Like me, you’ve probably heard the sentiment that however much progress we’ve made on sustainability we are still way behind Europe; much of what we consider advanced is just standard practice over there.

For example, there’s an EU-wide mandate for new buildings to be net zero by 2021. The UK has mandated an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Many of Europe’s building codes are far stricter than our own…and so on.

Virtually all one hears on this subject is anecdotal, or so general that it’s not useful.  Here at Urban Green Council we’ve been asking ourselves for some time how much what we “know” about Europe’s building industry is accurate and what lessons there are for own industry.  Are the progressive measures similar across Europe?  Do they have programs on par with the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan? How do our best buildings (both new and existing) compare with those in Europe? What about the rest of the world, like Canada and Asia? And how much of the differences between these regions are driven by market characteristics like energy prices?

Our September conference, Global Lessons in Green Building: How NYC Stacks Up, will address these questions through two high profile panels.  One will focus on policy and codes, the other on market and finance forces.  We’ve developed the conference hand-in-hand with our partner, ULI New York, and are looking forward to the closing remarks from Clay Nesler of Johnson Controls. It’s our hope that learning about green building in the rest of the world will give us a better understanding of initiatives at home and expand our sense of what’s possible.

Please join us September 19^th.  A cocktail reception will follow the proceedings.

RELATED READING:
Greening the Concrete Jungle (The Economist 9.3.11): America’s cities are confronting climate change. They are also saving money.
Germany Sets Renewable Records (Grist.org 8.31.11): In the first half of 2011, renewables accounted for fully 20.8% of power production.
In Seattle, Work Starts on “Greenest” Office Building (L.A. Times 8.29.11): 1st big office building designed to carry its own environmental weight being built in Seattle, 1 of 12 “living buildings.”
Is This the World’s Greenest Neighborhood? (NRDC: Switchboard 8.24.11): Dockside Green in Victoria, BC was the first applicant for LEED for Neighborhood Development.
Western Grid 2050 (NRDC Switchboard 8.24.11): Provides a Clean Energy Vision & Roadmap for the West’s Economy and Environment

Our June 15th panel discussion, Oppositions: Pennies from Heaven?, was one of the best we have organized here at Urban Green Council.  The moderator and panel had just the right mix of background and perspective to foster a really engaged discussion.  Not everyone agreed about everything, which forced both the panelists and the audience to consider the subject of photovoltaic systems from positions outside their comfort zone.

Laurie Kerr, Senior Policy Advisor at the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, took the role of moderator and started things off with a challenge to the other panelists to justify the expense of PV systems when myriad other technologies could provide similar benefits at a fraction of the cost.  Her prime example was a calculation showing that swapping your incandescent lamps for compact fluorescents was 457 times more cost-effective at reducing your electricity use than installing solar PV. This framed the conversation and placed the onus on solar advocates to justify the expense of these systems while other measures languish.

Each panelist was given five minutes to present; Bill Guiney from Johnson Controls was first.  Bill is a kind of solar thermal hot water guru, having worked on and advocated for these systems for roughly 20 years.  He pointed out that solar thermal is a simple and effective system that for most projects can eliminate the use of electricity, natural gas or other fuel to heat water.  He recognized that many early solar thermal systems lacked rigorous engineering and, as a result, there were many early failures and horror stories.  Today, the solar thermal industry is highly regulated, the systems are extensively engineered, and applications are as reliable and failure-free as any other mechanical system. The systems are not expensive, don’t require particularly specialized labor, and take up so little space that they are applicable even in very dense locations.

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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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On June 15th we will hold the next session of our exciting “Oppositions” series: Pennies from Heaven?

Photovoltaics have always been one of the holy grails of the green building movement, and the appeal is easy to understand. Solar power has the allure of something that we might simply plug into our existing system in lieu of dirty fossil fuels. Every aspect of our society is so totally dependent on fossil fuels that we struggle to imagine life without them, and there is a very real desire in our culture to find a technological solution that will simply replace them- some new energy source that we can swap in at the supply end of the equation. But fossil fuels are a one time gift of the planet and it’s entirely possible that we will never find any substitute that has their ease of extraction, portability and use. Fossil fuels are an almost perfect material vehicle for energy- you can pipe or truck them unlimited distances at air temperature and extract their energy with machines as varied as small clay ovens or multi-megawatt cogeneration plants. Replacing them will almost certainly require radical changes to how we think about, and interface with, energy.

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The Emerging Professionals (EP), a committee of Urban Green Council, is a coalition of young professionals in the New York City area involved in the green building movement through hosting educational seminars, networking and other social events. Jessica Cooper (LB Architects) and Nicole McGlinn (KPF), in conjunction with UGC Board Member Molly Zinzi (Google) and Caitlin McCusker (Urban Green Council), are the leaders of EP.

