limited space—and there was

Before ClimaCool's work, the 29-story building's HVAC equipment was efficient when running at full capacity, but energy was wasted during off-peak hours.

no need to tear out a wall to install a large centrifugal unit. Once installed, it was easy to integrate into the existing building communication system. Additionally, Stiff, who has maintained the building since 1981, was able to customize the cooling to meet occupants’ needs.

After the successful installation and operation of the new system, Stiff is a strong advocate for modular chillers, saying they offer benefits conventional chillers can’t match. Apart from the added efficiency, the longtime facilities professional can’t say enough about the durability of the new system. In fact, he describes the benefits in just three words: quality, performance and longevity. gb&d july–august 2016

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TRENDSETTERS

ENERGY (A ND MONE Y ) SAV ING H A ND DRY ERS

Excel Dryer LEED Fellow Penny Bonda was surprised to find a green alternative to recycled paper towels. In fact, high velocity hand dryers blow away the perceptions of most in the industry.

Penny Bonda

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Hotels that vie for worldclass travelers, large conventions, and black-tie affairs have to achieve that precarious balance between luxury and sustainability. Chicago’s Fairmont hotel is one such example.

And sometimes the analysis comes down to the restrooms.

No one likes seeing a wastebasket overflowing with paper towels, and now they don’t have to.

Highly efficient electric hand dryers have replaced recycled paper towels on the basis of superior cost-savings, drying effectiveness, and carbon footprints.

The cost part is understandable.

It’s much easier on the hotel’s maintenance staff whose sweeping and disposal tasks disappear with electric hand dryers. But efficacy and resource efficiency is what surprises The specific hand dryer model in use is the XLERATOR, a high-speed energy efficient dryer that has come to dominate its category since its 2001 launch by manufacturer Excel Dryer, Inc. of East Longmeadow, Massachusetts (near Boston). It replaces older models from this and other companies that were largely viewed as inadequate

to the task of hand drying. By simply concentrating a blast of heated air at a higher velocity, the dryer works better—in about 10 seconds.

But what surprises many— including Penny Bonda , a LEED fellow with the U.S. Green Building Council, a partner with Ecoimpact Consulting, and past president of the American Society of Interior Designers—is the environmental superiority of this type of hand dryer over recycled paper towels.

“People generally believe that recycled anything is the greenest solution, which often isn’t true,” Bonda says. She didn’t come about this observation casually. She had to see the cradle-to-grave analysis of how electric-powered dryers stood up to recycled-source paper towels for herself.

William Gagnon, vice president of marketing for Excel Dryer, fully anticipated the questions that Bonda and other green designers would have.

The company hired Quantis International to perform a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA, peer reviewed to ISO 14040 gbdmagazine.com

PHOTO: WILEY

By Russ Klettke

TRENDSETTERS

CARBON FOOTPRINT 6000

5000

4000

PHOTO: COURTESY OF EXCEL DRYER, INC.

3000

standards) on the XLERATOR, conventional hand dryers, and paper towel systems—recycled and non-recycled—in 2009.

Quantis considered the use of resources as well as the release of pollutants throughout each product’s life cycle, from raw material acquisition through production, use, and end-oflife treatment. This allowed for direct comparisons between the four products and systems, taking into account the differences in impacts on climate change, freshwater use, human health, ecosystem quality, and resource depletion (i.e., renewable vs. non-renewable energy sources where the dryers are used).

The results of the LCA were conclusive. The XLER ATOR performed significantly better than earlier-generation electric dryers, paper towels, and paper towels with 100% recycled content. On all measures.

Bonda is enthusiastic about these results and believes that designers and clients need to be aware of them. “Product and material specification becomes easier, almost intuitive, once the design professional understands the LCA process and the vital role it plays in green design,” she says.

Gagnon’s father, Denis Gagnon, developed the product after purchasing the company in 1997. Almost universally, the complaint was that traditional

2000

1000

0 XLERATOReco 500 Watts

materials production

XLERATOR 1500 Watts

manufacturing

Conventional Hand Dryers

transportation

ABOVE Excel Dryer commissioned a Life Cycle Assessment on the XLERATOR, conventional hand dryers, and paper towel systems—recycled and non-recycled—in 2009. The LCA considered the use of resources as well as the release of pollutants throughout each product’s life cycle, from raw material acquisition through pro-

Paper Towels

use

100% Recycled Paper Towels

end of life

duction, use, and end-of-life treatment. As the above graph shows, the XLERATOR reduces carbon footprint up to 70% vs. even 100% recycled paper towels. The results also proved that the XLERATOR hand dryer reduces the environmental impact of hand drying by 50% to 75%.

The XLERATOR is a high-speed energy efficient dryer that has come to dominate its category since its 2001 launch by manufacturer Excel Dryer, Inc.

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CONSUMED

PRODUCED TRENDSETTERS

hand dryers took too long, 3045 seconds, to truly dry users hands. Excel once had a trade show display in its early days that said, “No Pants Required,” referring to the common practice of giving up on the hand dryer by resorting to clothing fabric to complete the task.

They set about a three-year project to design a more powerful, faster, yet energy-efficient version of the dryer (that was originally introduced in 1963). The firm contracted with Invent Resources, which employed scientists and engineers in product development.

Among their criteria was that the new dryer costs would come in within 15-20% of the existing model and would work on 15-amp circuits. “We were thinking about older buildings with older electrical systems,” William Gagnon says.

Both father and son knew they were up against some misconceptions. “At that point, people clearly preferred paper towels,” William says. “They as-

37%

sumed a superiority of ‘100% recycled paper.’” People assumed that recycled paper towels are in some recycling loop, where those towels used are used over and over; in fact they go to landfills after a single use. Recycled content might be preferable to paper derived from non-sustainably raised forests, but even that type of paper towel fell short in the LCA study.

report significant cost savings: Longmeadow High School , near the company headquarters, reports a 96% cost reduction; Boston’s Fenway Park has units in operation throughout the facility and claims an annual reduction of 123 tons of waste (24% less) compared to the prior year when paper towels were used, in addition to fewer toilets clogged by paper

“All interior spaces affect human health. As such, designers have an obligation to provide spaces that protect the health and enhance the well-being of occupants.”

the hospital’s stringent infection control board standards.

Bonda worked with Gagnon to develop a course titled “Next Generation Green Restroom Design v2,” eligible for AIA, GBCI and IDCEC CEU credits. “All interior spaces affect human health,” she says. “As such, designers have an obligation to provide spaces that protect the health and enhance the well-being of occupants.” Because whether in hospitals or hotels, high schools or office buildings, no one wants to get sick. They just want to dry their hands, no pants required, and get on with their day. gb&d

37%

PENNY BONDA, LEED FELLOW USGBC; PARTNER, ECOIMPACT CONSULTING; PAST PRESIDENT, AMERICAN SOCIETY OF INTERIOR DESIGNERS

The results in real-world towels; the USGBC cites them applications since the product as “the specified hand dryer of ENERGY rolled out worldwide have prov- choice” for its own showcase green restrooms in Washingen the theoretical models. In SURPLUS case study after case study, com- ton, D.C. Plus, Northwestern mercial-scale users (there are Memorial Hospital in Chicago residential customers as well) had 100 units installed to meet

energy used energy surplus

Have you seen the latest figures?

Yep, we’re officially working out of a Living Building.

37% The Bullitt Center produces 37% more energy than it needs.

Congratulations to the Bullitt Center team for achieving net-positive energy usage and final Living Building Challenge certification. PROSOCO is proud to have played a small part in its creation with our LS/CS and LSGuard concrete flooring products and our R-Guard FastFlash liquid flashing and air barrier system.

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You. Us. The project.

800 255 4255

PROSOCO.COM

gbdmagazine.com

GREEN BUILDING TRENDSETTERS & DESIGN

Up Front Typology Trendsetters Features Spaces Punch List

gb&d

54 Resiliency Roundtable

We reached out to six experts to find out what critical resilient designs are necessary to save our people and our planet

july–august 2016

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RESILIENCY RESILIENCY R RESILIENCY RESILIENCY R RESILIENCY RESILIENCY R RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY R E S I L I E N C Y RO UN DTAB LE RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY FEATURES

re·sil·ience r ˈzilyə ns/ noun e

e

1. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.

2. the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY RESILIENCY R E S I L I E N C Y RO UN DTAB LE RESILIENCY RESILIENCY ESILIENCY

FEATURE

FEATURES

We approached six experts—a designer and urban planner at Perkins+Will, Berkeley professor, resiliency director at ARUP, San Francisco Foundation program director, AECOM senior VP, and the founder of The Resilient Design Institute—and asked them an urgent question:

“What critical resilient designs must the built environment adopt now, and what are the best solutions for implementing those designs?”

The next 16 pages hold their warranted concerns, their savvy solutions, and their compelling insights—which could be the key to saving our buildings, our people, and our planet from the perils of natural disasters and climate change.

—Amanda Koellner, managing editor

july–august 2016

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FEATURES RESILIENCY ROUNDTABLE

KRISTEN HALL “Instead of allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed, designers can help cities, stakeholders, and developers get creative about the benefits that a major investment in our water’s edge can bring. As keepers of the vision of what cities can become, designers also have an opportunity to help move the public conversation away from doom and gloom, and refocus on the possibilities for positive change.”

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gbdmagazine.com

PHOTO: COURTESY OF PERKINS+WILL

FEATURES

The difficult first task of planning for resilience is to get your head around the challenges before you can begin to think about design solutions to address them.

The most advanced cities are still working on understanding and interpreting what climate science is projecting for their region, mapping the impacts, and working out their vulnerabilities.

I live and work in San Francisco, where we face the ongoing and fairly well understood threat of earthquakes and the slow-moving threat of sea level rise. We are lucky that we don’t have immediate and new challenges such as hurricanes and superstorms, but it does make it difficult to mobilize people to action when sea level rise seems like an abstract disaster that will happen far off in the future. However, if we want to protect our communities, we would be wise to begin to mobilize resources in the very near future to start building our way out of it.

Upon identifying and understanding your region’s vulnerabilities, you are now faced with a dilemma of how to respond. When looking at a site-scale intervention, you must assess the state of preparedness at the city level and ask the question: do you wait for the city to come up with a solution, or do you solve the problem on your own site?

There are strategies that can be pursued independently at the site-scale, such as physically elevating a site out of the rising floodplain.

Many developers—now facing newly revised FEMA Floodplain maps—are looking to this approach, but it is a solution that comes with its own challenges. Because many cities are still working out how to address their own vulnerabilities, there is no clear plan for how to integrate an elevated site into a larger system of lower-lying streets and open spaces.

Furthermore, you run the risk of investing in infrastructure that will become redundant or obsolete in the context of a broader, citywide approach to resilience.

Zooming out, we see the same challenges of coordination at the city scale. As a city, what if you plan to address your own vulnerabilities and your neighboring cities do not? Water knows no jurisdictional boundaries, and watersheds are often a multi-city gb&d

Kristen Hall is an urban designer and planner who specializes in complex urban infill projects. She has led the urban design of several high profile projects in San Francisco, including Mission Rock and Central Subway Chinatown Station. Through her experience both locally and internationally she has worked across many different scales and contexts to design masterplans, write guidelines, coordinate public outreach, and create implementation strategies. Kristen’s core area of expertise is delivering projects that require innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and stakeholder engagement.

