Elemental

These are my links for July 31st through August 4th:

• By Degrees – White Roofs Catch On as Energy Cost Cutters – Series – NYTimes.com – LEED rewards white roofs (heat island effect) and it also pops up in BREEAM Communities – but beware: "Still, the ardor of the cool-roof advocates has prompted a bit of a backlash.
  Some roofing specialists and architects argue that supporters fail to account for climate differences or the complexities of roof construction. In cooler climates, they say, reflective roofs can mean higher heating bills.
  Scientists acknowledge that the extra heating costs may outweigh the air-conditioning savings in cities like Detroit or Minneapolis.
  But for most types of construction, they say, light roofs yield significant net benefits as far north as New York or Chicago. Although those cities have cold winters, they are heat islands in the summer, with hundreds of thousands of square feet of roof surface absorbing energy."
• Five UK firms vie for Masdar standards job – Building – Masdar, the £13bn UAE project to create the greenest city on earth, has invited five UK organisations to tender for the contract to design its sustainability standard
  They are Aecom, Arup, BRE, Hyder and WSP. Cyril Sweett is advising BRE on the cost element of its bid.
  The standard will set out sustainability targets for the project. Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, the developer of the 5.5 million m2 city, invited bids at the beginning of June and it is understood shortlisting is imminent.
  A source close to the bidders said the standard was intended to go beyond anything done before. He said Masdar would be likely to aim to be carbon positive, water neutral and waste neutral.
• Green Compass – Constructing Excellence in Wales (CEW) has worked with BSI to develop PAS 402 as part of its Green Compass waste programme, which gives assurance to anyone disposing of construction waste that it will be collected, checked, recycled or disposed of in an environmentally sound fashion. PAS 402 provides the framework for waste management organisations to demonstrate performance in key areas. Green Compass, managed by CEW on behalf of the Welsh Assembly, is the first scheme of its kind in the UK and is expected to make a significant contribution to minimising the levels of waste going to landfill.
• Tanya Ross on engineers and the media – Building Sustainable Design – Tanya makes some good points, but there's more to be said. Give me a minute while I go and work out the right answer to 3 decimal points ;o)
  "In a more general context, we need to keep promoting the idea of engineers as shapers of the urban landscape, as solvers of some of the problems posed by climate change. We’re clever, vital people who can help to save the planet, not a collection of wrench-wielding cowboys. Sure, it’s an enormous task, but it’s one we should relish. All engineers would benefit from increased public awareness. Whether it is not having to explain to your grandmother what exactly you do for a living or being considered suitable matrimonial material, even a modicum of greater awareness could mean improved recognition."
• Suburbs get urban makeover – USATODAY.com – An interesting take on the cultural aspects of urban design – asian influences in the US (both investors and occupants). Via @UrbanLandInst on twitter:
  "Suburbs that had not allowed development to rise too high above the single-family homes that have shaped suburbia for decades are beginning to embrace the "urban" in "suburban."
  The trend reflects the priorities of the times: saving energy, reducing traffic congestion, saving land, and promoting walking and mass transit."
• Footprint » WRAP/RIBA competition results – Designing out Waste – Interesting: "architects have yet to get to grips with waste. When it comes to sustainability, the profession focuses on reducing operational energy use and embodied carbon, but that rarely translates into preoccupation with reducing the overall waste stream from a project. WRAP launched a campaign in October 2008 to reduce waste to landfill by half by 2012. Many contractors have signed on, but so far only two architects (Ryder and White Design)."

admin News architects, CE, Energy, Engineering, growth, Housing, LEED, masdar, NYT, roof, roofs, standards, suburbs, Sustainability, urban, wales, waste, wrap

These are my links for April 7th through April 9th:

