Brian Wennersten, LEED BD+C, O+M, GPRO:CM is an Instructor and Principal of SKYed Eco Education & Consulting, and a certified GPRO Instructor. The following is derived from an interview with Anthony Brower, LEED AP BD+C, ID+C, Sustainable Design Director at Gensler.

GPRO continues to expand its reach in teaching green building practices to those working in the construction field with its recent release of GPRO Electrical Systems course.

Local Union 3, I.B.E.W NYC, longstanding supporters of GPRO, will continue their commitment to green building practices by teaching GPRO Electrical Systems and Operations & Maintenance Essentials to their apprentices and journeymen this fall. Topics will include: fundamentals of green building and sustainability in electrical systems, lighting, heating and cooling, renewable energy, green job management and other work practices that will assure high building performance.

The electricians union will also soon begin construction on their new Electrical Industry Training Center (EITC) building in Long Island City, which is aiming for LEED certification.  The space will provide an innovative and technologically advanced learning environment for union members to continue their professional development. In addition to GPRO courses, Local 3 will offer hands-on training for solar and wind power at their custom designed training installation on the roof of the new building.

Local 3 electricians joined in the integrated design process with the architects at Gensler which enabled the team to provide a more holistic approach to the project.  We had the opportunity to speak with Anthony Brower, Sustainable Design Director at Gensler.  Mr. Brower said that from an electrician’s perspective, reducing energy consumption was at the forefront in the design of the building.  He noted that the training center will allow end users to learn about the latest technology in Advanced Lighting Control systems as well as benefitting from improved indoor environmental quality.   With all of these energy efficient features, GPRO students will not only be able to learn in an amazing setting, but they will be taught by example from how the building was designed and constructed while continuing to meet the increased demands to train electrical professions in energy efficient technologies.

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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Credit: Flansburgh Architects

If LEED is a careful balance between the pressing need to reduce our environmental footprint and the harsh reality of our risk-averse real estate culture, the Living Building Challenge (LBC) can be seen as an effort to simply look past the hurdles of reality to the ideal buildings.  It’s an inspiring exercise to imagine buildings that produce energy, water and nutrients rather than consume them; buildings that are largely devoid of the toxins and carcinogens that typically foul the air and soil in and around any human development.  Where LEED measures how much you’ve reduced your estimated energy use, LBC tells you not to use any at all.  Where LEED gives credit for using percentages of recycled materials, LBC has a long, long list of toxic materials (materials commonly found in virtually everything we purchase) that you simply can’t have anywhere in your building.  Of course, setting such high standards means that only a very few projects can even attempt to meet them, which leads some to ask: What’s the point?

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Most discussions of green design these days revolve around the need to think holistically.  In the case of lighting it is important not to view the discipline in it’s own silo- but to consider it’s role in a system that includes site energy, information technology, and even the power grid itself.  The folks at Redwood Systems aim to make all of this much easier by developing an LED lighting system that receives power from not from electrical wiring but from data cabling.  Learn more over at MIT’s Technology Review.

Time magazine on interactive solutions to environmental issues.

The extremely cool “Living Light” project, image left, maps real time air quality in Seoul, Korea. Official website here.  Design, fabrication and operation video available here.

Kieran/Timberlake’s winning design for the US Embassy in London features an elaborate facade of ETFE and thin-film photovoltaics to control daylight and produce energy.  The thin-film PV of the facade is supplemented with a traditional PV array on the roof.  Among other green features the design includes interior vertical gardens that spiral through the volume adjacent to vertical circulation.  Pictures at ArchDaily here.

The EPA celebrates the 10th year of Energy Star, a program that has grown from a simple effort to improve the lighting in 23 commercial buildings to a remarkable database which ranks the energy use of 120,000 buildings around the country.

Princeton students measure campus lighting to advance sustainability.

The NYT notes a new report from Osram on the efficiency of LEDs. We are going to dig deeper into this report but the findings seem to strongly favor LEDs. Of course- one of the major issues of LEDs is not addressed- the number of really badly manufactured LED fixtures are on the market.

And in another article the NYT notes improvements introduced by, Luminanz, a small British firm.