Just in time for our upcoming workshop on the LEED for Neighborhood Development standard, NRDC has published a Citizen’s Guide to LEED ND.  Billed as a “user-friendly and accessible” document, the Guide has been developed to provide residents, policy makers and others the tools to assess the sustainability of development proposals- using the technical framework of the LEED-ND rating standard.  You can download and gather more information (include a sweet little smart growth slideshow) about the guide, here.  And Kaid Benfield of NRDC blogs about the new document, here.

Dockside Green, Vancouver, Canada. Photo Credit: Lawrence Wong

In partnership with Les Bluestone’s firm, Blue Sea Development, Habitat for Humanity has completed a 60+ unit affordable housing project in the Longwood neighborhood of the Bronx. Habitat for Humanity projects are notable for their “sweat equity” program in which families actually help build portions of the projects – in this case, installation of interior finishes. This particular project is expecting LEED certification under the Home for Midrise Multifamily standard, but it is also notable for its adoption of Active Design principles like open and inviting stairwells, and exercise rooms.  Read more on the New York Times piece here.  As an aside, almost all American obesity programs have focused on our poor national diet (fast food, corn syrup) and sedentary home life (coach potato TV watching) but a recent study suggests our sedentary work lives also play a major role- so I hope you are reading this while jogging.  In any case, it’s great to see the Active Design guidelines begin to impact built projects, and wonderful to see another impressive project by Habitat come to fruition.

Photo credit: Amal Chen/The Epoch Times

Marc Gunther has a short piece on his blog about the inimitable Michael Deane, Chief Sustainability Officer for Turner Construction.  Mr. Deane was an early board member of Urban Green Council and has remained a long time friend of, and advocate for, our organization.  So it’s nice to see him get more props for the impressive work he is doing at the one of the largest construction firms in the U.S.

Never shy about sharing his opinions, Mr. Deane offers some juicy quotes including, “The only excuse for not building a LEED building is ignorance.”  Take that, skeptics!

The piece suggests that green construction represents an incredible 46% of Turner’s work.  I should also note that Mr. Deane’s colleague at Turner, Pat DiFillipo (Executive Vice President at Turner and a current Urban Green Council board member), is one of the speakers at our upcoming conference: Speak Green.

What more could you ask for? A stellar music lineup every week in this Brooklyn venue is the icing on this LEED-certified bowling alley.

Last week, the Emerging Professionals took a behind-the-scenes tour of Brooklyn Bowl to hear firsthand the many facets of its sustainable design from co-owner Charley Ryan.

Charley walked us through the trials and tribulations of becoming the world’s first LEED certified bowling alley.  Starting with the envelope, we were surprised to learn that not only were the original flooring and walls preserved in this former iron foundry but so were the rafters – including the illuminating skylights’ strategic placement.  Where new flooring is concerned, the stage consists of 100% recycled truck tires and the bowling lounge is 100% reclaimed cork.  Even the carnival-themed decor, from the clown bean bags to the shooting gallery birds, was recycled from movie sets.  The materials used throughout the venue aren’t just sustainably-produced or salvaged, they’re local.  The majority of the furniture, fixtures, and building materials were sourced from Brooklyn.  Even the 10 draught beers were brewed here – much of it from their adjacent neighbor Brooklyn Brewery.

Erica peruses a book on their design process while Charley describes the difficulties of sound-proofing the roof.

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On June 17^th we are holding our first full-day workshop on the LEED for Neighborhood Development standard.

Although our organization largely focuses on buildings, we’ve mentioned many times the great importance we feel should be placed on community planning. Where your building is located, and the contextual fabric of that location, is often more important than the design of the building itself.  It has always been clear that choosing a greenfield site over an already urbanized location has major environmental repercussions: from simple disruption of ecology to less efficient utility distribution.  Since climate change has become the most pressing issue of our time, we have come to understand that even just within the limited focus of energy-use there is a clear imperative to curtail sprawl.  The transportation and energy impacts of a building’s location were codified into the metric of “Transportation Intensity” by Alex Wilson in a quietly transformative article at BuildingGreen.com in September of 2007.  Here were the statistics that backed up many of our suspicions that, say, replacing a poorly performing inner-city high-school building with a LEED platinum school 20 miles outside the town was not an unequivocally good thing.

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When Tony Malkin announced all the amazing retrofit measures he would pursue at the Empire State building, there was somewhat silly flap in green building circles about the fact that he was not pursuing LEED certification for his project.  It made a certain amount of sense- he had partnered with RMI, the Clinton Climate Initiative, JLL, Johnson Controls and others to basically redefine what was possible in large scale retrofit work.  He generated his own press and probably felt he didn’t need a LEED plaque to prove his work to anyone.  Here at Urban Green Council we felt like the LEED or not-LEED discussion was beside the point, but were interested to note that they will be pursuing LEED-EBOM certification after all.  They’ll undoubtedly get it- the only real question being the level, and one assumes that depends largely on their Energy Star score.  One hears anecdotally that most high profile tenants are asking for LEED these days and, though we have no inside knowledge here, one wonders if having to explain why their building wasn’t LEED Certified to every other interested tenant didn’t play a part in their decision.