URBAN DESIGNER AND PLANNER PERKINS+WILL affair, bringing even more stakeholders and more complexity to the table. Planning for resiliency is complicated by the fact that most cities struggle to provide adequate housing and maintain aging infrastructure, never mind provide solutions to an abstract, undefined challenge that is still 35 years down the road.

Designers can be instrumental in identifying the scale of the problem and working across agencies to come to an implementable solution. Thoughtful design is critical at a time when limited public funds are available. Cities can no longer afford large infrastructure projects with a single focus. A levee can no longer just stop the water; it must also create a public benefit by contributing a wonderful park and be financially linked to value generation of the adjacent land that benefits from this amenity. Instead of allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed, designers can help cities, stakeholders, and developers get creative about the benefits that a major investment in our water’s edge can bring.

As keepers of the vision of what cities can become, designers also have an opportunity to help move the public conversation away from doom and gloom, and refocus on the possibilities for positive change. For example, the San Francisco Bay Area is a region that links its identity to the water— and yet, there are so few places to enjoy being by the bay, to go to the edge and actually touch the water. In the near future, the region will be spending a phenomenal amount of time, energy, and resources on adapting the water’s edge, and we can use this opportunity to start a wonderful, exciting conversation about how this investment can not only adapt the waterfront for sea level rise, but also reinvigorate our community while enhancing our access and enjoyment of our Bay and waterways.

Hall’s Resiliency Top 3: 1.

RDoC: Developed by Perkins+Will in conjunction with Degenkolb Engineers, Mazzetti Engineers, Public Architecture, and Alliance Health of San Francisco, RDoC is a concept for a rapidly deployable health clinic that can be used as a replacement venue for critically ambulatory health services in the aftermath of a seismic or severe weather event.

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Mission Rock (pictured on p. 58): This 28-acre mixed-use district designed

by Perkins+Will features 1,500 new rental homes, along with office, dining, and retail space to replace a parking lot near the Giants’ stadium in San Francisco. It’s instituting a “working waterfront” street to invite local manufacturers and makers to bring their production activities to the shore.

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San Mateo Wastewater Treatment Plant (pictured on p. 59): Perkins+Will developed a design competition submission to transform an unknown, inaccessible, undesirable municipal facility into a welcoming community asset. The goal of the design was to have the plant double as an educational Resource Recovery Center and use wastewater to generate clean energy while recovering nutrients and potable water from it—simultaneously collecting and reusing rainwater and recharging an adjacent creek with freshwater.

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The Perkins+Will design for Mission Rock includes 8 acres of public open space including a 5-acre park with a shoreline walkway.

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RENDERINGS COURTESY OF STEELBLUE/PERKINS+WILL, SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS; COURTESY OF PERKINS+WILL (TOP RIGHT)

At the San Mateo Wastewater Treatment Plant, the design of the landscape provides storage for water at varying levels of flood conditions while maintaining pedestrian access through raised paths and bridges.

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DALE SANDS SENIOR VP AND GLOBAL DIRECTOR, METRO REGIONS AND CLIMATE ADAPTATION SERVICES AECOM

Dale Sands is global director, Metro Regions and Climate Adaptation Services for AECOM’s flagship environmental business. Sands, with experience in 65+ countries, completed service as vice chairman of the United Nations’ Private Sector Advisory Group for the UNISDR (2013 to 2015), and was a board member from 2011 to 2015.

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Resilience is increasingly important to incorporate into infrastructure design and construction. The United States had 212 disasters from natural events between 2005 and 2014, second only to China with 286 events. The capital losses from the US disasters were, by far, the highest in the world. The dollar losses approached $500B. Making resilience a priority in the design of our infrastructure assets is gaining importance. While definitions of resilience vary, there is growing acceptance that human settlements must withstand, recover from, and continue to prosper in the context of increasing impacts from acute shocks and chronic stresses. Today, 50% of the population resides within cities, but it is projected to increase to 70% by 2050.

This necessitates creating a more resilient infrastructure for society.

To achieve improved infrastructure resilience, it is important that building codes be reviewed and updated to reflect the conditions in which facilities are expected not only to survive but also to maintain their

functions. In the aftermath of damaging events, the concept of “building back better” is extremely important because it sets a resilience pathway for the future.

Conditions have changed in the past 35 years with a significant increase in disasters of all types: geophysical (earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic activity), hydrological (floods, landslides, subsidence), meteorological (blizzards, severe/tropical storms), and climate-related events such as extreme temperatures, wildfires, and droughts. These events are likely to continue to increase into the foreseeable future.

In 2015, the reinsurance company Munich Re reported 1,060 natural disaster events compared to less than 400 events in 1980.

In this context, the importance of building codes for both new construction and repair/retrofit has never been more crucial. They can be an important part of the solution. And this is not just for economic viability; it is also critical for community safety. Given the increasing hazard events in the US and worldwide, our building codes must be visionary, robust, even cutting edge.

New building codes, with better standards as a minimum, must be developed and enforced. If infrastructure is going to be rebuilt in impacted locations, it must be built back better. Infrastructure projects must be constructed for resilience tomorrow, the next day, and for years out. Without robust building codes, every project plan should be evaluated for its resilience. gbdmagazine.com

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“The United States had 212 disasters from natural events between 2005 and 2014, second only to China with 286 events. The capital losses from the US disasters were, by far, the highest in the world. The dollar losses approached $500B.”

Sands’ Resiliency Top 3: 1.

San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC): SFPUC is implementing a multi-billiondollar investment in the city to upgrade its wastewater infrastructure in response to climate change, as well as to improve service. AECOM played a key role on the Mayor’s Sea Level Rise Committee, developing storm surge inundation maps that are now the recommended standard for all sea level rise planning within the city and county.

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Australian Department of Defence (Defence): AECOM was commissioned by the Australian Department of Defence to define the potential risks to assets as a result of climate change. AECOM performed detailed modeling of coastal erosion and flooding from storm surge and extreme rainfall and also supported Defence’s internal engagement by developing site-based visual summary sheets and animations for use in stakeholder workshops and internal branch briefings.

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF AECOM (FACING PAGE); DAVID LLOYD

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Adapting to Climate Change Application (ACCA): This tool from AECOM helps to understand risk and increasing resilience and was created to identify potential future impacts of climate change on assets and operations and find ways of effectively responding and adapting to these impacts. ACCA has been used to carry out analysis on buildings, transportation, water, energy, and environmental projects. AECOM, in partnership with IBM, developed the Disaster Risk Reduction Scorecard in 2014 based upon the UN’s Ten Essentials for Disaster Risk Reduction. The Scorecard received the ND GAIN 2015 Prize. AECOM is working with CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project) to develop a strategic approach for cities and companies regarding climate change. Further AECOM developed Sustainable Systems Integration Model (SSIM) to provide a holistic approach to measuring environmental, social and economic sustainability.

Incorporating water sensitive urban design features in all elements of the cityscape, at large and small scales, can create meaningful benefits. These include natural rainwater treatment and enhancing biological diversity.

There is more than sidewalk planting—it is an integral part of the SFPUC “living machine” that treats rainwater and greywater from buildings for reuse inside.

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“One of the most important priorities of resilient design is to provide for ‘passive survivability,’ which the Resilient Design Institute defines as ensuring that livable conditions will be maintained in a building that loses power.”

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Alex Wilson is president of the Resilient Design Institute. He is also founder of BuildingGreen, a 15-person, Brattleboro, Vermont company that has been publishing information and consulting on green building practices since 1985.

The priorities for resilient design are pretty clear. First, buildings should be sited and designed to achieve a reasonable level of protection from expected disturbances and interruptions, including those from climate change; and second, buildings should retain a reasonable level of functionality and keep occupants safe should they lose power for an extended period of time. In general, we know a lot about how to achieve the former, but we have barely begun to think about the latter.

Loss of power is a common secondary impact of many—if not most—natural disasters. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfire, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, ice storms, heat waves, and drought can all result in power interruptions. Outages can also be expected with terrorist events, including cyber-terrorism, and can result from human error and equipment failures.

One of the most important priorities of resilient design is to provide for “passive survivability,” which the Resilient Design Institute defines as ensuring that livable conditions will be maintained in a building that loses power.

A big part of designing a building to achieve passive survivability has to do with the building envelope. A highly insulated building envelope will maintain livable conditions inside far better than a poorly insulated envelope. Overall building degbdmagazine.com

PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE RESILIENT DESIGN INSTITUTE

ALEX WILSON

FOUNDER RESILIENT DESIGN INSTITUTE

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Wilson’s Resiliency Top 3: The Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital (pictured here): This was being planned when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, and some hospital patients there were unable to be evacuated due to the flood. In some situations, hospital staff had to use furniture to break windows in patient rooms because temperatures had risen as high as 110°F without air conditioning.

Perkins + Will, the designer of Boston’s Spaulding Rehab, took that to heart and created what is probably the nation’s first modern hospital with operable windows in all patient rooms. The hospital is filled with other resilience features, including elevated mechanical equipment, a fully floodable first floor, and two back-up generators, either of which could operate the building on stored fuel for weeks.

PHOTO: ANTON GRASSL

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Wilson’s Resiliency Top 3 (continued): 1. fdafd 2. The Brock Environmental Center of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (pictured right): This is a remarkable building. Designed to withstand hurricane-force winds and storm surges that will become increasingly common at this site on the Chesapeake Bay, it is so well insulated that the solar and wind systems provide more than 100% of its energy needs. It also uses only water that is collected onsite; this rainwater harvesting and treatment system will keep operating even if the municipal water system fails. The building is one of a handful nationwide that is certified by the Living Building Challenge.

3.

Alain Hamel’s home in Northern Quebec This homebuilder, who has been constructing LEED-certified homes in the Saguenay region for 7 years and was previously doing general construction in the Montreal region since 1985, may own the most resilient home in North America.

It is only 100 feet from a lake but is 75 feet above the water level and boasts extraordinary insulation levels (R-80 walls and R-150 roof), solar-powered back-up electricity, a 3.3 kW gas generator, and a host of other resilience features.

sign, including orientation, passive solar design, inclusion of thermal mass, cooling-load-avoidance measures, and natural ventilation are also key aspects of such design.

Emergency power plays an important role in passive survivability. Back-up generators, solar-electric systems with battery storage (or specialized inverters that allow utilization of solar power even during outages), and microgrids that serve a group of buildings can all serve this need.

Access to potable water can also be a challenge during an extended power outage. In buildings that aren’t served by municipal water, electric pumps are usually required to deliver water; in taller buildings served by municipal water systems, pumps are usually required to elevate that water to upper floors. Hand pumps and back-up power can serve these needs, respectively.

All of these aspects of resilient design are addressed in a new suite of LEED pilot credits on resilient design (credits 98, 99, and 100 in the LEED credit library). For projects going for LEED certification, this is a useful starting point.

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PHOTOS: DAVE CHANCE PHOTOGRAPHY

The Brock Environmental Center of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, pictured here and on our cover, produces 83% more energy than it uses. It is also the first commercial building in the continental U.S. permitted to capture and treat rainfall for use as drinking water.

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KRISTINA HILL “If cities wait, they’ll be in triage mode and will have to abandon districts that can’t afford to adapt using local funds.”

