Greenbuild 2011 in Toronto is complete! The closing plenary on Friday was a pleasant mixture of inspiring presentations, rousing calls to action and jokes about Canadian accents.  Fortunately, the Canadians were the ones doing the joking so no international tension was sparked.

The session started with a bang for me on a personal level.  Judith Webb, USGBC Vice President for Marketing introduced Scot Case from UL Environment (a major sponsor of the conference) and she explained that she met Scot at Speak Green, the June conference I organized while I was at Urban Green Council.  She even spent a sentence describing what the conference was about.  I was pretty thrilled to have something I played a central role in lauded in front of the entire Greenbuild conference.

For his part, Scot Case gave one of the only sponsor speeches I can remember that seemed heartfelt and didn’t include a laundry list of accomplishments.  He told us why he was excited to be in the room (because many of his heroes had stood at the same podium) and why UL Environment wanted to support the event (because they want to be at the forefront of certifying the impact of materials and products for buildings.)  Kudos to UL for letting him do it his way.

Four speakers comprised the closing plenary, or to be exact, four speakers, one video and one pinch hitter.

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A quick post to thank everyone who attended Speak Green on Wednesday.  The panel discussions were fascinating and unearthed a host of new perspectives on green building.

Though broad ranging- covering everything from UL labeling to chocolate milk (you had to be there)- the discussions dug deep into the many aspects of how we talk about green building to the mainstream of the industry and the general public.

In addition to the photos of Speak Green seen above, watch out for video of the panel discussions and a narrative summary of the entire symposium coming soon.

And thanks to those who were there for what we felt was a really fantastic series of discussions. We’ve been getting a lot of feedback on the conference and welcome more input. Please leave your impressions in the comments to this post.

James Russell visits the new Syracuse Center of Excellence, and finds both a gorgeous building and a host of reasons to focus our national research efforts on energy conservation.  The center will focus on advanced building technology, and the architect, Toshiko Mori, made sure that every aspect of the project was an advertisement for practical energy conservation.  We should also commend New York State for placing this building in an urban core.  Too often we see these sort of research centers plunked in the wasteland of suburbia where all the benefits they might produce are mitigated by the energy intensity of their location.  For instance, plugging the Syracuse CoE location into the Walk Score website fetches a highly respectable Walk Score of 83, while as a counter example the also new Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at SUNY Albany receives, eh-em, a 48- which basically means that every human that ever enters the building will have driven to the location.

James Russell focuses on the design and technical components of the Syracuse center (as opposed to its location), but uses these as a framework to discuss the big picture- our profligate use of fossil fuels.  Too few of today’s critics (of architecture, culture or art) are connecting the dots like this.  James understands that sustainable architecture doesn’t come at the expense of design- it is produced because of design.  As he puts it:

“The stakes are too high for America to continue to pretend conservation is not urgent.”

We knew there was a good reason we asked him to moderate the final panel of the day at Speak Green.  If you join us at the conference, take the opportunity to thank Mr. Russell for his work.

As noted in our newsletter today, Curtis Ravenel, Global Head of Bloomberg’s Sustainability Group, will deliver the Keynote at our upcoming conference, Speak Green.

We invited Curtis to speak both because of his strong background on these issues and because Bloomberg has just released their first ever annual sustainability report.  Corporations release sustainability reports all the time, so what makes this one special?  In our minds there are three strong reasons: scale, exposure and ambition.

With more than 12,000 employees and annual revenues of nearly $7 billion,  any initiatives  Bloomberg LP adopts are poised to have a dramatic impact.  As one of the highest profile media organizations in the world, their initiatives are likely to draw far more attention than those of a typical corporation, and if successful will serve as a beacon for many other organizations.  Bloomberg’s position within the financial industry is critically important.  The business cases for sustainability and green building are being built step by step, project by project.  But with a relatively limited number of green building projects available as examples, Wall Street has largely been reluctant to recognize their financial benefits.

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Manitoba Hydro Place ventilation diagram. Credit: Bryan Christie

“Cleaner, Faster, Cheaper, Safer” -  James Russell’s description of energy conservation in an age of Middle East turmoil and nuclear catastrophe.  His excellent piece in Bloomberg focuses on two projects that realize aggressive energy conservation savings in high design packages: Manitoba Hydro Place (diagram above, including massive solar chimney) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.  Mr. Russell is singing our favorite tune and you can hear more from him at our upcoming June 8th conference, Speak Green, where he will moderate a panel and (if we are lucky) discuss his new book, The Agile City.

Today Urban Green Council is very excited to announce a one-day conference in June on exploring the messaging and marketing of green building: Speak Green.

Those familiar with Urban Green Council’s high-caliber programs might ask: why this subject and not something more technical, something more directly relevant to building performance or energy efficiency?  Our answer is simple: we believe that green building is on the cusp of breaking into the mainstream of the building industry and we want to make sure it’s done right.  To that end, effective messaging is of the highest relevance.

By most measures green building has been enormously successful in a very short period of time.  The solutions proposed by the green building community, and incentivized by LEED, have gained broad acceptance among the innovators and early adopters of the building industry.  This is true across most sectors; from commercial to residential to health care to schools.  Much of this success has been possible because the less risk-averse in the building industry were persuaded to adopt new solutions.  From architects to owners to tenants, those willing to innovate have taken up the call and pushed green building into the forefront of the conversation.  But there is much work to be done, with green building still only making up a small percentage of construction in the United States.

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