Elemental

These are my links for January 29th through February 3rd:

• Inbuilt gains official status to approve Passivhaus buildings – Inbuilt has been awarded the highly-prized status of Certifying Body for Passivhaus buildings. Passivhaus is a design methodology for ultra low-energy buildings, promoted by the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt, Germany. There are about 12,500 Passivhaus buildings worldwide, the vast majority of them in Germany and Austria, and the approach is rapidly growing in popularity in the UK as developers and designers consider their options to meet the Government's zero carbon targets.
  Inbuilt is now one of a tiny handful of organisations in the UK, and just 20 worldwide, who are accredited by the Passivhaus Institut to offer certification services. Certification provides a robust assessment of a building’s predicted energy use and allows an architect or builder to claim the 'Passivhaus' tag for a building and to market it as meeting the scheme's very precise performance standards. In the UK, only three individual buildings have been formally certificated so far.
• NGS GreenSpec – Opinion – Quality Assured PassivHaus Buildings – Part 1 – Excellent piece on Passivhaus by Mark Siddall of Devereux Architects (despite the mandatory slightly shrill rant against CSH/BREEAM which detracts from the piece, IMO). Covers the quality assurance aspects very well and explains why PHPP needs to be used. First of two articles – read both.
• Factor 4 efficiency illustrated by contemporary economic statistics 20100117_wf – Interesting analysis from Wolfgang Feist on CO2 vs. GNI and life expectancy.
• Zero carbon definition offers a new practical approach – EC Harris comment on zero carbon definition: "The revised cost of complying with the new zero carbon definition will depend on the value attributed to the ‘Allowable Solution’ and also the renewable strategy adopted to deliver the 45-50% renewables.
  However, the fabric efficiencies have been reported as adding between £2,000 -£6,500 per unit and the renewables requirement is likely to add around £15,000 per unit. This results in an additional build cost of £20,000 per unit but represents half the previous £40,000 estimate to deliver the full Code Level 6 definition.
  Astute house builders will therefore see opportunity in the new definition, with commercial advantage gained by selecting sites and design solutions which allow on site renewable costs to be minimised either through connection with district heating or large scale wind coupled with the use of an ESCO. Renewable availability of a site must now be considered in land acquisition and existing land banks reviewed."
• News analysis – Is aid without climate adaptation a waste of time? – The Ecologist – However, some NGOs have been amending an existing emergency relief strategy, Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), to integrate climate science into their work. DRR uses past events to help the community become more resilient to them in the future. Integrating climate science in DRR plans involves taking account of future predictions for a given area, such as flooding or sea level rises. ‘DRR enables humanitarian agencies to extend the time horizon and to mitigate rather than just respond,' says Dr. Mike Edwards, climate change programme development officer CAFOD.

admin News adaptation, aid, change, climate, co2, CSH, GNI, passivhaus, statistics, zero_carbon

These are my links for January 23rd through January 26th:

• Not the last straw: Homes made from straw bales make a comeback | MNN – Mother Nature Network – Volunteer labour makes costing straw bale difficult: "Though the materials used for straw bale buildings – straw & plaster – are typically inexpensive, the special knowledge required to design & build these structures usually means that labor costs can be anywhere between 10 percent and 20 percent higher than for traditional buildings, though some of that cost is made back through energy efficiency.
  “The construction of these buildings takes a person who’s done tons of training to really understand exactly how to get the material to behave,” says Moore. “It just ends up costing the consumer too much money for the benefit it produces.”
  In addition, straw bales can create extra hassle in terms of coordinating their delivery from local farmers, having a big enough job site to store all the bales and keeping them dry during construction.
  One way that people help keep labor costs down is to throw “bale raising” parties where friends & family members help stack bales and plaster walls."
• Forget Sustainability, It’ s Time to Talk Resilience – "There's a new concept infiltrating the climate change conversation, and it has the potential to change the conversation altogether. It’s time to give sustainability a rest and start talking about resilience, Rob Hopkins writes in Resurgence.
  “The term ‘resilience’ is appearing more frequently in discussions about environmental concerns, and it has a strong claim to actually being a more successful concept than that of sustainability. Sustainability and its oxymoronic offspring sustainable development are commonly held to be a sufficient response to the scale of the climate challenge we face: to reduce the inputs at one end of the globalised economic growth model (energy, resources, and so on) while reducing the outputs at the other end (pollution, carbon emissions, etc.). However, responses to climate change that do not also address the imminent, or quite possibly already passed, peak in world oil production do not adequately address the nature of the challenge we face.”"
• House 2.0: The Denby Dale Passive House – "Because of all this, the house down the end of Geoff and Kate’s garden has assumed a significance they cannot have dreamt of when they first contacted Bill Butcher. It’s not just a low energy house, it’s a Passive House. And it’s not just a Passive house, it’s an assault craft landing on the beach that is the Code for Sustainable Homes. By 2016, when in theory the Code should kick in fully and all new homes should be “zero carbon”, you would not be allowed to build this house. For a start, it is going to have a gas boiler — not permitted under Code Level 6. And it will have nothing in the way of home-generated electricity (although the Feed-In-Tariff coming on stream later this year may cause Geoff and Kate to reconsider)."
• Archinect : Views : Victory Gardens, or the Impact of the Financial Crisis on Architecture – Gloomy, but worth reading the whole article: "The hard part is going to be for architects to understand just how this is healthy for the profession. First, architects have hardly raised their productivity since the integration of digital design tools into their work. Sure, designs have gotten much more complex, but more isn’t always more. Many firms have wound up wasting labor on gimmicky designs produced by an army of interns. Now those firms are going to finally begin using technology the way it was meant to be. Watch as fifty-person firms shrink to five or ten core employees. Instead of talking about the cool things that digital technology can make, architects are going to talk about how fast and efficient digital technology makes them.
  That will be a huge paradigm-shift and will lead to more interesting work along the way."
• Sustainability: Carbon reduction – Building – Everything you need to know about CRC: "So is the financial liability placed on organisations by the CRC significant enough to demonstrate a convincing business case for improving energy performance in existing buildings? Not quite. However, the business case becomes more compelling when energy savings are taken into account as shown in the table below.
  Early investment in more energy efficient systems can reap significant savings in terms of reduced energy costs. The example shows the initial investment paid back in less than four years. If early action is difficult due to the current economic climate, then appropriate investment in time for the capped phase (2013) will also significantly reduce CRC liability and generate substantial energy savings. "

admin News AECB, BIM, CRC, future, passivhaus, recession, resilience, rob_hopkins, straw-bale, Sustainability, TT

These are my links for January 15th from 14:23 to 14:23:

• McDonald’s seeks to cut cows’ methane emissions | Environment | The Observer – The fast food chain, which uses beef from 350,000 cattle a year for its burger meat, is to conduct a three-year study into methane emissions from cattle on 350 farms across Britain. Gas produced by flatulent livestock accounts for 4% of the UK's total carbon emissions. It is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse agent. A study carried out in America in 2006 calculated that producing a single cheeseburger involves the emission of around 3.1kg of carbon dioxide.

admin News agriculture, emissions, environment, food

I’m almost finished writing my final installment on BREEAM vs LEED, but I’ve run out of time to publish it this week.  In the meantime, you may be interested to know that CIBSE have a conference coming up on this very subject on 10th Feb 2010 in Balham. A snip at £225 for members.

Hear from Chris Twinn (Arup), Alfonso Ponce-Alvarez, (Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment), Ivan Rodriguez (URS Corp), Esfandiar Burman (ARCADIS), Sean Lockie (Faithful+Gould), Steven Brindle (Waterman Energy & Environment Design), Vincent Murray (IES) and Angus McIntosh (Kings Sturge).