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PHOTOS: MARCUS HANSCHEN (TOP RIGHT); NATE KAUFFMAN (BOTTOM RIGHT)

Kristina Hill is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies international strategies for adapting urban infrastructure and coastal districts to sea level rise. She has worked on urban water systems in the Pacific Northwest, New Orleans, the Mid-Atlantic and New England coasts. Her current focus is on the San Francisco Bay region, where unique opportunities exist to bring new housing strategies into a dynamic metropolitan landscape of wetlands, sand dunes, and beaches.

Flooding is and will be our most significant urban adaptation challenge.

Recent scientific estimates of future sea level rise predict 4-6 feet by 2100, rising rapidly after that. Some experts think a better estimate would be 6-9 feet by 2060.

Groundwater levels will also rise, on top of sea levels, causing extensive freshwater flooding in coastal cities that may well double the area that floods by salt water.

In addition, rainfall intensity has already increased and will continue to get worse.

If cities wait, they’ll be in triage mode and will have to abandon districts that can’t afford to adapt using local funds. “Abandonment” is another word for economic and environmental disaster—when it happens in under-funded cities, it will leave behind underground infrastructure, building ruins, and soil contamination.

The most important new urban designs are those for floodable development, examples of which already exist in Europe.

We could build a multi-functional version in North America, turning new housing investments into a hybrid infrastructure that protects existing neighborhoods and infrastructure systems. Low-rise or mid-rise housing can be built on pile foundations in areas that will be permanently flooded as a result of rising groundwater or salt/ brackish water. The housing can be built in artificially excavated ponds surrounded by open water on three sides, with access on the fourth side to an earthen levee with a road on top and infrastructure hook-ups.

These ponds would form a honeycomb pattern in a floodable area, functioning as a “micro-polder” that is able to absorb several feet of additional water from temporary flood events that otherwise would damage surrounding areas. These “micro-polders” could be protected from waves and debris by a perimeter system of larger storm-protection levees. By building this new kind of urban district with “wet feet,” we can provide critical protection for existing urban districts.

Cities can implement this by creating a legal entity like a public development authority to prepare the ground. This augb&d

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING AND URBAN DESIGN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

Hill’s Resiliency Top 3: 1.

The Sand Engine (Zandmotor), near The Hague in The Netherlands: This is an example of an artificial landform, a sand spit made of dredge material, that was placed in a design-build operation to nourish the coast around it by utilizing the energy of waves to move the sand along the coastline and widen the surrounding beaches. It has produced recreational value, habitat value, and storm protection value, all in one project design that is less expensive than traditional beach nourishment.

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LEAP for San Francisco Bay (pictured right): A set of unbuilt landscape-based proposals that expand on the Sand Engine concept with other forms, this was illustrated and developed by a young designer based on ideas from my work and many experts he has spoken with around the Bay.

3.

European versions of floodable development: (A.) Nesselande housing, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; (B.) the site preparation for the HafenCity District, Hamburg, Germany; (C.) Backenhafen Water Houses (Studio Gang design), HafenCity District, Hamburg, Germany;: All three of these projects provide examples of floodable development—in (A.) it’s housing on pile foundations in a high-water table environment; in (B.) it’s a whole urban district built on mounded earth, with hardened or waterproofed first stories for the buildings; and in (C.) it’s mid-rise buildings on pile foundations standing in the water of a canal.

thority would excavate the ground to build the levees, build roads on top, and supply the new floodable housing with electricity, water and other public services. Development fees from the new housing would be used to help pay for this infrastructure, and for other amenities such as artificial beaches and wetlands that add recreation and habitat value to the floodable district.

Cities with flooding shores would be able to accommodate increased density while reinvesting in a resilient new system of stormwater infrastructure.

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FRANCESCA VIETOR

Francesca Vietor, program director for Environment, Public Policy, and Civic Engagement at The San Francisco Foundation and president of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, is working to build climate resilience in the Bay Area’s most vulnerable communities and to tackle the region’s economic inequality and wealth disparity. Before this, she was executive director of the Chez Panisse Foundation, president of the Urban Forest Council, president of the Commission on the Environment, and the chair of Mayor Newsom’s Environmental Transition Team.

She has worked for several nonprofits, including Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace, and she serves on the boards of SPUR and Environmental Working Group.

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Nowhere are the twin threats of affordability and climate change more pronounced than in San Francisco. One-bedroom apartments now rent for $3,500 a month or more, and residents are leaving the city in droves to find more affordable housing in the suburbs. Thousands of shoreline homes, businesses, and pieces of infrastructure are threatened by the rising tides of the Bay. When you add on the fact that California has more than a 99% chance of having a 6.7 or larger earthquake in the next 30 years, the drive to design for resilience becomes an imperative.

San Francisco’s last major earthquake was in 1989. The “Loma Prieta” quake was a 6.9 in magnitude, and the shock was responsible for 63 deaths and 3,757 injuries.

While the collapse of a section of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland was responsible for the single largest number of casualties, the collapse of other man-made structures contributed to the economic and life loss as well. Another major earthquake in the Bay Area could cut off water supplies, disrupt

energy, and cause untold damage to the 101 cities in the region.

Then there is climate change. We know from climate disasters like Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina that climate change acts as a threat multiplier for the poorest and most vulnerable communities. The nation wept as people in low-income neighborhoods in New Orleans and New York were flooded from their homes, cut off from fresh water supplies, left without power and abandoned by government. Many of these same communities even had raw sewage flowing in their streets—thanks to the legacy of waste treatment plants built in poor communities.

Lucky for us, San Francisco is the “city that knows how.” We are winning the race against time in preparing our frontline communities for the impacts of climate change and earthquakes by building resilient energy, water, and wastewater systems.

San Francisco’s $4.8 billion Water System Improvement Program is nearing completion, and our $6.9 billion Sewer System Improvement Program is getting ready to launch. Pioneering programs like community choice power, green infrastructure, and wastewater reuse are coming online at rapid pace. The combination of these large scale infrastructure projects and innovative, performance-based technologies will create thousands of jobs, help protect our most vulnerable communities, and build resiliency system-wide. gbdmagazine.com

PHOTO: KATHI O’LEARY

PRESIDENT OF THE SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION AND PROGRAM DIRECTOR FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, PUBLIC POLICY AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT THE SAN FRANCISCO FOUNDATION

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Vietor’s Resiliency Top 3: Community Choice Power: Community Choice energy is a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address the impact of climate change by cutting energy consumption, increasing renewable energy, and building local clean electricity generation. By developing local clean energy resources, Community Choice programs can spur local economic development in the community, provide good local clean energy jobs, offer competitive electric utility bills and price stability, reduce pollution, and provide other community benefits. It can serve as a significant step towards a more resilient and sustainable economy. San Francisco’s CleanPowerSF launched on May 1, 2016, and offers residents the opportunity to support a greener more resilient city.

2.

Green Infrastructure (pictured left): Green infrastructure enhances resilience in the built environment. Natural and constructed infrastructure, ranging from conserved riparian buffers to rain gardens and permeable pavers can help enhance stormwater management capabilities in ways that reduce vulnerabilities to flooding. In an urban environment, green spaces mitigate the urban heat island effect by providing shade. Natural features provide habitats for animals in urban and rural areas. Green infrastructure helps build climate resilience by managing stormwater that may otherwise flood communities. San Francisco has eight green infrastructure projects currently under construction with many more in the planning phases.

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Wastewater Reuse: The Living Machine at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission headquarters not only treats the building’s wastewater onsite but also seamlessly integrates into the building’s lobby, front walkway, and city sidewalk. After collection and primary treatment, all wastewater flows into the Living Machine’s tidal and vertical flow cells, where its fill-and-drain technology treats the water through periodic tidal cycling. The effluent is then double filtered and disinfected with both light and chlorine. The high-quality, clear water from the system will then be reused both inside the building for toilet flushing as well as exterior irrigation. The innovative model builds resilience by removing wastewater from the overall system and producing water for reuse. The SFPUC will save approximately 750,000 gallons of water per year and provide an additional 900,000 for non-potable uses off site.

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF SFPUC

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LISA DICKSON AMERICAS DIRECTOR OF RESILIENCE ARUP Lisa Dickson is an associate principal in Arup’s Boston office with expertise in translating the risk of climate change into resilient solutions within the built, social, public health and natural environments, including economic considerations.

She was a contributor to the World Resource Institute’s 2010 Public Sector GHG Protocol and aided in the development of the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure’s (ISI) project rating system. In 2010, she was invited to Shanghai to comment on China’s 12th 5-Year Plan and present on the use of carbon markets to drive investment within the transportation sector.

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It can sometimes be overwhelming to know where to start and how to translate the uncertainty of climate change into actual design criteria. At Arup, we approach this by breaking it into three steps: establishing the climate baseline, prioritizing risk, and then focusing on adaptation.

Climate baselines are shifting, making the modeling process more challenging than it has ever been before. At Arup, we work closely with climate scientists to develop responses that are both robust and implementable.

Once we have determined what the climate is going to look like in 20 to 50 years in a geographical area, we work with the client to understand what the critical resources are and overlay the expected climate change impacts on these resources.

The overall vulnerability is determined based on a combination of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Exposure is the extent of the climate impact (for example, depth of flooding, number of heat waves, etc.). Sensitivity is an assessment of how well the asset would function with this exposure. And adaptive capacity speaks to whether or not there is redundancy in the system.

Once we finish those evaluations, we subject the more vulnerable resources to the next step: the risk assessment. The risk assessment examines aspects of probability and consequence. What’s the probability of failure; what’s the consequence of failure?

And that’s what tells you the overall risk.

In many cases, human health and safety and continuity of services are the primary things we consider when thinking about the consequences of failure for a particular resource or entity.

Consequence also lets us prioritize needs. For example, in comparing vulnerability, it might be that both a bike pathway and a substation are found to be equally vulnerable. However, in comparing overall

criticality, it is more likely that there would be a higher consequence if the substation were to fail than the bike path? The substation then becomes more of a priority and area of focus than the bike path.

While we are highlighting the built environment here, we also analyze the natural and social environments, with a particular emphasis on vulnerable populations and public health. At the end of this assessment, we take the list of resources that have been identified as having the highest probability and consequence of failure and use that group as the focus for the last step: climate adaptation and preparation. gb&d gbdmagazine.com

PHOTOS/RENDERINGS: FRANK MONKIEWICZ (FACING PAGE); COURTESY OF ARUP

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Dickson’s Resiliency Top 3: 1.

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NY Rising Community Reconstruction Program (pictured above): In this community-based, comprehensive planning process, Arup acted as the project manager and served as the technical liaison between the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery and affected community members over a ninemonth process that resulted in five community reconstruction plans with recommendations in the areas of infrastructure, housing, economic development, natural and cultural resources, and community planning and capacity building. The resulting detailed list of projects is currently under proposal for federal funding.

2.

Partners HealthCare: Arup is also conducting climate risk assessments across 30 of Partners’ healthcare facilities, including hospitals, community health centers, clinics, and research-based laboratories—performing assessments that involve the development of climate scenarios for sea level rise, storm surge, precipitation, temperature, and wind. Vulnerability assessments will determine the most at-risk operations within each campus.