Photo Credit: Phil Bartle

Our April Green Building Salon will focus on several projects that have implemented the NYC Active Design Guidelines (ADG).  It should be a great presentation and discussion, featuring several excellent projects and folks from NYC DDC, Bright Power and Perkins + Will.

The ADG are remarkable both for their content and the process that brought them about.  They are the result of a unique partnership between several city agencies; the Department of Design and Construction, the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, the Department of Transportation and City Planning.  The fact that these agencies worked together to develop this document is a recognition that the solutions for broad public health problems like obesity, diabetes and heart disease are not available within the boundaries of a single discipline.  It’s wonderful to see city government tackling such complicated issues and delivering eminently sensible solutions in such a clear and engaging format.  It’s a beautifully designed book, worthy of the very important subject matter.

And there can be no doubt of the importance of the subject matter.   As the ADG states “physical inactivity and unhealthy diet are second only to tobacco as the main causes of premature death in the United States.”  It is hugely important to solve these problems from both the humanitarian and financial perspectives- they lead to staggering loss of life and quality of same, and they cost our society untold billions of dollars.

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At Greenbuild 2010 in Chicago, the USGBC introduced the fruits of an IT project called the Green Building Information Gateway, which included a web portal and a mobile device application, both pilots.   The mobile device app was limited to Chicago projects but was still pretty exciting.  The app mapped certified projects in Chicago and allowed you to browse the points achieved in each category.  Several projects were featured as case studies and included photos and in-depth project descriptions from BuildingGreen.com.  The app has now been updated to include national data, and while a bit more limited in its scope than the pilot we saw in Chicago is still worth checking out.  You can find them in iTunes here.

The basic thing the app does is locate projects on a google-type map.  Open the app and it produces a map of wherever you are in the US, with little bubbles icons for each LEED Certified project, color coded to the project certification level: Platinum is grey, Gold, is, uhh, gold, Silver is blue and basic certification is green.   The Chicago based app used little oak leaves (from the USGBC logo) for each project- which I much prefer and would leave bubbles to signify non-LEED green projects like Enterprise Green Communities projects- a stated goal of the IT project.  The map of most of NYC looks like this:

You can zoom in closer and tap the compass icon to see your location.  Our office is the blue bubble below:

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Urban Green Council’s High Performance Green Building Salon on March 10th will focus on the use of wood in institutional buildings.

Olympic National Park, Washington. Credit: Sergio Bonachela

I have a deep, and deeply conflicted, affinity for the use of wood in architecture.  My childhood was filled with hikes in the forests of the Cascade range in Washington State and some of my most cherished memories from those years are walking among the 500 year old groves of Douglas Fir giants in Olympic National Park out on the Pacific coast.  Wood is the principal construction material on the West coast- my thesis project at the University of Oregon was a modern interpretation of  timber shed structures, set on the site of an abandoned timber mill.  How I ended up in New York City is a whole other story but I came right after college and in my professional life I have always longed for the warmth and elegance of wood structures- of which there are very few here on the East Coast.  There are building code impediments to the use of wood here, of course, but it is also just not a material one identifies with this place the way we do with steel and stone.  But as an architect I still found myself proposing it where appropriate, from wood-mullion curtain wall systems, to German passive house certified windows, to FSC-certified flooring.  What is it about wood that warms my heart and relaxes my soul?  Ilana Judah  at FXFowle, the moderator on March 10^th, points out there is a “biophilic component” to this attraction.  Wood is a living thing and we connect to it on this level, even if subconsciously.

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Credit: Pro Europa

It would seem that I owe Frank Gehry an apology or, since it is unlikely that Mr. Gehry is aware of my existence, that I at least owe our readers a follow up to my post last year in which I condemned certain aspects of his work.  You may recall that Gehry was quoted last year in Business Week, disparaging both the cost and effectiveness of LEED.  I had a pretty strong reaction to this, and I wasn’t the only one.  More recently Gehry tempered his stance on LEED in an interview with PBS. It’s worth reading the whole thing but he basically says that he would prefer increasing the thresholds of codes rather than legislating the point-based system of LEED.  It’s a fair point, though I would argue we need voluntary standards like LEED or the Living Building Challenge to demonstrate what is possible before we can begin to mandate individual elements within codes.  In any case, what caught my eye in this interview was his reference to his Novartis building in Switzerland.  He is quoted as follows:

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