On April 28th, twenty-eight young professionals joined us for a rapid-fire charrette challenge that asked them to direct their creative energy towards the Active Design Guidelines. The national Natural Talent Design Competition is taking a year hiatus to build the 2010 winning projects in New Orleans, of which one of the top four winners is our group’s submission: RAMPed UP.  Undeterred, we decided to offer an alternative: a local charrette competition.

To prepare for the upcoming challenge a week prior, the seven teams met us at one of the premier examples of Active Design in NYC: the High Line.  Scavenger hunt style, they navigated the city and recorded three examples of ‘good’ Active Design and three examples of ‘bad’ Active Design. Aside from informing them that they would need to ‘get creative’ on the 29th, no other information was disclosed.

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Urban Green Council Program Associate Emma Gillespie recently had the opportunity to interview Brooklyn Bridge Park architects Nik Elcovitch and Matthew Urbanski from Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates on the park’s sustainable features. Urban Green Council will be offering a tour of the park on April 21st.

Emma Gillespie:  The park has many sustainable design aspects- which ones are you most proud of?

Matt Urbanski: I think the main thing that makes this project most unique is the overarching concept of creative reuse. Along with reuse must come resourcefulness- trying to make the most out of the resources a site provides, which is different than what you might be encouraged to do otherwise. Our approach is one of resourcefulness but its not one solely motivated by sustainability or a green agenda. That, of course, dovetails beautifully with what we are doing, and this approach of resourcefulness is an aspect of the green agenda… And it was also out of great respect of what was already there… [Reuse and resourcefulness] came together to support the green agenda. One of the great resources of the site was the incredible scale of the site. There was an industrial scale that came out of the utility that seemed to work very well as a new type of experience for New Yorkers. We have some of the best parks in the country, but they’re not necessarily industrial. So to tap into the industrial scale was key to the idea behind this project.

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Q&A with Dr. Karen Lee, Director of the Built Environment Program at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The Active Design Guidelines focus on many issues that, while obviously important, might also be called common sense design issues; designing streets for people rather than cars, or designing stairs to be used rather than ignored, etc.  Why aren’t these things just done as a matter of course?  Another way of putting this is, how did get to the point where the Active Design guidelines are necessary?

The design strategies you mention used to be a “matter of course!” We used to have to rely on our own bodies to move ourselves between buildings, within buildings, and during play and recreation. With technological advances (and in the name of “convenience”), over the past few decades we have managed to design such movement out of our daily lives. Today it’s possible for people to leave their houses, get into their cars, park at their destination and step right onto an elevator or escalator – leaving them with almost no physical activity in their daily lives.

Today we are facing an unprecedented epidemic of obesity, along with related chronic diseases such as diabetes. Heart disease and strokes continue to be the leading cause of death in NYC and the U.S. and recently overtook infectious diseases as the leading cause of death globally. Here in New York, approximately 60% of adults and 40% of children are overweight or obese, and 75% of deaths in the city are due to chronic diseases. We sometimes refer to these as “diseases of energy” – since today people are consuming more and more calories, and at the same replacing physical activity with devices that consume large amounts of petrochemical fuels and electricity (cars, elevators, escalators, televisions, etc.). The result is a negative impact on our health, and on our planet.

Luckily, New York City is taking the lead to reverse these trends through initiatives like the Active Design Guidelines (also referred to as “ADGs” – you can download a free electronic copy). We’re seeing a parallel surge of national programs, including Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” initiative. With these efforts, we’re beginning to change our built environment and our culture to increase opportunities for daily physical activity, and begin reducing our reliance on so much petrochemical fuel and electricity.

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Join us on Thursday April 7th, for a forum on NYC Residential Deconstruction.

Once, “deconstruction” evoked academics picking apart literature to show how the shapes of the component parts revealed the culture of the author.  Nowadays, “deconstruction” evokes crowbars, wrenches, Sawzalls, and sorting bins.  I can’t help but think we’re getting more value out of the new version.  The value comes because deconstruction attacks both ends of a huge problem: the massive amount of materials used in constructing our buildings, which must  then be removed when we take them down.

First, let’s be clear:  if you have a building that’s serving a useful purpose and is appropriate in size and function for its site, the greenest thing to do is almost always to keep it, repair it, rehab it, retro-commission it, audit and retrofit it, but unless it’s a real mess, don’t tear it down.  The carbon pulse that comes from any new building will not be repaid in operating savings for several years, even with a good new building.

But still, there are buildings that have to come down.  In New York City, this is almost always so that another building can go up, but regardless, all the stuff that comprised the old building has to go away.  (If you’re really lucky, you may be able to re-use part of the existing structure, but that’s a rare case.)  The simplest approach used to involve throwing it in trucks and taking it to the landfill. But long ago, people realized that copper and steel were way too valuable to be treated like that, and recycling was born.  Today, almost all structural steel is recycled, at rates like 97% for I-beams and structural steel, 70% for rebar, and 106% for cars. (Huh?  That’s because new cars are lighter, so you get 1.06 new cars out of the steel reclaimed from one old car. OK, maybe that’s slightly tricky accounting, but still, the recycling is good.)

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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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