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NYC Office of Housing Recovery Operations: Through extensive design analysis of 15 building typologies, Arup is helping assist flood-prone property owners rebuild better, stronger, and more resilient housing. Arup was hired to assist the NYC Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery Operations (HRO)—which assists property owners as they rebuild housing—to provide support and identify issues and challenges associated with rebuilding and retrofitting properties to withstand flood events.

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GREEN BUILDINGFEATURES & DESIGN

Up Front Typology Trendsetters Features Spaces Punch List

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74 Cabins In The Woods

A group of students builds a cluster of prefab retreats on a budget in the snowy Colorado forest

80 Whatever Floats Your Boat

In this case, an incredibly green biomorphic home that blends organic design with technological sophistication

84 Inventing The Future

A new addition to the UC Berkley campus foster the creators of tomorrow

90 Sustainable Stimuli

The University of Wisconsin— Milwaukee’s new “Innovation Campus” blends green design, engineering inspiration, and crossdiscipline collaboration

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CABINS IN THE WOODS

By Emily Torem

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A group of students built a cluster of cabin-style prefab dorms in the snowy Colorado forest to teach future architects how to harness passive building principles and incorporate human-centric design

PHOTOS: JESSE KUROIWA

Henry David Thoreau once spent two years sequestered in a house by the famous Walden Pond. While the idea of living in communion with the natural world has always dazzled us, such solitude has the potential to be quite lonely.

Enter Rick Sommerfeld, founder and director of Colorado Building Workshop— the design build program at the University of Colorado Denver—who recently led 28 graduate students in the completion of 14 micro dormitories set in a gorgeous lodgepole pine forest outside the city.

The project was the result of a partnership with Outward Bound, which delivers supervised, educational expeditions in the wilderness for a variety of age ranges. The dorms will provide housing to Outward Bound staff, who come from all over the world and need a place to roost between courses.

Specifically built to include and encourage a healthy balance of reflection and social experiences, the fleet of cabins was intentionally built to include exterior space, which arrives in the form of a quaint wraparound porch that faces its fellow cabins. “We were looking at existing cabins, and saw that needs weren’t being met,” Sommerfeld says. “This type of housing didn’t provide a front porch or any type of social space for gathering.”

Sommerfeld and his students were intent that the cabins meld into the background of the woods, allowing maximum access to it, while still providing essential shelter and amenities. “That really drove the project,” he explains. “The guides that are using the cabins, when they’re not living there, they’re living in a tent. They’re very aware of where the sun is, and how the air is coming through the walls.” Slid-

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ing glass doors and frameless windows make residents feel as though their living room and the woods are one.

The cabins are arranged in neighborhood-like clusters of two or three, so that the density of the woods still permeates their surroundings (you can’t see every single cabin from any one cabin), keeping it from feeling too town-like, while providing a proximal social network. Hot rolled steel siding and birch interiors echo the grey and brown tones of the forest, while sheltering residents from the snow that is a product of the 10,200-foot altitude of the cabin site.

The snowfall, as much of a character in the woods as the trees themselves, was a challenge, given that the students had a mere three weeks to bring their project to life and were in charge of fabricating, construction, and millwork. “We were concerned that the weight of the snow would be so enormous that it would require an extremely thick roof,” Sommerfeld recalls.

Their elegant solution was to separate the cabin’s frame from its interior, or ‘box,’ creating a layered effect that would keep precipitation maintenance breezy despite the structure’s delicate footprint. “It’s like

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Over concerns of the accumulating weight of snow, the team separated the cabin’s frame from its interior, or ‘box,’ creating a layered effect that would keep precipitation maintenance breezy despite the structure’s delicate footprint.

The overall efficiency of the building is marked by many things, from budgeting (about $9,000-$10,000 per cabin); to prefabricating the wall pieces in Denver and then flat packing them for their voyage to Leadville; to using nesting software for the cabinetry to avoid wasting a scrap of wood.

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A total of 14 micro dormitories are set in a gorgeous lodgepole pine forest outside of Denver.

Specifically built to include and encourage a healthy balance of reflection and social experiences, the fleet of cabins was intentionally built to include exterior space, which arrives in the form of a quaint wraparound porch that faces its fellow cabins.

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PHOTOS: JESSE KUROIWA

SPACES

Hot rolled steel siding and wood interiors echo the grey and brown tones of the forest, while sheltering residents from the snow that is a product of the 10,200-foot altitude of the cabin site.

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The interior of the cabins, set in warm birch plywood, will stand up to wear and tear for wilderness activities, and provide plenty of storage and space-saving amenities. In addition, sliding glass doors and frameless windows make residents feel as though their living room and the woods are one.

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MICROCABINS “The biggest thing is this idea of collaboration. For most of the students, this is their first fully realized project they had designed and built on their own. At 10,200 feet, the air is thin. It was hectic.

It was snowing on you. It was a pretty intense three weeks.”

Rick Sommerfield, founder and director, Colorado Building Workshop

a tent with a fly screen on it, or a layer of gore-tex and then a layer of polypropylene—we were looking at the layering of the building with the same lens,” explains Sommerfeld. “The frame creates the exterior social space (the front porch), but because it’s disconnected from the box itself, it can handle the snow load.

It can even leak a little bit without any adverse affect on the cabin.”

Besides being crafted to handle its snowy environs, the micro dorms were also built with materials selected for their durability and low maintenance. “There was a want from both the client and the students to create something they didn’t

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have to paint or refinish,” says Sommerfeld of the hot rolled steel exterior. The interior, set in warm birch plywood, will stand up to wear and tear for wilderness activities. “If someone is throwing an ice ax around, it’s much more durable than drywall would be.” In step with this approach was the overall efficiency of the building process, from budgeting (about $9,000-$10,000 per cabin), to prefabricating the wall pieces in Denver and then flat packing them for their voyage to Leadville; to using nesting software for the cabinetry to avoid wasting a scrap of wood. “It allows us to apply any leftover wood to the next cut automatically,”

Sommerfield says. “The software says, ‘oh we know you have this scrap leftover, lets apply it to the next piece in the most efficient way.’ It’s a more sustainable approach.”

“The biggest thing is this idea of collaboration,” he continues. “For most of the students, this is their first fully realized project they had designed and built on their own. At 10,200 feet, the air is thin. It was hectic. It was snowing on you. It was a pretty intense three weeks.”

But the stunning end result—warm, sturdy, and inviting—will surely inspire more than just Outward Bound staff to spend a few weeks in the woods. gb&d gbdmagazine.com

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FACING PAGE Besides being crafted to handle its snowy environs, the micro dorms were also built with materials selected for their durability and low maintenance.

BELOW The cabins are arranged in neighborhood-like clusters of two or three, so that the density of the woods still permeates their surroundings (you can’t see every single cabin from any one cabin), keeping it from feeling too town-like, while providing a proximal social network.

Cabin 10 Floor Plan 1.

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Cabin 09 Floor Plan 1.

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Covered Deck Upper/North Bed (Double) Lower/South Bed (Double) Desk/Storage Mud Room/Closet Storage Only Operable Wall (Barn Door) Operable Vents

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CABIN 10

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WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR BOAT

By Jeff Link

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RENDERINGS: COURTESY OF GIANCARLO ZEMA DESIGN GROUP

In this case, an incredibly green biomorphic home that blends organic design with technological sophistication

Italian architect Giancarlo Zema’s new eco-friendly floating home is a domestic escape for those who want to live simply, surrounded by nature.

Inspired by the aquatic nests of birds, the WaterNest 100 is a self-contained, 1,076-square-foot living space resembling a louvered, slightly flattened egg.

The home is built from 98% recycled materials and powered by a rooftop solar array.

So what are the advantages of living on a floating house—other than, say, the great panoramic views? According to Sara Schutte, project manager at Giancarlo Zema Design Group, there are many, beginning with “the possibility to live in close contact with nature and be totally off-grid in a fluid and sensual environment that transmits tranquility, such as water does, as an innate memory of our growth in amniotic fluid.” Beyond that, Schutte says, “climate change will continue in the coming years, thereby increasing the water level of our oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers. Living in a floating manner protects us from this adversity.”

This is not the first high-concept aquatic residence out of the Giancarlo Zema Design Group, an architecture practice based in Rome, which specializes in semi-submerged structures, marine parks, floating habitats, yachts, and interior design. Projects such as Trilobis 65, a residential yacht powered by hydrogen fuel cells, or the Jelly-fish 45, a floating home that provides underwater views, reflect the firm’s interest in biomorphic forms that blend organic design with technological sophistication.

Like those projects, the WaterNest is conceived as a model of ecological sensitivity. The $600,000-800,000 concept has elicited requests from various gb&d

THIS SPREAD The interior can include a living room, dining area, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom and accommodate up to a family of four. It’s also possible to configure as an office, lounge bar, restaurant, shop, or exhibition space.

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“Climate change will continue in the coming years, thereby increasing the water level of our oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers.

Living in a floating manner protects us from this adversity.”

Sara Schutte, project manager, Giancarlo Zema Design Group

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parts of the world, especially the United States, United Arab Emirates, Europe, and Australia.

Electricity is produced via a 60-square-meter amorphous solar array that has a peak output of 4kW, more than enough power to supply the 1.5kW of energy needed to operate the house.

The roof’s rounded shape, aside from its visual elegance, accommodates bathroom and kitchen skylights and optimizes electricity generation by mirroring the arc of the sun. The terrace under the doors and along the windows is designed to allow in the low-angled light of the winter sun. In the summer, the brisesoleil at the highest point of the roof keeps the home shaded and cool.

In addition, the home is sensitive to resource conservation. The WaterNest 100 uses laminated wood from controlled cultivations, Schutte says—no forest-clearing—and recycled timber. The hull is made of recycled aluminum, furnished

by Italian companies, and the wood furniture—softly lined and modernist—is eco-friendly. In place of air conditioning, a micro-ventilation system allows fresh

1,076ft2 WaterNest 100 is a self-contained, 1,076-square-foot living space resembling a louvered, slightly flattened egg.

98% The home is built from 98% recycled materials and powered by a rooftop solar array.

4kW Electricity is produced via a 60-square-meter amorphous solar array that has a peak output of 4kW, more than enough power to supply the 1.5kW of energy needed to operate the house.

RENDERINGS: COURTESY OF GIANCARLO ZEMA DESIGN GROUP

air to circulate upward from the hull through floor grilles, taking advantage of water immersion to cool the interior.

The WaterNest 100 is designed for use on rivers, lakes, bays, atolls, and calm seas, but its potential uses are open to the imagination. The interior can include a living room, dining area, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom and accommodate up to a family of four. It’s also possible to configure as an office, lounge bar, restaurant, shop, or exhibition space.

EcoFloLife, which developed the WaterNest 100 based on Zema’s design, is now taking orders, Schutte says, and the first installation is nearly complete. “It will be ready very soon and the unveiling will be a big surprise. We are working on the development of an ecological Floating Village where WaterNests create a sustainable colony like a large solar station,” Schutte says. gb&d gb&d

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S PAC E S L E A R N

INVENTING THE FUTURE

By Vincent Caruso

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PHOTO: TIM GRIFFITH

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A new addition to the UC Berkley campus fosters the creators of tomorrow

Anybody who has remotely paid attention to news from the west coast for the past few years should be able to make two distinct observations. First, thanks to sleep deprivation and the dawn of the Information Age, ambitious, high-reaching business startups burgeoning from Silicon Valley have transformed the United States economy. And second, California is in the arid midst of a punishing drought. While these matters are simultaneously impactful in their respective ways, they tend to occupy different parts of our mind—when in reality, they couldn’t be more inextricably intertwined.