BREEAM and LEED are the two most widely recognised environmental assessment methodologies used in the construction industry today.   Whilst the thrust of the two are similar – i.e. conserving energy and reducing carbon emissions, generally it is not straightforward to compare the two. What might be applicable in one assessment method might not be relevant in another.

How can a project team determine under which methodology their project can achieve the best rating? This conference aims to give you the necessary background and help you make an informed decision about your project.

admin Accreditation, Events Add new tag, BREEAM, LEED

This follow up post is for those who are familiar with BREEAM and have some knowledge of the credit numberings and weightings for both schemes. If you need to refer to the manuals the BREEAM manual can be found here and the LEED manual can be found here.

If you are just looking for an overview, try the first post in this series here.

I start with a brief overview of LEED 2009 scoring and prerequisites.

Then I look at the main differences and significant similarities in LEED 2009 from BREEAM 2008.

I finish with the weightings which are now within LEED – a significant change between v2 and 2009 which brings it much more in line with BREEAM.

LEED 2009

LEED 2009 replaced LEED 2.0 from 27 April 2009. All discussion which follows refers to LEED-NC (new construction). There are small differences for the other schemes.

Unlike BREEAM, LEED is a points rather than percentage system. There are 100 base points, 6 possible Innovation in Design and 4 Regional Priority points.

Prerequisites

LEED introduced prerequisites before BREEAM’s mandatory credits. Prerequisites are mandatory for all ratings.

Sustainable Sites

• SSP1 – Construction Activity Pollution Prevention

Water Efficiency

• WE1 – Water Use Reduction

Energy and Atmosphere

• EAP1 – Fundamental Commissioning of Building Energy Systems
• EAP2 – Minimum Energy Performance
• EAP3 – Fundamental Refrigerant Management

Materials and Resources

• MRP1 – Storage and Collection of Recyclables

Indoor Environmental Quality

• EQP1 – Minimum Indoor Air Quality Performance
• EQP2 – Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) Control

Sustainable Sites

SS1 forbids development on farmland, wetlands and within 50 feet of a water body. BREEAM has no equivalent (but these may be covered elsewhere within UK legislation).

SS2 requires development density calculations which BREEAM does not. There are similarities in the types of services (bank, shops, post office, etc) which the development is rewarded for being near.

SS3 (brownfield development) is considerably easier to achieve than LE2 (contaminated land).

The transport credits in LEED are considerably less onerous than the BREEAM equivalents. For example, a 300,00ft² office building would require 95 cycle spaces under BREEAM, but only 36 under LEED. LEED rewards specific parking for LEV and FEV or for an LEV sharing scheme. There is no current equivalent under BREEAM, but there is the opportunity to propose this as an innovation credit.

SS5.2 promotes a high proportion of open space to encourage biodiversity. There is no BREEAM equivalent.

SS7.1 and 7.2 refer to heat island effect which BREEAM does not cover, although green roofs are rewarded (for different reasons) under LE 4, LE 5, LE 6 and Pol 5.

Water Efficiency

WEP1 looks at water use reduction against a baseline, rather than setting an absolute target like BREEAM.

WE1 looks at irrigation which is included as Wat 6 in some BREEAM schemes, but not currently in BREEAM Offices 2008.

WE2 relates to BREEAM credit Wat 5, recycling, which is again not included in BREEAM Offices 2008.

In BREEAM there are 3 credits which reward specific design solutions or technologies, namely water meters, sanitary supply shut-off and major leak detection. LEED tends not to dictate design solutions, focussing instead on the intention (i.e. water use reduction).

Energy & Atmosphere

EAP2 requires the building to be designed to ASHRAE 90.1. This is more onerous than designing to CIBSE standards and UK Building Regulations, and there is no BREEAM equivalent. However, by designing to this standard, there is no need to specifically require technologies or design solutions, in the same way that BREEAM does. It gives designers more discretion.

EAP3 relates to refrigeration and is covered in the EU by legislation.