• Insulation is king – part 2 – "When NOT to insulate
  Some properties, typically built before 1940, have no vertical damp proof course (VDPC) around the windows. They rely on the ventilation in the cavity to stop rainwater penetrating to the inside wall. In this case you will need to either insert a VDPC or not fill the cavity.
  In any house, cavity wall insulation will reduce ventilation, preventing natural moisture build-up from being removed. So if you have cavity wall insulation make sure you also have trickle vents or extract fans."
• Interior Design Trends – Garden Landscaping Ideas – Beautiful Homes | Maryland – Northern Virginia – Washington, DC – Passivhaus – Always interesting to see reactions to Passivhaus (more desirable than LEED?):
  "The thought of a home so efficient that it doesnt need a HVAC system is quite intriguing, and for some, more desirable than a LEED cert. The PeakOiler's will love it. Of course, our HVAC contractor might not like the concept too much, but hey, there's still ductwork to run and an ERV to take care of. …
  Another one of my concerns is that the home is that the home I've seen are necessarily boxy and without much exterior detail. According to Katrin Klingenberg, an architect who built one of these in Champagne Urbana, IL, "The surface/volume ration has to be very good… you do not want to have a lot of nooks sticking out of your house… because you lose energy". This runs counter to our typical bungalow designs that are quite high on the nook and cranny ratio."
• Forestry Commission – The Trees and Design Action Group – via Hatty at the AJ Footprint blog (an excellent blog, BTW), "No trees, no future" report from Forestry commission.
• Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air: the Freakonomics of conservation, climate and energy – Boing Boing – Great review from Cory of David McKay's Without Hot Air. I think I'm going to have to cave and buy on paper – I've not opened the electronic version I downloaded months ago and this review really makes me want to read it.
• Reinventing America’s Cities – The Time Is Now – NYTimes.com – "With their crowded neighborhoods and web of public services, cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.
  Such policies have caused many of our urban centers to devolve into generic theme parks and others, like Detroit, to decay into ghost towns. They have also sparked the rise of ecologically unsustainable gated communities and reinforced economic disparities by building walls between racial, ethnic and class groups.
  Correcting this imbalance will require a radical adjustment in how we think of cities and government’s role in them. At times it will mean destruction rather than repair. And it demands listening to people who have spent the last decade imagining and in many cases planning for more sustainable, livable and socially just cities."

admin News architects, biodiversity, books, cavity, cities, climate, ecology, Economics, globalwarming, insulate, passivhaus, planning, reference, refurbishment, retrofit, Sustainability, trees, urban

These are my links for March 24th through March 29th:

• Lack of integration threatens UK’s sustainable buildings – Nothing new here – what are we going to do about it?: "The report argues that the "large number of interfaces" between the parties to the construction process, coupled with "high transaction costs and risk of duplication and re-work", serves a body blow against efforts to the rapid growth of sustainable buildings. It recommends that at the start of a project, "an integrated project delivery team with in-depth knowledge of the construction process" must be put in place."
• Design for Homes – Continuing Professional Development (CPD) – Masses of CPD pdf's – including articles from Pooran Desai and loads on sustainable communities.
• Transsolar Climate Engineering: Moderating The Design Process- 3/1/2009 – Building Design & Construction – "Among the participants were two German engineers, Matthias Schuler and Thomas Auer, who, according to Schuler, came away from the project with two overriding ideas. The first was that the most energy-efficient buildings they studied had been designed from the start with the target of reducing energy consumption—holistically, not as an afterthought.
  The second grand idea was that the “conversation” between architects and engineers was halting, at best. “Engineers think in numbers, architects think in pictures,” Schuler recalls. “There was a need for a moderator”—an entity that would iterate ideas back and forth between members of the Building Team to enable them to integrate the physical elements of any building project to produce the optimal solution."
• Architects are creating toxic ‘killing machines’ – Building Design – "Architects are creating “killing machines” by not considering the toxicity of the materials used in buildings, America’s leading sustainability expert William McDonough said this week."
• The Four Sins of LEEDwashing: LEED Green Buildings That Perhaps Aren’t Really Green : TreeHugger – 1) The Sin of Not Following Through
  2) The Sin of Valuing Gizmos Over Appropriate Design
  3) The Sin of Laughably Inappropriate Use
  4) The Sin of Wretched Excess.
• BRE-PassivHaus-Primer.pdf (application/pdf Object) – Passivhaus is flavour of the month at the minute. Nice 8 page pdf explaining the principles and the differences between passive and passiv.

admin News architects, Bill_McDonough, building, buildings, collaboration, construction_industry, CPD, design, engineers, green, holistic, IAQ, integration, LEED, passivhaus, reference, RIBA, Sustainability, Sustainable, system:filetype:pdf, system:media:document, toxic

What I’ve been reading about:

• Inderpaul Johar of zer’o zer’o at the RSA – Great video interview with Indy of 3 yo company zer'o zer'o, talking about how zero carbon will only be possible through collective behavioural change. Also how architectural design now has to design around architecture, social models and business models. Innovative thinking!
• The First-Time CEO’s Recession Survival Guide – Start-up advice: "We set off with the same directions: tackle a big problem, listen to customers, work hard, pinch pennies, hire slow, fire fast. Still good advice. But I think we’ll have different advice for one another once we’ve come through this downturn, about how we had to change to survive."

mel starrs News advice, architects, competitors, entrepreneurship, startup, top_10

These are my links for August 10th through August 15th:

• Blogs – RIBApedia – RIBApedia opens it's doors. Under the blogs page: "Blogs (or webblogs) are diaries written and disseminated on the web." Tempted to log-in and start tweaking stuff but the rules of engagement aren't clear? Do you have to be an architect to participate?
• Wright’s Palmer House Put on the Market | News | Architectural Record – Cheap at half the price:"The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Palmer House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, acclaimed by historians as one of the architect’s best residential projects, has been put up for sale by the family of the original owners. The asking price is $1.5 million."
• Making Energy-Saving Buildings – Forbes.com – …the vision behind a new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) "net-zero energy" commercial building initiative launched Tuesday. The program's goal, set forth in a section of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, is to get net-zero energy commercial buildings of all types up and running in the U.S. by 2025. At the moment, however, this is not economically feasible. "You could build a building that's net-zero energy-efficient today, but the utility savings are not sufficient to pay back that investment over the life cycle of the building," says David Rodgers, the DOE's deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency.
• AIA Deconstructs Green-Building Standards| News | Architectural Record – While officially neutral on green-building rating systems, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) recently parsed three of them in an effort to evaluate how well they align with the association’s sustainability goals. In its report, which was released in May, it carefully avoided picking a favorite of the three systems: t he U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED NC 2.2, the Green Building Initiative’s Green Globes, and The International Initiative for a Sustainable Environment’s SBTool 07.
• Castlemore’s Waverley Gate project awarded EPC – Building Services Journal – The fun that can be had with statistics. For example:"Castlemore’s Waverley Gate development in Edinburgh has been awarded an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), placing it in the top 11% of sustainable commercial buildings in the UK.". No mention of where the 11% came from. Which list of sustainable commercial buildings are they talking about? The building gets a C by the way.

mel starrs News architects, DOE, EPC, FLW, Green_Globes, house, LEED, RIBA, social_media, statistics, US, wiki, zero_carbon

What I’ve been reading about:

• Reader’s Rant – Building Services Journal – "BREEAM is about environmental damage reduction and not about sustainable development. Yet BREEAM is increasingly interpreted within the construction sector as being a metric for sustainable development. Use of the terms ‘very good’ and ‘excellent’ have become misleading because they are hijacked to mean ‘more sustainable’ to one degree or another. In fact, it would be more accurate to call buildings achieving these ratings as BREEAM ‘not as bad as most’ or BREEAM ‘a bit less harmful’."
• IES enters free DEC software market – Building – Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) has developed a free alternative to the Government’s ORCalc Display Energy Certifiacte (DEC) software. The Glaswegian firm is planning on a late-August launch.
  The company said the software allowed users to produce DECs and the attached advisory reports as well as facilitate lodgements.
  Benefits over ORCalc listed by the company include: no restriction on the number of building zones (benchmark categories); user-friendly input Web based access; personal user area to store and manage DEC submissions; and ability to save and move between the different sections of the submission
• Hobbits in a hole – Building Design – My favourite tacky hobbit houses in Oregon are in trouble. I could go and snap one up at a bargain auction price…
• Kevin McCloud’s own ‘grand design’ in chaos – Building Design – Read this article, and especially the comments. As usual when a 'design guru' such as Kevin McHeadintheClouds (or Wayne Hemingway to name another, or indeed Germaine Greer, who isn't even a designer) gets involved in 'real' projects, they get hauled over the coals by those who have considerable more experience and a much more realistic view. Poor Kev.
• Small Scale Wind Energy | Carbon Trust – A new Carbon Trust study into the potential of small-scale wind energy has found that small wind turbines could provide up to 1.5 Terawatt Hours (TWh) per year of electricity (0.4% of total UK electricity consumption) and 0.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) emission savings. This is based on 10% of households installing turbines at costs competitive with grid electricity, which is currently around 12p per kWh.
  The study also indicates that for the UK as a whole, the majority of electricity and carbon savings are available from small turbines in rural areas – four times as much as urban areas irrespective of costs, and considerably more given economic drivers. This is mainly due to wind speeds generally being higher in rural areas. Turbines in some rural locations could provide cheaper electricity than the grid, but it appears that in many urban situations, roof-mounted turbines may not pay back their embedded carbon emissions.
• Expert tells legislators in city the price of oil will drop | NewsOK.com – Todd Buchholz (author of "new ideas from dead economists", former advisor to Bush and technophile predicts:"Oil will peg out two years from now being closer to $50 a barrel, which is still high enough to make those alternative fuels worth pursuing.” He said he wouldn't be surprised if discussions took place two years from now about keeping the price of oil from getting too low so it "doesn't pull the rug out from solar, wind and clean coal technology.”

mel starrs News architects, BREEAM, carbon_trust, DEC, Economics, EPC, hobbit, house, Housing, ies, learned, lessons, oil, Oregon, report, Software, Sustainable_development, wind