It’s almost serendipitous that the center of technological progress and target of creeping ecological dehydration should coexist within the same state borders, for it is the intelligence radiating from the Silicon bubble that will be most vital to adapting to a future that many fear will be environmentally perilous.

Such brainpower was the kind that the College of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley had in mind when looking to establish a space on campus for the kindred assets of creativity and sustainability to germinate and intermingle. William Leddy of Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects, principal architect in charge of the university’s new Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, shared the dean’s vision in creating space that’s not just advantageous to engineering students, but also attractive to curious students of all disciplines who are ripe for creative engagement.

“We wanted the architecture to tell the story,” Leddy says. “We wanted to explore this narrative of how you engineer the future, how you engineer environments that can have lasting significance

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PROJECT LOCATION Berkley, CA Client University of California, Berkeley Size 24,035ft² Completion August 2015 Program Education Awards AIA Top Ten Project, AIA San Francisco Sustainability Commendation, UC Office of the President Best Practice Award for Energy Efficiency in New Construction Certifications Tracking LEED Platinum

TEAM Architect Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects General Contractor/ Construction Manager Hathaway Dinwiddie Landscape Architect Cliff Lowe Associates Civil Engineer BKF Structural Engineer Forell/Elsesser MEP/Fire Protection Integral Group Engineers

in the lives of students moving on.” Key to any narrative that glides toward the future is a lucid illustration of the causal preceding events of the present. For this, transparency played a central roll. Designing a space that’s amply transparent would expose the fundamental elements of “creative collision,” student collaboration, and budding ingenuity in the rising action portion of Leddy’s dramatic structure.

The employment of large glazing panels would equip the interior with charitable daylight, inspiring those aforementioned “creative collisions,” chance encounters, and exchanges of ideas to occur all while extending a connection to students on the other side of the wall.

“We wanted to reveal the hum of creativity inside the building to the rest of the campus,” Leddy explains, though that hum travels through physical boundaries inside as well. Like much of the exterior, the studio spaces are also largely exposed to students casually passing by, diffusing the tone of throughout the strata of the campus.

It makes little sense to construct a space designed to incubate the evolution of a sustainable future if said space isn’t an imposing expression of sustainability itself. Positioning the building in a way that would allow it to inherit the benefits of its natural environment most maximally was of top priority. “We oriented the building appropriately to the sun to maximize daylighting and to the winds to maximize natural ventilation,” Leddy says, explaining that it facilitated “an ideal balance of daylight from one side to the next so we could minimize electric lighting loads during the day and further incorporate a variety of daylighting strategies to enhance that, while of course reducing energy loads by coming up with energy efficient heating systems and cooling systems. One system among these that you won’t find is air conditioning. The design team opted instead for what Leddy calls a “bump cooling” system, which demands far gbdmagazine.com

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“We wanted to tell the story. We wanted to explore this narrative of how you engineer the future, how you engineer environments that can have lasting significance in the lives of students moving on.”

William Leddy, principal, LMSA

PHOTO: TIM GRIFFITH

The designers oriented the building appropriately to the sun to maximize daylighting and to the winds to maximize natural ventilation.

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components that serve distinct practical functions work cohesively to shape the project as a whole—whether it be the next great irrigation device or the built environment that houses it. gb&d

SUPPLIERS Exterior Design/Build Subcontractor CS Erectors Inc. Steel Olson & Co Steel Mechanical & Plumbing Pan Pacific Mechanical Electrical Design/ Build Subcontractor Architect Morrow Meadows, Inc. Roofing Alliance Roofing Inc. Drywall & Framing Cal Drywall, Inc. Doors Minton Door Company Curtain Wall Kawneer 1600 Wall System Exterior Metal Panels Alucobond Sun Control Devices Airolite Entry Doors Blumcraft Interior Aluminum Doors & Glazing Wilson Partitions Ceilings Armstrong Tile Daltile

PHOTOS: TIM GRIFFITH

less energy and only adds appropriately supplemental cooling. Because the building opens to the prevailing winds, 100% of the instructional spaces above the basement level and 85% of regularly occupied spaces are naturally ventilated.

When the windows are closed, mechanical ventilation provides 30% of added fresh air.

While Leddy’s team was able to use the campus’s natural surroundings to the building’s benefit, tackling irrigation proved to be somewhat of a problem. The square footage available on the site was tight and redolent of an urban cityscape, rendering the list of options relatively scant. The building itself was built over an existing two-story basement with very little sub-grade space for things like rainwater cisterns. Working within these constrained parameters, the team was able to install a drip irrigation system that has reduced water consumption to about half of the U.S. Green Building Council baseline. Further tending the urgency of California’s regional drought, the system features an automation function that cuts off water consumption when vegetation has been sufficiently treated.

The PV array overhead, angled at a distinguishing, idiosyncratic tilt, is the most eye-catching of the Jacobs Institute’s sustainable strategies. But visually striking or not, asserting an aesthetic that expresses the underlying character of a space is a virtue that Leddy views as fundamentally symbiotic with the practice of sustainable building, even to the extent of integrating specific pieces of machinery into the center of that artistic expression. The array, Leddy argues, “is expressive of the idea that this space at one level is a work of architecture while it’s also a machine for producing energy, and it retains that engineering quality.”

By introducing the purely mechanical into the boundary of the broader architectural statement, the building itself, much like the glazing, offers a transparent look into how separate integral

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A tilted PV array, angled at an idiosyncratic tilt, helps further the architect’s “narrative of how you engineer the future.”

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SUSTAINABLE STIMULI

By Vincent Caruso

The University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee’s new “Innovation Campus” blends green design, engineering inspiration, and cross-discipline collaboration

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FACING PAGE The most striking example of creative stimuli came from the installation of artwork into the project. Upon entering the building, guests are greeted by a large lobby print by Sir Paul Smith, with its bold, bright stripes and colors. Other graphic wall coverings seen throughout the building, however, are more straightforward in their purpose to influence their observers. Abstract prints showing x-ray images, atomic molecules, DNA strands, etc. were selected by the building’s researchers to connect back to their research in an artistic way.

tects. The benefits of the openness toward the building’s exterior also contribute to sustainability performance. “The building is oriented east-west to take advantage of the solar orientation that was available on the site,” Goodhart outlines, noting that controlled daylight is introduced from the north and south. With the implementation of lighting controls and shading devices, direct sunlight is diffused and allowed to penetrate deeper into the building, reducing energy required for lighting the spaces.

The sustainability efforts ultimately earned the Innovation Accelerator center a LEED Silver accreditation—an extraordinary feat considering how great the energy consumption demanded by traditional laboratory facilities usually is. “The design team incorporated as many passive and active sustainability features as was practical,” Goodhart says. Examples include efficient orientation of the building, an HVAC system with heat recovery capabilities, green and reflective roofing surface methodologies, and photovoltaic panels that generate electricity.

The most striking example of creative stimuli came from the installation of art-

PHOTOS: C&N PHOTOGRAPHY

For those of us who were brought up during the ascent of what we now call “the Information Age,” it is easy to take all that this era has created for granted. Tech now represents a dominant segment of our economy, and it’s only growing, which means that the slice of our population equipped with the cognitive wherewithal to continue to advance the science industry must grow correspondingly. As such, we’ve seen a rising number of universities erect designated hubs on campus to summon the restless spirit of ingenuity among faculty and students and parlay it into the marketplace.

The goal at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee (UWM) was to leverage the assets of the region to develop a world-class, public-private research park that spurs strong and enduring partnerships between academia and industry leading to new products, spinoff businesses, workforce development, and jobs. The UWM Innovation Accelerator is the first building on UWM’s Innovation Campus that was built with the intention of stimulating the industrious potential of UWM research and boosting collaboration with the nearby medical cluster.

Far from mere textbook lectures and simulated experiments, Innovation Accelerator laboratories boast state-of-the-art labs and prototyping equipment including CNC machines and 3D printers, which enhances the researchers’ and start-ups’ ability to apply their research.

At a modest 25,000 square feet, an intimate, collaborative environment has also been achieved. The entry lobby serves as a popular, open meeting place, and shared conference rooms inspire collaboration in a similar fashion. One popular pattern recognizable across facilities of this kind is the utility of visual access and transparency—a feeling of openness throughout the building that will inspire researchers to advance their own inventive pursuits. “The shared conferencing facilities, the two-story open entry lobby, as well as the various labs have corridor glazing to show what’s going on within them,” says Cliff Goodhart, project manager at Eppstein Uhen Archi-

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The goal at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee (UWM) was to leverage the assets of the region to develop a world-class, public-private research park that spurs strong and enduring partnerships between academia and industry leading to new products, spinoff businesses, workforce development, and jobs.

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The sustainability efforts ultimately earned the Innovation Accelerator center a LEED Silver accreditation—an extraordinary feat considering how great the energy consumption demanded by traditional laboratory facilities usually is.

PHOTOS: C&N PHOTOGRAPHY

work into the project. Upon entering the building, guests are greeted by a large lobby print by Sir Paul Smith, with its bold, bright stripes and colors. Other graphic wall coverings seen throughout the building, however, are more straightforward in their purpose to influence their observers. Abstract prints showing x-ray images, atomic molecules, DNA strands, etc. were selected by the building’s researchers to connect back to their research in an artistic way. “It was an important aim to design the type of corridor that served as more than just a space students jostled through on their way between labs,” Goodhart says. As a result, these spaces have become popular gathering spots for students to converse and share ideas. gb&d

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GREEN BUILDING & DESIGN

Up Front Typology Trendsetters Features Spaces Punch List

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Ecosia

98 Material World

AMAM for Agar Plasticity

102 Guest Columns

Lisa Bate, Katrin Klingenberg, Dr. Chris Pyke

105 On the Spot Samuel Carter

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Software Solution Ecosia

Forget Google. This browser builds up communities through reforestation.

For people in developed countries, the Internet has become a necessary resource for daily life and a tool upon which the success of most businesses depends.

But for those in developing countries, a healthy and profitable piece of land to farm is instead essential to survival, and a surplus insures the stability of the community. One business based out of Berlin has taken these two truths and molded them into a product that both benefits and empowers citizens of developed and developing countries.

Ecosia is a search engine (easily added to Google Chrome or Firefox) that generates its income through ads and uses 80% of its proceeds to plant trees. Since its founding in 2009, it’s resulted in the planting of more than 4 million trees around the world, mostly in West Africa’s Burkina Faso. Users simply have to search the Internet using Ecosia to add money to the cause—perfect for people who want to help with rising global CO2 levels, but feel at a loss for how to do so. “What makes Ecosia special is that it was founded to tackle the specific issue of deforestation and climate change by generating funds through a useful tool,” says Jacey Bingler, head of public relations at Ecosia.

The search engine is the brainchild of world traveler and dedicated social reformist Christian Kroll. After he graduated with a degree in business administration, he decided to travel the world—India, Thailand, Nepal, and finally Argentina—in search of an idea for a business model that would have a positive global impact.