EA1 is roughly equivalent to Ene 1. However there are 2 key differences – it is stated in terms of improvement over a baseline in energy, rather than a target carbon amount, and is also stated in terms of COST of energy. This is also the case for EA2 which looks at renewable and is roughly equivalent to Ene 5.

There is a total of 11.85% available for BREEAM Offices 2008 Ene 1 for a zero carbon building (which relates to Building Regulation Part L calculations). The maximum number of points available under LEED is 19 for a 48% improvement on energy performance calculated from Appendix G baseline from ASHRAE 90.1-2007. Points are very roughly equivalent to 0.9%, so a maximum 17% in LEED for a very good low energy building versus almost 12% for a zero carbon building seems better value! The calculations are more onerous for ASHRAE than for Part L.

The other main difference in LEED is that Green Power is rewarded, whereas in BREEAM contracts with green energy suppliers is not rewarded.

Materials & Resources

MRP1 relates to storage for recyclable waste. This is similar to BREEAM but the areas required are much greater – almost double at smaller floor areas and 1.5 times as large at higher floor areas.

LEED generally deals in percentage improvements rather than absolute values. This applies to the reuse of materials too. There are a number of additional credits to BREEAM where items such as rapidly renewable materials, local materials and reuse of interior elements are rewarded.

Rather than focus on an accreditation scheme and chain of paperwork (which Mat 5 in BREEAM now uses), the intentions are stated and it is up to the assessor and design teams discretion to ensure compliance is met.

There is still a focus in both schemes for rewarded recycling rather than reducing waste in the first place.

Indoor Environmental Quality

IEQP1 relates to ASHRAE 62.1. There is no BREEAM equivalent as minimum ventilation rates are covered by Building Regulations.

IEQ1, IEQ2, IEQ3 and IEQ5 are quite sophisticated and beyond any current UK requirements. BREEAM does not reward well designed mechanically ventilated systems. If a building requires mech vent, LEED may well be the better accreditation to go for.

IEQ7.1 requires ability to measure post-occupancy thermal comfort. This is far and beyond BREEAM or CIBSE, but is picked up in BSRIA’s soft landing framework.

IEQ8 covers daylight and is similar in scope but uses a different methodology to BREEAM.

Weightings

Whilst LEED does not convert points into a percentage in the same way that BREEAM does, there was a considerable change in allocation of points per credit between LEED 2.0 and LEED 2009 which means there is now an implicit weighting. As this article points out, the new credit weightings heavily favor urban projects.

Comparing the weightings per credits for LEED 2.0 vs. LEED 2009

admin Accreditation BREEAM, LEED

I promised, what seems years ago, to write some thoughts on the differences between LEED and BREEAM. Initially I had intended to pull together the highlights into one article, as I was sure I had seen a credit by credit analysis elsewhere. I can’t now find that and this post had started to get monstrously long, so this is the first of 3 articles.

I’ve been BREEAM qualified since about 2002, around half my professional career, and LEED-AP for almost a year. BREEAM in particular has been good to me over the past decade although I do have my reservations.

For new readers or those coming from the US, you might want to start with my rough guide to BREEAM 2008. And for an excellent primer on LEED 2009, I cannot recommend highly enough this post over at Real Life LEED.

BSRIA have an excellent article here from February 2009 which covers some of the differences between the two schemes:

So is the dynamic tension between two competing systems desirable? Clearly, a one-size-fits-all assessment scheme would be difficult to achieve on a global basis. For example, water efficiency is a major issue in Dubai and Australia, but not in Scotland and nor in Wales. So different issues need to be ranked differently to match regional environment and regulations.

While LEED is dominated by the American ASHRAE standards, BREEAM takes it cue from European and UK legislation. The regional versions of both schemes flow from those antecedents.

BREEAM Gulf has been adapted for the local market. Gone are the Good, Very Good, and Excellent ratings, and in comes star ratings. The weightings are changed so that water is the key issue, rather than energy as in the standard UK schemes. In addition to the CIBSE guidance being the measure for certain credits, ASHRAE and other standards are also now referenced in BREEAM Gulf.

