Greenbuild is upon us again and I find myself using a different strategy this year, trolling the sessions for people rather than subjects.   Not surprisingly, I’ve found that interesting speakers are the source of unexpected subjects and some more frequently surprising connections.  Thankfully, Greenbuild still offers a great opportunity to hear from an unparalleled variety of them.

Highest on my list of people to see is Paul Hawken and his talk at the closing plenary this year.  Hawken is the author or co-author of several books that have quite literally transformed the culture of the sustainability community.  If you haven’t already read them, I recommend Natural Capitalism, The Ecology of Commerce, and Blessed Unrest, to name a few.  Hawken has spoken before at Greenbuild, but unlike some even very good speakers, he is not the sort to trot out the same bullet points each time.  This year, there are signs that he will speak about a tremendously exciting project to develop an inexpensive PV product based on green chemistry and biomimicry principles.

Biomimicry is a very quickly moving field with an enormous amount of potential.  As a result I will be front and center for the Evolution of the Biomimicry Approach session featuring Jane Suri from IDEO and Karen Davis Smith from Jones + Jones, people I wouldn’t normally get a chance to hear from.

Money remains the dominant factor in almost all human endeavors as it is the resource that allows our big ideas to move forward.  But the different languages spoken by the green building and finance industries are still a huge hurdle.  Roger Platt of the USGBC will moderate a panel tackling this subject head-on through the prism of Responsible Property Investing (RPI). The panel, Investing in Green, includes Lauren Miller from UNEP’s Principles for Responsible Investment group and David Wood from the Hauser Center at Harvard.

Because New York City has lately had its share of innovative affordable housing projects, I sometimes forget that other people are doing great work in the field as well. I am interested in hearing about some Chicago success stories at the LEED for Neighborhood Development: Creating Green Affordable Housing Neighborhoods session, moderated by the remarkable Doug Farr, author of Sustainable Urbanism.

I will try to provide updates throughout the conference, so please drop by our booth (#291) if you have a moment.

Frank Gruber reviews Grid/Street/Place: Essential Elements of Sustainable Urban Districts over at the Huffington Post.  Great to see arcane smart growth manuals getting the attention of a popular site like Huff Post.  Grid/Street/Place, which you can purchase here, is a similar “playbook” to the recently released Smart Growth Manual, which Gruber also reviewed at Huff Post, here.

Preservation, the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation has devoted their March/April issue to green building and there is some great stuff inside. My favorite quote is from Blair Kamin:

Choosing between preservation and conservation . . . is like choosing between a Volvo and a Saab. They have more similarities than differences.

Kamin’s piece is here.  You will also find a solid article on the retrofit of the Empire State building, a great case study of a Rhode Island Fire Station and a handy Green Guide to simple retrofit moves.

The conversion of this old brick powerplant in Chicago to the Shaw Technology & Learning Center embodies just about everything we hold dear here at Urban Green: the intelligently adapted reuse of an existing building, the preservation of a community, and, of course, a green design.  Doug Farr is well known for his landmark planning work and his fantastic book, Sustainable Urbanism, but his design firm, Farr Associates, has shown serious chops in this individual project.  Don’t miss the slideshow that accompanies the Architect magazine article.  The project is, well, a powerhouse.

A nice piece on solar hot water in the Wall Street Journal.

from BuildingGreen.com

Alex Wilson has posted a list of the products he found most exciting at Greenbuild in Phoenix this last November.  Definitely worth a browse.

I missed this great list from Planetizen back in November (I know, bad form) of their Top 10 Books on urban planning and design of 2009.  A great list (though personally I would pass on the Leon Krier.)

The Mind & Matter blog provides a great list of 5 transformative building materials to watch in the near future.

The winter gift season keeps on giving.  I had not seen this post over at the UK Architect’s Journal outlining the creation of public Christmas tree sculpture from 35 recycled bicycles.  Those damn Brits are so clever.

As Ben Weber, my associate here at Urban Green, points out. This is not for the newsletter- it’s for the news-laughter.