While in South America, Kroll was

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confronted with the horrors of rainforest deforestation. So, consequently inspired by reforestation projects in the Atlantic Rainforest in Argentina and Brazil and Thomas L. Friedman’s Book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” he began work on Ecosia.

“Many social businesses have a business model that makes room for donations, but they weren’t necessarily founded to cater to a specific good cause,” Bingler says. Ecosia is founded on the basis that it will obviously empower those in Burkina Faso, but also its users. There is a tree counter next to the search bar that tells users how many trees they have helped plant, and the company is transparent about its financial statements too. “The communities in the villages in Burkina Faso are involved in every step of the planting program,” Bingler says. “They are consulted and asked permission

before a new planting site is opened. They keep everything that is produced in the course of the tree planting program, i.e. seeds, forest goods etc. and they don’t have to buy seeds or land (the land is public property) to create as little dependencies as possible.”

When a forest is reintroduced to an area, it not only minimizes CO2 effects, benefiting the global population, but also benefits the local community by helping with water retention in soil, which allows for other plants, such as herbs and grass, to grow for livestock to eat. In turn, this empowers the women of the villages who harvest and sell the surplus, as well as the children who now heard the livestock closer to home and have time to attend school. The company is on a “journey to one billion trees,” and you can help with just the click of a mouse. gb&d gbdmagazine.com

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF ECOSIA

By Alex Nates-Perez

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IN CONVERSATION with Samuel Carter Continued from p. 23

strategies and projects. We are currently in the process of finalizing that program. gb&d: And what about Rebuild by Design— have any of the winning projects broken ground at this point?

Carter: The six winning designs were awarded funding about a year and a half ago and are now well on their way toward implementation, but they are still in the design phase. One of the key things that needs to happen with projects of this scale are environmental impact studies, and those are all moving at the pace that was expected. One of the interesting things about this process is that the funding is time bound—even if the projects get every possible extension allowable to them, they still have to be completed by 2022, which with the scale of the infrastructure we’re talking about is actually quite an aggressive timeframe. So there’s going to be real tangible progress, very visible to New Yorkers and folks in New Jersey very soon. gb&d: Now that the concept of resilience has gained such currency, how do you envision its next evolution? Resilience V2, if you will.

FACING PAGE Christian Kroll, the brainchild behind Ecosia, wants to plant one billion trees with the help of a search engine.

ABOVE The company works out of their Berlin office, which they furnished with reclaimed wine crates, shipping pallets, and a vertical garden.

The simplicity of how it works: 1

You search the web with Ecosia

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Search ads generate income for Ecosia

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Ecosia uses this income to plant trees

Carter: For folks like me who have been working actively in the space for 10 years, right now is very much a moment for the world to recognize how this work can happen. As complicated as it is, as place-based as it is, we’ve found a way to do it creatively, to work with communities and ultimately to fund projects. It’s something we’re very proud of here at the foundation. In the future, I see resilience as moving more and more toward embodying a holistic notion of systems. Currently it tends to get organized around specific hazards. So, for instance, people might talk about climate resilience or resilience to coastal issues. But one of the things that is interesting to me is how these different sectors of the field are starting to marry out of need, because if you’re only dealing with one particular type of hazard or one particular type of geography, and you’re not dealing with other elements of our communities like the social or the economic, you’re not actually getting the value from the resilience intervention that you might otherwise. My hope for the field is that we continue to collaborate across disciplines and across geographies to really think holistically about the places that we love and care about and really position This conversation continues on p. 105

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Material World AMAM for Agar Plasticity

A plastic-free future brought to you by red algae and an epiphany in a supermarket

By Alex Nates-Perez

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PHOTOS: COURTESY OF LEXUS INTERNATIONAL

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Three Japanese designers walk into a supermarket—and no, this isn’t the beginning of a joke—to find themselves stopped at an item they had walked by many times before.

The product that caused pause is agar, a seaweed-derived food product frequently eaten in Japan and also used in the scientific and medical fields worldwide. The three designers, Kosuke Araki , Noriaki Maetani, and Akira Muraoka, “were attracted by its material quality.” Agar has a porous, feathery structure and is very light despite its volume, which makes it an interesting option for a plastic alternative.

According to Muraoka, he and his friends had long been concerned about the energy used to produce packaging materials as well as recycle them.

Boiling specific kinds of red algae and then dehydrating the broth and collecting the residue can produce agar with minimal energy. Plus, agar is also completely biodegradable.

Due to its low production cost, energy requirements, and almost zero environmental impact, it seemed to be the perfect material for this young trio to explore.

Araki, Maetani and Muraoka studied together at the Product Design Department at Tama Art University and later formed AMAM , a name conceived from the combination of each of their names. Together, they came up with the idea for Agar Plasticity—dubbed “an ongoing material research project”—and submitted their design proposal for agar as a substitute to synthetic plastics to the 2016 Lexus Design Award. gb&d

Fast forward, and AMAM was one of 12 finalists chosen to develop a prototype with support from a seasoned and internationally renowned designer. After their mentorship period with British designer Max Lamb, AMAM was chosen as this year’s Lexus Design Grand Prix winner. “This is a bold and ambitious experiment, which aims to address one of the biggest pollution problems of our time,” says Alice Rawsthorn, a British design critic and one of the competition’s judges. “The designers have made tremendous progress during the course of the award cycle,

ABOVE Kosuke Araki, Noriaki Maetani, and Akira Muraoka make up AMAM and studied together at the Product Design Department at Tama Art University.

FACING PAGE Agar Plasticity is a completely biodegradable packaging substitute, designed to be used instead of synthetic plastics.

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I NSI DE T HE RUNNERS - UP

SHAPE SHIFTERS In an attempt to promote individuality as well as cut back on consumption, fashion designer Angelene Laura Fenuta created a 3D printable garment with a versatile movable function, which won a Prototype Award. 3D printing cuts back on production costs and resources used to create garments that can be reshaped for multiple silhouettes and functions.

PLANTS-SKIN Hiroto Yoshizoe, a spatial designer based in Tokyo, took Lexus’ anticipation theme to the gardening scene. His colorful, design-forward pots change color to let plant owners know when the soil is too dry—saving water and promoting a healthy indoor plant environment.

BIO-VIDE Japanese product designer Takuma Yamazaki used fallen leaves as a visually appealing material alternative to plywood and paper. With further research into biodegradable resin, Yamazaki’s design could be used to make environmentally friendly furniture that will eventually seamlessly return to the earth.

For a full breakdown of all of the winners, head to www.lexus-int.com/ lexus-design/lexus-design-award/

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PHOTOS: COURTESY OF LEXUS INTERNATIONAL

DROP BOX Chinese designers Ding Dong, Ma Jincai, Peter Lou, and Huang Junxi coupled biomimicry with sustainable design to create a humanitarian aid product. Drop Box is made of recycled, completely biodegradable material and can be filled with supplies, dropped from planes, and spiral down safely to land during times of disaster.

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“This is a bold and ambitious experiment, which aims to address one of the biggest pollution problems of our time.”

ALICE RAWSTHORN DESIGN CRITIC, COMPETITION JUDGE

ABOVE No one has ever used the seaweed-derived food product, Agar, for packaging purposes before.

FACING PAGE AMAM was paired with British designer Max Lamb, pictured here, who worked with them during the mentorship period.

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particularly in devising a wide range of possible practical applications for the material.

Their success in doing so gives us confidence in their ability to tackle the many challenges and complexities they will face in continuing the development of the project.”

The theme of this year’s Lexus Design Award was “anticipation: anticipating the needs of people and society.” AMAM decided to consider agar as a sustainable raw material because to them “anticipating effective and sustainable uti-

lization of natural resources has become more and more indispensable,”Muraoka says.

Agar isn’t the only material being explored as a plastic alternative, as other companies are exploring biodegradable substances like mushrooms to replace plastic packaging. Agar, however, is propelling into exciting, uncharted territory. “No one has ever explored the possibility of agar as a plastic material, so there are a lot of things unknown,” Muraoka says.

“When we imagine what kind of future we would like to live in, we’ve thought that we shouldn’t ignore the social problems happening today,” he continues. “We instinctually thought about solving social problems, and we hope our work will reduce the garbage in the world. Agar Plasticity is our investigation into the potential for agar to replace plastics.” Their product is now well on its way to making AMAM’s vision of the future a reality thanks to the support of Lexus.

As Yoko Okazawa, group manager of Lexus International says, “AMAM anticipates the future with a visionary solution to replace plastics by a sustainable material and therefore create a better world for generations to come.” gb&d july–august 2016

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PUNCH LIST GUEST COLUMNS

Guest Columns How can tracking data improve the well being of humans and our planet?

Lisa Bate principal B+H Architects

High performance building design has always been fundamental to the B+H process, and since the mid-1990s, we have been committed to creating innovative sustainable designs for current and future developments across the globe. Minimizing resources and consumptives and their effects is fundamental to our process and an important factor for us and all of our clients. With new technology available, it is now possible to track and quantify building performance data in real time, which can be used to improve the performance and well-being of humans and our planet.

The next wave of sustainable building innovation— the accumulation, interpretation, and sharing of live data—is what will contribute the most value to humans and to companies going forward.

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One of the most useful tools for sustainability-focused designers, architects, and builders is GIGA, a database system and app that comprehensively tracks building and material performance in real time. GIGA helps green building professionals find the best manufacturers and products that contribute to a sustainable design.

Created by a team of ex-pat, local architects and designers in China, GIGA was originally conceived to improve green building standards. Since receiving international recognition from the Clinton Foundation, it has evolved to incorporate data from several other countries as well. The resulting data provides design professionals, building owners and property managers a snapshot of what’s being done in several regions and how interior designers and architects are tackling green standards.

cy—and is not monitored as closely once occupancy begins.

But with the database, professionals can predict the off-gassing period through material specifications and architectural data, potentially saving building owners and tenants time and money on move-in dates.

Then once operational, through monitors and the app-tracking real time data, we can adjust building systems, such as fresh air intake and volume of air f low, to provide a healthier

“Like any other resource, data like this remains useless if the industry does not learn from it, innovate from it, or choose to act on it.”

Monitoring Performance Beyond the literal nuts-andbolts, monitoring the environmental health of building occupants is another stream of data that demonstrates the value of green standards. GIGA allows owners, tenants, and building professionals to monitor air quality and environmental conditions, such as ambient temperature, CO2, PM2.5 (pollutant particulates), and relative humidity using the RESET app.

Typically, industry standards analyze indoor quality in the “flush-out” phase that follows the completion of construction—preceding occupan-

more productive environment.

Monitoring data tells us when to replace equipment filters and change cleaning, printing, and other products to provide the best indoor environment for people to work, learn, live, and play in.

One could argue that the value of a building is only fully realized once it is inhabited, as the occupants are where the big money is and big data needs to be focused. But you can simply look at the RESET app and see the impact of cleaning products high in VOCs being used or the impact when cigarette smoke enters a monitored area

through an open door. This app helps professionals to see the impact of buildings as they age and to anticipate how other environmental concerns can develop over time.

Data as a Tool Although the wealth of data provided by GIGA is an important tool, it’s just a tool. Like any other resource, data like this remains useless if the industry does not learn from it, innovate from it, or choose to act on it.

While the industry has expanded and grown significantly, it is also constantly evolving to accommodate changes in the economy and the environment.