BREEAM has long been able to adapt to local contexts. With BREEAM Bespoke, for example, the assessor can work with BRE to develop assessment criteria specially tailored to a building where it doesn’t fit neatly into one of the existing schemes.

I would interject at this point and say that this is a bit of a fallacy. Whilst BREEAM Bespoke is flexible, the core content of the credits is already set out – clients often believe they will be able to write credits from scratch if they go down the BREEAM Bespoke route and can be disappointed when they find they can’t.

LEED, however, has not been created with this level of adaptability and it is not run that way. Instead it is fixed to the ASHRAE standards and the US way of thinking (for example, credits are awarded for having enough car parking spaces, rather than minimising them as in BREEAM).

There are also differences in the way LEED calculates credits. They are generally linked to the US Dollar (especially the energy credits), which means that if the exchange rate is unfavourable, then the building’s rating could suffer.

A key change that may make LEED more exportable is the introduction of regional bonus credits. Six regional priority credits will be available based on what the US-GBC’s regional councils and chapters deem important, environmentally, in that region.

A downside is that these credits are not available for non-US projects. However, there are national versions of LEED being developed by individual national green building councils. Canada was the first, followed by India. Countries such as Brazil and Italy are looking to have their own versions soon.

The table above is courtesy of Eszter Gulacsy from MTT/Sustain. It summarises the key differences between the two schemes, which I will go into some more detail in the next post.

A further consideration, going back to my post on politics in sustainability, is that BREEAM reflects UK thinking and LEED reflects US thinking. I have mapped where I think the two schemes might fall on the Nolan Chart:

Feel free to disagree with where I have placed them, I’m sure US readers will guffaw at my thinking that LEED is libertarian – it perhaps falls more into the centrist section?

Generally BREEAM dictates specific technologies or strategies, whereas LEED states the intention of the credit and leaves it up to the designers discretion as to how to meet it. This is an important difference. It would be interesting to compare the countries which have chosen BREEAM over LEED and see if there is any correlation to prevalent political thinking.

My next post in this series will begin to look at the detail, including a credit by credit breakdown of the two schemes.

admin Accreditation BREEAM, LEED

These are my links for January 10th through January 14th:

• Why do architects earn less than other professionals? – BD Resource – Going back 50 years or so, architects used to have similar earning power to lawyers and medics, but we seem to have gradually painted ourselves out of the picture for clients. We wanted to focus on the interesting design bits. We didn’t want to “do money”, which led to the rise of the QS in advising and controlling costs for the clients. We were less interested in the management of projects, which led to the project manager becoming the client’s agent. All the so-called boring technical bits we delegated to technicians, technologists and engineers. No wonder clients now put far less value on what architects do.
• Building4Change : M&S backs A rated appliances and Code level 4 – Quite a commitment!: "High street retailer Marks and Spencer is incorporating energy efficient domestic appliances and building to level 4 of the Code for Sustainable Homes into its home insurance policy. If a property is damaged severely and warrants a total rebuild, properties will be rebuilt in line with the Code for Sustainable Homes level 4."
• Completion date scrapped for Masdar eco-city – Building – "Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s clean energy firm, has abandoned the final completion date of 2016 for its pioneering £13bn desert eco-city project.
  Initiated in 2006, Masdar City was billed as the world’s first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city. At the city’s groundbreaking ceremony in 2008 a completion date of 2016 was announced, but this has now been scrapped.
  The first stage of the project will be finished by 2013, with a new date of 2020 set for Masdar City to have a critical mass of residents and businesses."
• Ex-Llewelyn Davies Yeang team on move again | News | Architects Journal – Llewelyn Davies Yeang’s (LDY) former masterplanning unit has been sold on for the second time in two years
  The 13-strong team, which was offloaded by LDY in February 2008 to consulting giant the Tribal Group, has joined multi-disciplinary design and engineering outfit Scott Wilson.
• ASHRAE Standard 189.1 The Standard for the Design of High-Performance, Green Buildings – "Standard 189.1P, once published, will provide a ‘total building sustainability package’ for those who strive to design, build and operate green buildings. From site location to energy use to recycling, this standard will set the foundation for green buildings through its adoption into local codes. The Standard for the Design of High-Performance, Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings, is being developed by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) in conjunction with the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The standard is slated to be the first code-intended commercial green building standard in the United States when published early in 2010. It covers key topic areas similar to green building rating systems: site sustainability, water use efficiency, energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality, and the building’s impact on the atmosphere, materials and resources."
• Green, not grand – "Environmental concerns are no longer being overlooked by many developers, who have begun to take advantage of the politically correct, socially responsible image that being "green" provides, especially to attract multinational tenants. To prove their buildings are environmentally friendly, design professionals are beginning to adopt standards from the United States for "green" buildings, such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, an internationally recognized rating system designed by the US Green Building Council. LEED certification is meant to verify that buildings are energy and water efficient, have low CO2 emissions, and utilize local resources that use smaller amounts of energy to create and transport. "