We at B+H are looking forward to further developments of the app to monitor acoustic performance, lighting levels, and energy to drive human comfort and social sustainability as we recognize the inhabitants of our designed buildings are our clients’ most valuable asset.

Lisa Bate is B+H Architects’ regional managing principal of North America. As an ambassador for sustainable design, Lisa has held various positions on environmental boards including Canada Green Building Council and the United Nations Environmental Protection– Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative. Lisa also currently sits on the Board of Directors for the World Green Building Council.

PHOTO: ANDREW WILLIAMSON

GIGAdata

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PUNCH LIST

“Resiliency is the ability to go beyond energy security to achieve comfort, quality of life, and affordable livability, and passive buildings are making this a reality.”

Why is it imperative that we bring the conversation of resiliency, especially in affordable housing, to scale? To enable a future that provides for the safety, health, and viability of all.

PHOTO: KATRINA KRAMENA VIA PHIUS

Katrin Klingenberg executive director Passive House Institue US | PHIUS

High-performance building and zero-energy certification standards are widening the conversation beyond simple energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions reductions to put a greater emphasis on human comfort, health, and resilience.

Severe weather events like Hurricane Sandy reminded us that assuring safety and survival are the main priorities in the face of a disastrous event, yet if our communities are to be truly resilient, they must also be able to coast through power outages in addition to being socially and economically resilient. Building better buildings is an important component of developing gb&d

more resilient communities.

This conviction was a driving factor behind the development of the PHIUS+2015 Passive Building Standard released

by Passive House Institute US (PHIUS) this past year. This standard is the first of its kind that is based upon climate-specific comfort and performance criteria. It pins down the sweet spot between investment and payback to present an affordable solution to achieving the most comfortable and cost-effective building possible for a given location. Buildings designed and built to this standard perform 60-85% better (depending on climate zone) on an energy con-

sumption basis when compared with traditional construction.

Yet the benefits of passive buildings go way beyond mere energy savings, because energy efficiency at this scale means that with the addition of a small renewable energy system, occupants can not only zero out their home’s greenhouse gas emissions and reduce their carbon footprint under normal operation, but they can also survive off the grid in the event of natural disaster or other crisis.

If all buildings were built to passive building standards, then a small micro-grid would suffice to power an entire community and make it less vulnerable to power outages. Resiliency is the ability to go beyond energy security to achieve comfort, quality of life, and affordable livability, and passive buildings are making this a reality.

The release of the cost-optimized PHIUS+2015 Standard is spurring new growth in passive buildings from coast to coast.

Certified and pre-certified PHIUS projects have now surpassed the 1-million-square-foot milestone, consisting of 1,200 total units nationwide, with some of the most notable gains coming from the affordable multifamily housing sector. More units coming online means more families are enjoying the benefits of passive buildings, and that we are that many more steps closer to a more resilient future.

The affordable housing sector is taking notice of the demand for these projects. The Enterprise Foundation now actively incentivizes PHIUS+2015 certification under their 2015 Green Communities Criteria, used by affordable housing

agencies in 22 states across the country, with various other housing finance agencies and major cities like New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle directly encouraging developers to take the extra step of PHIUS+2015 certification.

Following the recent completion of phase two of the Orchards at Orenco affordable multifamily housing development in suburban Portland, Oregon, built to meet the PHIUS+2015 Standard, prospective tenants lined up around the block before dawn for the chance to call home to one of the largest passive building projects in North America.

It is imperative that we bring the conversation of resiliency, especially in affordable housing, to scale. With so much activity going on in the affordable housing sector right now, this is a great opportunity to address many of the challenges that lie ahead in the coming years beyond the implications of climate change. Shoring up the resiliency of our buildings and communities will be an integral step to building a future that provides for the safety, health, and viability of all; and that is something we here at PHIUS believe everybody can get behind.

Katrin Klingenberg is the Executive Director of Passive House Institute US (PHIUS), which she co-founded in 2003. A German-born and trained architect, she drove the development of the new climate-specific, costoptimized PHIUS+2015 Passive Building Standard and now directs the technical and research programs of PHIUS.

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PUNCH LIST GUEST COLUMNS

What do the benefits and value provided by green buildings look like at scale?

Dr. Chris Pyke chief operating officer Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark

Every high performance green building is a great idea.

Each project saves energy, conserves water, manages waste, promotes occupant comfort, and provides many other benefits for people and the environment. The green building movement has created thousands of such better buildings, and the value of these properties has been repeatedly recognized with superior economic performance—lower vacancy rates, faster to lease, higher effective rents, and increased operating income.

This track record of success has now changed the question that businesses are asking relat-

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ed to green high performance score, and benchmark the buildings, and more recently, sustainability performance of the burgeoning market for ul- property companies and funds tra-efficient net zero energy around the world. In 2015, buildings: What do the bene- GRESB covered a broad cross-secfits and value provided by these tion of the investor-owned real buildings look like at scale? We estate universe, including 707 know that we can create one companies and funds with an great project and that great aggregate asset value of $2.3 projects represent buildings trillion. The assessment is the that are better for people and global benchmark for environthe environment. The chal- mental, social, and governance lenge before us is to take this (ESG) performance of real estate experience companies and create and funds.

Want to learn more? Meet Chris Pyke GRESB is value by emat the New Buildings Institute Getting bracing and not a certifito Zero Summit in Denver, Colorado integratcation; rathon October 12-14, 2016 where he’ll i n g these er, GRESB’s talk more about how industry leaders ESG data ideas as core are turning project experience into provides business integrated business strategy. actionable strategies. transparenThis means moving the frontlines of the cy for investors. fight for better buildings from In the case of LendLease, a individual projects—the site of perennial sector-leading propso many tactical victories—to erty developer and operator, entire portfolios held by real the company engaged a decade estate companies and funds. ago in demonstration projects This change in focus will accel- to sketch out a practical roaderate and deepen the impact of map to “zero net” performance, the green building movement, such as its early demonstration taking us from a few marquee project providing “zero net” projects to ubiquitous market carbon, waste, and water perfortransformation. mance for military housing at What does it look like when Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. Today, high performance building is LendLease has institutionalintegrated with business strat- ized this experience in a comegy? Let’s take a look at the case mitment to address “strategic of a global leader recognized in challenges” including climate the annual GRESB assessment. change impacts and resource GRESB is a platform to assess, scarcity through strategies for

energy, water, waste, and supply chain management. This is reflected in exceptional performance goals for projects such as Bangaroo South in Sydney, a 7.5-hectare urban regeneration site targeting carbon neutral operations. The key is in integration. Bangaroo South is not a one-off project. Instead, it reflects a long-term commitment to gaining practical experience and institutionalizing high performance building goals.

Importantly, with this kind of track record, it would be unthinkable for the next project to set lower standards. This creates an internal ratchet that incrementally drives expectations toward higher performance and integrates sustainability more deeply into the organization’s core value proposition.

LendLease’s experience is not unique. GRESB recognizes a cadre of comparable sector-leaders around the world, such as Kilroy Realty, Host Hotels, and UBS Real Estate. These leaders set the industry standard and clearly demonstrate the potential for high performance, even a practical pathway to net zero.

However, it is essential to recognize that these leaders are not the norm. Our wealth of project-level experience is not raising all boats equally. Results from the annual GRESB assessment show that the majority of participating companies and funds have room for improvement and many are just starting out. In the vast majority of cases, real estate companies and funds could be doing more to reap the benefits of project-level experience with organizational strategies that institutionalize approaches to creating value from superior projects. Project experience tells us how. Our business strategy will take these lessons to scale and create real business value.

Dr. Chris Pyke is the Chief Operating Officer for GRESB, an industry-driven organization committed to assessing the ESG performance of real assets around the world. He also directs the Green Building Information Gateway (www.gbig.org), a global platform providing information about green building activity and serves on the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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PHOTO: COURTESY OF GRESB

“Moving the frontlines of the fight for better buildings from individual projects to entire portfolios held by real estate companies and funds will accelerate and deepen the impact of the green building movement.”

PUNCH LIST

On the Spot Samuel Carter

IN CONVERSATION with Samuel Carter Continued from p. 97

ourselves for strength looking forward. gb&d: Is there a project underway today that you think fully embodies that approach?

The subject of this issue’s In Conversation interview, Samuel Carter—a managing director at The Rockefeller Foundation working on the Resilience Team and the Global Resilience Partnership—fills out our questionnaire, picks the subway over the skies, and drops wisdom on why our world isn’t necessarily scarier now; we just know more.

GREATEST PROFESSIONAL PET PEEVE

Preciously held beliefs in disciplinary dogma.

ENVIRONMENTAL COME-TO-JESUS MOMENT

Reading Silent Spring in 2001 as an undergraduate at NYU. MOST COMPELLING ARGUMENT FOR ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP

Our children.

WAY TO MAKE THE ENVIRONMENT A NON-PARTISAN ISSUE

Focus on resilience—we’re getting more out of every dollar to create more benefits for more people today and saving money on recovery from future disasters.

WHAT YOU’D TELL THE GREEN MOVEMENT IF IT WAS YOUR CHILD

When you get out of high school everyone will stop picking on you and realize you were right.

BUILDING TREND YOU HOPE WILL NEVER GO OUT OF FASHION

Designing with the natural landscape.

THE PERFECT CITY WOULD HAVE

Fair and equitable access to housing and, as Truman Capote famously said, the ability to purchase a canary at 3:00a.m.

Integrating/communicating across disciplines.

MOST MEANINGFUL PROJECT YOU’VE COMPLETED

ONE TECHNOLOGY ON THE HORIZON THAT CAN CHANGE THE WORLD

The National Disaster Resilience Competition.

YOUR TOPIC IF YOU WERE ASKED TO GIVE A TED TALK

Helping things (people, plants, and communities) grow stronger and more healthy.

Driverless cars.

“Working at the Edges: Dissolving disciplines and building coastal resilience.”

PHOTO: COURTESY OF SAMUEL CARTER/THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION

YOUR FIELD’S BIGGEST HURDLE TO IMPROVING ITS PRACTICES

BUILDING YOU WOULD SAVE IF THE WORLD WAS GOING TO END

International Space Station.

EXPLAIN “GREEN” TO A KINDERGARTNER

MOST COMMON GREEN MYTH

It necessarily runs counter to business/capitalism.

ONE QUESTION INDUSTRY PROFESSIONALS SHOULD ALWAYS BE ASKING THEMSELVES

ONE BOOK EVERYONE SHOULD READ

How is my design influencing broader social/ physical/ecological systems.

MOST MEMORABLE MENTOR OR TEACHER

Helping.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee.

Henk Ovink, Special Envoy for International Water Affairs at Kingdom of the Netherlands.

FAVORITE MODE OF TRANSPORTATION

The subway.

WASTEFUL HABIT YOU’RE TRYING TO KICK

Air travel.

MOST FULFILLING HOBBY

Cooking.

MOST MEMORABLE HOMETOWN HAUNT

James River Park in Richmond, VA.

gb&d

SOCIAL MEDIA—HELPING OR HURTING

THE THOUGHT OR IDEA THAT CENTERS YOU

While it feels like we live in a scarier world than ever before, we really just know more. The question is what we do with that knowledge.

Carter: In addition to the State of Louisiana project involving the Isle de Jean Charles, there was a very interesting proposal from the City of New Orleans, which was awarded funding through the National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC).

It came together on the 10-year anniversary of Katrina, so it was a special moment for the city after having been through a number of planning processes and trying various incremental changes. They’ve proposed a Resilience District for the city in a neighborhood called Gentilly. What’s interesting about their proposal is, counter to how the city has been engineered for the last hundred years, that they are proposing to create ways that the city can live with the water that is coming in, and that will be coming in. They plan to create water gardens throughout the community and to reclaim land in ways that create beautiful new parks that have the dual purpose of a public amenity and are also a safe space for flooding. And they’ve proposed to reorganize transportation infrastructure in ways that allow for safe flooding of the street, while still allowing people to use them.

It is a very exciting project just from a physical standpoint. But especially exciting about it for me is that it really embodies the resilience thinking that we are promoting at the foundation in that it’s also a major economic development program for the city. Over 50% of African-American men in New Orleans are unemployed in the formal workforce. What that says is that there is a huge gap of opportunity, and there is not the connection of talent with jobs. The city sees resilience and water management as their future economy, in the same way that it is for the Dutch, where managing water has been a major driver of their economy for centuries. The project will actually create a whole new stream of funding for jobs in water engineering, urban planning, operations and maintenance of the parks, etc. It will be a laboratory to develop some of the best practices in water management in an urban context—in a city that is something like 4 feet below sea level on average. It is a wonderful embodiment of the spirit of resilience. gb&d

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PUNCH LIST

Directory & Index

ADVERTISERS

C CityScape Global, 4 cityscapeglobal.com +971(4)336.5161 Construct, 14 constructshow.com 866.920.0208 E Excel Dryer, Inc., 108 exceldryer.com 413.525.4531 F Fabcon, 2 fabcon-usa.com 800.727.4444 G GreenBuild International, 107 Greenbuildexpo.com 972.536.635 N New Buildings Institute, 3 Newbuildings.org 503.761.7339 P Prosoco, 52 prosoco.com 800.255.4255 S Sustainable Furnishings Council, 9 sustainablefurnishings.org 252.368.1098

PEOPLE & COMPANIES

# 360 Architecture, 36 2015 Green Communities Criteria, 103 71 South Wacker, 33 A Adapting to Climate Change Application, 61 Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS), 14 AECOM, 60 Agar Plasticity, 99 AIA San Francisco Sustainability Commendation Award, 86 Airolite, 88 AKT Peerless, 37 Alliance Health of San Francisco, 57 Alliance Roofing Inc., 88 Alucobond, 88 Amazon, 37 American Society of Interior Designers, 50 Araki, Kosuke, 99 Armstrong, 88 Arup, 70 Austin Maynard Architects (AMA), 20 Australian Department of Defence, 61 B B+H Architects, 102 Backenhafen Water Houses, 67

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Ballestra, Sandy, 26 Bangaroo South, 104 Bates, Lisa, 102 Bingler, Jacey, 96 Blumcraft, 88 BOMA 360, 26 Bonda, Penny, 50 Buell Kratzer Powell, 41 BuildingGreen, 62 C Cal Drywall, Inc., 88 California Solar Energy Industries Association (CALSEIA), 19 Canada Green Building Council, 102 Capote, Truman, 105 Cardinal Health Distribution Center, 37 Carson, Rachel, 13 Carter, Samuel, 13 Central Subway Chinatown Station, 57 Chez Panisse Foundation, 68 Chicago Commercial Real Estate Development, 34 Civil Engineer Sopris Engineering, 86 CleanPowerSF, 69 Cliff Lowe Associates, 86 ClimaCool, 48 Clinton Foundation, 102 Cobb, Henry, 33 College of Engineering at University of California, Berkeley, 86 Colorado Building Workshop, 75 Commercial Buildings Initiative, 34 Community Choice Power, 69 CS Erectors Inc., 88 Cushman and Wakefield, 26 D Daltile, 88 Degenkolb Engineers. 57 DeHart, Darick, 46 Designed for the Future, 14 Dickson, Lisa, 70 Dinwiddie, Hathaway, 86 Disaster Risk Reduction Scorecard, 61 Dong, Ding, 100 Donovan, Shaun, 13 E EcoFloLife, 83 Ecoimpact Consulting, 50 Ecosia, 96 Emanuel, Rahm, 34 Endres, Dave, 37 Energos, 47 ENERGY STAR, 29 Environmental Working Group, 68 Eppstein Uhen Architects (EUA), 92 Evaporcool, 42 Excel Dryer, Inc., 50 F Fabcon, 36 Fairmont Hotel, 45, 50 Federal Council on Environmental Quality, 17

FEMA, 57 Fenuta, Angelene Laura, 100 Fenway Park, 52 Flaherty, Sean, 45 Food & Drug Administration, 37 Friedman, Thomas L., 96 Furr, Pat, 44 G Gagnon, Denis, 51 Gagnon, William, 50 Giancarlo Zema Design Group, 81 GIGA, 102 GivePower Foundation, 16 Goodhart, Cliff, 92 Google Cardboard, 45 Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery, 71 Green Building Information Gateway, 104 Green Infrastructure, 69 Green Office Challenge Award, 34 Green Warrior Society, 14 Green, Jarred, 14 Greenpeace, 68 GRESB, 104 H Hall, Kristen, 57 Hamel, Alain, 64 The National Solar Job Census, 19 Henry Ford Health System, 37 Hill, Kristina, 66 Hopwood, David, 33 Hybrid Electric Buildings, 14 I IBM, 61 Innovation Accelerator, 92 Innovation Campus, 92 Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, 70 Integral Group Engineers, 86 International Space Station, 105 International Water Affairs, 105 Intersolar North America, 19 Invent Resources, 52 J Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation, 86 James River Park, 105 JDRM Engineering, 48 Jelly-fish, 45, 81 Jincai, Ma, 100 JLL, 33 Johnson, Steve, 46 Junxi, Huang, 100 K Kawneer 1600 Wall System, 88 Kaynemaile, 14 Kingdom of the Netherlands, 105 Kirco Manix, 37 Klingenberg, Katrin, 103 Koellner, Amanda, 45 Kroll, Christian, 96 L Lamb, Max, 99 LEAP, 67 Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects (LMSA), 86 Leddy, William, 86 LEED Gold, 29 LEED Platinum, 33 LEED Silver, 92 LendLease, 104 Lexus Design Award, 99

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), 50 Longmeadow High School, 52 Lou, Peter, 100 M Maetani, Noriaki, 99 Mazzetti Engineers, 57 McPhee,John, 105 Metro Regions and Climate Adaptation Services, 60 Millennium Building, 29 Minton Door Company, 88 Mission Rock, 57, 58 Morrow Meadows, Inc., 88 Munich Re, 60 Muraoka, Akira, 99 N National Institute of Standards and Technology, 17 National Renewable Energy Lab, 44 Nature Remo, 14 Nesselande Housing, 67 New Buildings Institute Getting to Zero Summit, 104 New York University, 13 Nimitz Freeway, 68 Northwestern Memorial Hospital, 52 NRG Energy, Inc., 44 NRG-Reliant Skybox Data Center, 43 NY Rising Community Reconstruction Program, 71 NYC Office of Housing Recovery O Operations, 71 Okazawa, Yoko, 101 Olson & Co Steel, 88 Orchards at Orenco, 103 Outward Bound, 75 Ovink, Henk, 105 P Pan Pacific Mechanical, 88 Partners HealthCare, 71 Passive House Institute US (PHIUS), 103 Pei Cobb Freed and Partners, 33 Perkins+Will, 57 PHIUS+2015 Passive Building Standard, 103 PNC Bank Building, 48 Postman, Neil, 13 Pritzker Realty Group, 33 Public Architecture, 57 Public Sector GHG Protocol, 70 Pyke, Chris, 104 Q Quantis International, 50 R Raftery, Barrett, 16 Rainforest Action Network, 68 Rawsthorn, Alice, 99 Rebuild by Design, 8, 97 Retrofit Chicago, 34 S San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, 61 San Mateo Wastewater Treatment Plant, 57, 59 Sands, Dale, 60 Sandys & Associates, 49 Sandys, Tim, 49 Sarkar, Biplab, 45 Schaudt, Peter Lindsay, 33 Schutte, Sara, 81 Skybox, 44 Smith, Paul, 94

Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 13 Sol Systems Run for the Sun, 19 SolarCity, 16 Sommerfeld, Rick, 75 Spaulding Rehab, 63 SPUR, 68 Stanton, David, 37 Stiff, Richard, 48 Studio Gang, 67 T Tama Art University, 99 Tampa City Center, 26 Taube, Ben, 42 THAT House, 20 The Brock Environmental Center, 64 The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, 64 The Enterprise Foundation, 103 The Hague, 67 The Irvine Company, 33 The Living Machine, 69 The National Disaster Resilience Competition(NDRC), 18, 105 The Resilient Design Institute, 62 The Rockefeller Foundation, 13 The San Francisco Foundation, 68 The Sand Engine (Zandmotor), 67 The Secretary of the US Department of HUD,13 The Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, 63 The Tower Companies, 29 Thoreau, Henry David, 75 TOBY Awards, 25 Trane, 44 Trilobis 65, 81 U U.S. Green Building Council, 88 United Nations Environmental Protection–Sustainable Buildings and Climate Initiative, 102 University of California, Berkeley, 67 University of Colorado Denver, 75 University of Wisconsin— Milwaukee (UWM), 92 Urban Forest Council, 68 V Vectorworks Design Summit, 45 Vectorworks, 45 Venice Island Performing Arts and Recreation Center, 41 VersaCore+Green, 37 Vietor, Francesca, 68 W Walden Pond, 75 Walker, B. H., 17 Water System Improvement Program, 68 WaterNest, 100, 81 Webb, Debbie, 29 Wilson Partitions, 88 Wilson, Alex, 62 World Green Building Council, 102 World Resource Institute, 70 X XLERATOR, 50 Y Yamazaki, Takuma, 100 Yoshizoe, Hiroto, 100 Z Zema, Giancarlo, 81

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Like the iconic screen roles and the Chinese Theater, our buildings have withstood the test of time.

When we think of icons, we conjure up images of people, places and things that withstand the test of time, symbolizing our beliefs, culture and community. Greenbuild 2016 celebrates the icons of our movement. Those who are working in the trenches today, and those who are in line to take up the banner and lead the way into the future.

Plan now to join us for an epic celebration at Greenbuild 2016: Iconic Green in Los Angeles, California.

REGISTER TODAY!

expo:

OCT. 5-6 conference: OCT. 5-7

los angeles convention center los angeles, ca

“We conduct research about climate science and sustainable construction, so we need to lead by example. Manufacturers like Excel Dryer – who continue to innovate sustainable products like the high-speed, energyefficient XLERATOReco® Hand Dryer – allow us to do that.”

– Dan Fernbank, Energy Manager at the University of Reading

XLERATOReco Uses 55% Less Energy Than UK Blade-Style Dryers XLERATOReco uses innovative technology to dry hands fast while only using 500 watts, making it the most energy efficient and environmentally friendly hand dryer on the planet. When the University of Reading compared the independent research, they found that XLERATOReco used 55% less energy than the bladestyle hand dryer, representing an annual savings of $2,155.20.

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