admin News 189.1, architect, ashrae, building, China, CSH, green, LDY, LEED, m&a, masdar, masterplanning, Scott_Wilson, standard

There were a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the last decade. Last year alone we saw DEGW merge with Davis Langdon, Parsons Brinckerhoff acquired by Balfour Beatty and Fulcrum merge with Mott MacDonalds. Earlier in the decade Whitby Bird, Hilson Moran and RYB:Konsult all, in different ways changed company ownership, mostly in order to reward their founders.

Building services consultancy is not the place to find get rich quick entrepreneurs. If it was, founders would be targeting IPO, and companies would be floating on the stock market. This doesn’t happen because consultancy is a fairly mature market and the average profitability of companies in the sector is low – somewhere between 5-10%. Typically, founders build up their companies because they love what they do, not because they want to become a millionaire. But the day (usually) comes when they want to retire. There is nothing wrong in founders wanting to exit a business and wanting to be rewarded for the work they have done in setting it up. But in the current economic climate, what options are available to them? And what of the staff who are left behind?

The tried and tested option used to be the partnership. It’s a common model in both architecture and consultancy. But I think partnerships are increasingly a less attractive option as employees increasingly cannot afford to buy into the company (effectively buying out the top layer of partners to finance their retirement). There are plenty still around – for example Gifford has 51 working partners, and as a company is 59 years old. The expansion in number of partners took place fairly fast over the past 2 years, and in theory defends them against predators.

But what if your staff cannot afford to buy out the top layer? What are your options then?

Merging with a larger organisation (who are interested in gaining the staff and probably your reputation) seems to have been the favoured route for consultancies in the noughties. Whilst good for the exiting founders (and despite protestations that the merger is in everyone’s interests, blah, blah, blah – they do tend to exit the merged company within 3 years), is it good for the staff?

Scott Berkun has a great post on why big companies can suck:

Status quo / Follower mentality – The bigger a company gets, the more it’s main attractive power for new employees is job security, rather than opportunity to grow, learn or take risks. The Innovator’s dilemma is real, and leaders who have big success are often the last to recognize when it’s time to move on. For anyone interested in progress, risk taking, change or growth potential, a large company is incredibly frustrating, as the dominant psychology is one of play it safe and political correctness. A running joke at Microsoft used to be that the best way to get a product idea to ship at Microsoft was to have a competitor do it first.

Some figures suggest M&A successes are as low as a third. Whilst this is US data, I suspect a similar picture is found in the UK. So not only do the staff gets disillusioned and leave, but the acquirer loses the key thing he bought – in a knowledge industry – your people are your assets.

So what will the next decade bring? There will undoubtedly be more acquisitions. Some disillusioned employees will leave and set up their own practices. But company structures may have to change to reward both founders and employees. Perhaps given the very low profit margins in the industry we would be better to look at alternative forms of legal enterprise (community interest companies)?

admin Management, Opinion Balfour Beatty, Fulcrum, Mergers and acquisitions, Mott MacDonald, Parsons Brinckerhoff, Scott Berkun

One would have to be living under a rock (or at least, abroad) not to have noticed that there will be a general election in the UK sometime in the next 6 months. What will this mean for the construction industry? Plenty of speculation about, but not much talk about actual political and economic schools of thought, especially when it comes to sustainability.

First things first. There is no standalone discipline of sustainability. Basically, you have to be sustainable at something. Like sustainable construction. But even if you are committed to sustainable construction there is no ‘one correct way’ to practice sustainability. What is one man’s medicine is another man’s poison. Often what differentiates ‘flavours’ of sustainability is the economic and political beliefs and drivers of the actors involved.

Bill McKibben in a post about global warming says:

Most political arguments don’t really have a right and a wrong, no matter how passionately they’re argued. They’re about human preferences…

He does then state that we can’t afford to depend on current political processes to fix global warming, which I agree with, but I’m talking here about sustainability in it’s broadest sense rather than singly focussing on the carbon and global warming issues (the environmental leg, which we have broad consensus on). When it comes to sustainability, there really is no right and wrong. Looking at social and economic factors will inevitably bring in political beliefs.

To illustrate what I mean, and for those who haven’t come across it, there’s a lovely graphic called the Political Compass which plots both economic and politic beliefs on it. Below is the graphic for the main political parties in the UK in 2008.

The Political Compass owes more than a nod to the Nolan Chart which plots personal freedom against economic freedom. The idea of both of these is to expand the old fashioned political notions of left and right.

The usefulness of this when looking at sustainability (think of those 3 legs – social, economic and environmental) has to be huge? If we recognise this now, we will be able to have much more informed conversations about sustainability in construction over the next decade.

My hope for 2010 would be that economics and politics will no longer be neutral factors (or worse, taboo), but rather explicit within sustainability strategies. Any comments?

admin Economics, Opinion Bill McKibben, Political Compass, politics, Sustainability

These are my links for January 3rd through January 7th:

• She Just Walks Around With It: What I Would Tell Any Recent College Graduate – Wise words from Kristy: "That is NOT the same as liking what a company does, seeing a company that has lots of potential and potentially cool jobs, and just not liking some aspects of your current job there. Every job — especially in the beginning, good lord — comes with some "sh*t work": dumb things that just have to get done, and that you just have to do.
  Oh, I could write a manual about Success in the Workplace at the Entry-to-Mid Level.
  My point, really, is that every corporate job is going to suck to some degree. If it sucks and you totally can't see any reason to stay except for the paycheck, look for something else. If aspects of it suck but the long-term (1-3 year) potential is evident, don't screw up a good thing by focusing on the stupid."
• House 2.0: On Housing Benefit – Mark's B&W view of housing: "The problem is essentially that we have created a two-tier housing market. There is the private sector, which is expensive and insecure (esp. for renters), and the social/council sector which is cheap and very secure. And subsidised to the tune of £20billion a year…. It doesn’t strike at the root of the problem, which is that there are two different markets operating and cheap and secure housing is always going to be preferable to expensive and insecure, even more so now as windfall profits from owning private housing have been put on hold.
  A more logical solution would be to have just one housing market. To do that, you have two options. One would be to privatise the social/council house sector, and remove all housing benefit, instead supporting the poor by some other method – for instance, giving them money and letting them decide how to spend it. Alternatively, you could nationalise all housing and have it all rented out by the state."
• The enduring influence of architect Christopher Alexander, author of A Pattern Language. – By Witold Rybczynski – Slate Magazine – Most people discover Alexander through his classic, A Pattern Language, which appeared in 1977. Small and fat (more than 1,000 pages), printed on fine paper, and bound in a plain maroon cover embossed with a gold escutcheon, it resembles a Latin breviary. Its author's ambitious goal was nothing less than to catalog the entire built environment—from towns to bedrooms—as a collection of discrete "patterns," 253 of them. Each pattern was explained, supported by research, and illustrated by sketches and photographs. The patterns were linked to one another, showing which ones worked well together, and arranged hierarchically from large to small. "Neighborhood Boundaries," for example, suggests that strong neighborhoods require clear edges and restricted access. At the other end of the scale, "Ceiling Height Variety" observes that buildings with uniform ceilings are uncomfortable and recommends varying ceiling heights between large and small rooms to create different degrees of intimacy.
• CIBSE > About Building Services > Ken Dale Travel Bursary – The Ken Dale Travel Bursary makes awards available of between £1,500 and £4,000 to CIBSE members in the developmental stage of their career who wish to spend three to four weeks outside their own country researching aspects connected to their field of work and which will benefit CIBSE, their employer, their clients and the profession. CIBSE is especially keen to encourage applicants to take-up the award for research that articulates CIBSE's concern for the environment.

  The Bursary also offers the candidate the opportunity to experience technical, economic, environmental, social and political conditions in another country and to examine how these factors impact the practice of building services engineering.

• David Barrie: A New Deal for urban regeneration – Via Phil Clark on twitter, a great new blog find and a great post too: "Economic productivity today is increasingly linked with social welfare – and there's an ever-increasing recognition of a feedback loop between welfare, natural resources and economic development.
  In other words, sustainability is slowly but surely coming to mean not just environmental justice and intergenerational value but intra-generational value and equity"
• Blog | Yudelson Associates | Australian Efficient Building Scheme Allows Buildings to Trade Carbon Reductions – “An Efficient Building Scheme is identical to an emissions trading scheme except that it recognizes energy efficiency improvements in non-residential buildings, rather than emissions avoided. Simply put, it treats one ton of greenhouse gas emissions that is not emitted because energy is not used, in the same way that a conventional Emissions Trading Scheme treats one ton of CO2 that is not emitted due to a change in energy generation methods.” In other words, it’s far better to reduce demand than to fiddle with what the power plant has to emit to meet the (higher) demand of a building that wasn’t upgraded in terms of energy requirements.
• Anna Minton’s blog: Boris’ ‘Manifesto’ to keep public space public – "Surprised and pleased to see Boris Johnson call for public space to remain genuinely public. In his ‘Manifesto for Public Space’, which goes under the heading, ‘London’s Great Outdoors’, Boris writes that “there is a growing trend towards the private management of publicly accessible space” and that where this “corporatisation” occurs, “Londoners can feel themselves excluded from parts of their own city”. But he makes clear “this need not be the case” pointing to the Kings Cross development where it has been agreed that the local authority will retain control of the streets and public areas – ‘adopt’ the streets to use the jargon. He explicitly states: “This has established an important principle which should be negotiated in all similar schemes.”"
• BBC News – No central heating in new homes – Reading this, it screams of Passivhaus, yet isn't mentioned at all?: "The properties will be made air-tight and will be fitted with triple-glazed windows.
  They will also contain a "whole house ventilation" system which will recover at least 80% of the heat from stale air in the home and redistribute it into a supply of fresh filtered air.
  The executive director of Habitat for Humanity in Northern Ireland, Peter Farquharson, said the ambitious plan would "fundamentally change how people view new homes" and have a "far-reaching impact for the community and the sector"."
• Future Friendly Homes » The Passive House Solution | Certified Passive House Consultant | How Passive House works and why it matters – Passivhaus taking over the world? A good overview from an accredited practicioner stateside: "It is now available in the US. Consultants, projects or building components that have obtained the right to carry the logo have committed themselves to design excellence and the Passive House energy performance criteria. I am a Certified Passive House Consultant, one of 200 in the US and the first in the state of CT to provide this service."

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