Elemental

These are my links for July 23rd through July 27th:

• Worldchanging: Bright Green: Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities? – Read the whole article: “That sort of casual eagerness for the death of others is appalling. Worse, the strategy implicit in this vision of transitioning — that there can be local soft landings in the event of a global hard crash, that indeed the only proper scale at which to prepare for a soft landing is at the local level, and that perhaps collapse will solve some of our problems — is delusional.
  Collapse is not a tool for social change. …. Anyone who thinks an energy descent plan prepared by a community group future-proofs them against people like Charles Taylor has simply taken a vacation from reality.
  Local efforts can’t protect against the violence of a systemic breakdown. …To plan for the collapse of large-scale systems is to plan for widespread evil and suffering; ethical planning for the collapse is impossible: post-collapse idealism is oxymoronic.”
• All power to the wind – it cuts your electricity bills – opinion – 26 July 2010 – New Scientist – “Insofar as there is a problem, it lies in handing control of industrial policy to marginally priced markets. Market-based decisions are not technology-neutral. They favour short-term profits, and that encourages the building of power stations with low capital costs and high marginal costs. That means gas-fired plants, which are tailored to make a profit whether the spot price is high or low.
  In fact, hardly any nuclear or coal-fired plants have been built in the past 15 years, only gas-fired plants, along with renewables installed thanks to support mechanisms such as feed-in tariffs.
  If those mechanisms had been ruled to be market-distorting subsidies and removed, leaving the market to make all the calls, we would see nothing but new gas plants built. This would leave us vulnerable, wondering where tomorrow’s natural gas, on which we would be utterly dependent, would come from – a scenario that has only been prevented because wind turbines receive support.”
• Linking Green Buildings, Productivity and the Bottom Line | Buildings | GreenBiz.com – Interesting stats: “Indeed, the 2003 California report found average annual employee costs to be 10.25 times larger than the cost of space per employee. The author extrapolates these findings to calculate that a 1 percent productivity increase would therefore have a financial impact over time roughly equal to reducing property costs by 10 percent.”
• More than Passive – Michelle Kaufmann Studio – “Although he is introduced to me as “one of the world’s great Passivhaus experts” (and having designed over 100 built Passivhaus homes, he has earned this title), Walter is quick to respond saying that is not the title he wants. He clarifies in our conversation as well as during his very compelling presentation the next day. While Walter commends the Passivhaus intentions, he says that it is about more than that. It is about good design. “Designing a Passivhaus is easy. But we need to make sure we are designing good Architecture as well.” It is much more than just calculations and scientific numbers. “Good architecture is not a scientific result.” His message resonates strongly, as this is a fear of green rating programs in general (whether it be LEED, or other), that some architects will simply follow the checklist and not innovate or design.”
• A Bold New Model for Sustainable Cities – Robert G. Eccles and Amy C. Edmondson – HBS Faculty – Harvard Business Review – “Unlike the real estate developers doing places like Masdar in Abu Dhabi, New Songdo City outside Seoul, and Dongtan in Shanghai (basically “green” real estate plays with a “let’s build it and hope they come” approach), Living PlanIT’s model is to create an ecosystem of large and small company partners that will focus on creating products and services for sustainable urbanization. The people that the partners bring in to produce those products and services will be the anchor occupants of the model city. The hope is that this activity will then attract other businesses and inhabitants.”
• Commercial Lighting Solutions: Login – With lighting set to be the bete noir of Part L 2010, this looks intriguing (but US based): “The Commercial Lighting Solutions provide actionable “how to” guidance on ways to improve your building interior lighting efficiency and reduce your energy consumption, without compromising quality design criteria. Strategies include the use of high performance commercially available products, daylighting, and lighting controls, all within the context of integrated designs supported by performance specifications.”
• A Reporter at Large: The Island in the Wind : The New Yorker – Fascinating article on renewable energy in Denmark: “The biggest disappointment, though, had to do with consumption.
  “We made several programs for energy savings,” he told me. “But people are acting—what do you call it?—irresponsibly. They behave like monkeys.” For example, families that insulated their homes better also tended to heat more rooms, “so we ended up with zero.” Essentially, he said, energy use on the island has remained constant for the past decade.”
• Building4Change : Are airtight homes good or bad for occupant health? – “There is already strong evidence that energy efficient homes have a positive impact on occupants’ physical and mental wellbeing. Basic improvements in indoor temperature levels in winter and reduction in fuel poverty can have a significant impact. But there is a shortage of evidence to inform decision-making in this area and it is vital that risks to public health are not increased
  There are a number of areas where more knowledge is needed. Although 0.5 air changes per hour is the accepted norm, we lack a definitive assessment of a safe minimum level of ventilation. There is no comprehensive study on the part that home ventilation plays in ensuring health. We have insufficient knowledge of the actual ventilation rates being achieved in UK homes, impacts of ventilation system design, installation and operation, and impacts of occupant behaviour.”
• How to test your decision-making instincts – McKinsey Quarterly – Strategy – Strategic Thinking – This means that to protect decisions against bias, we first need to know when we can trust our gut feelings, confident that they are drawing on appropriate experiences and emotions. There are four tests.
  1. The familiarity test: Have we frequently experienced identical or similar situations?
  2. The feedback test: Did we get reliable feedback in past situations?
  3. The measured-emotions test: Are the emotions we have experienced in similar or related situations measured?
  4. The independence test: Are we likely to be influenced by any inappropriate personal interests or attachments?
• Enough With Jane Jacobs Already | By Andrew Manshel – WSJ.com – An odd article, but it reminded me of the existence of Whyte’s video “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”, which can be found online, worth hunting out: “More attention ought to be paid to the finely grained thinking of William H. Whyte and less to Jacobs’s overblown pronouncements and unprovable theories. Whyte was a close observer of people’s behavior in public spaces and emphasized the importance of the many subtle design features that make people comfortable in parks, plazas and public buildings. Following Whyte, designers, planners and community members need to pay more attention to proven, good ideas, to established data and to the fine points of landscapes and buildings.”
• They don’t build them like they used to: Steve Mouzon’s Original Green | Kaid Benfield’s Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC – ‘Original green’ means common-sense things like building with high ceilings, cross-ventilation and shading in warm climates, and building with steep roofs and southern exposure in cool ones. It means using original forms of transportation, such as walking and bicycling, whenever possible, and designing and inhabiting communities that facilitate such self-propulsion. It means growing food nearby, and ‘living local’ as much as possible. It means accepting a wider ‘comfort range’ of temperature; our ancestors, Steve points out, were adaptable and reasonably comfortable within a range of 30 degrees or so Fahrenheit; today people fight over two degrees’ difference in ‘thermostat wars.’ Original green places and buildings have intinsically smaller environmental footprints than conventional buildings and places, especially when lifecycle effects are included, and in many cases even if the conventional ones have the benefit of green technology.
• Theses on Sustainability | Orion Magazine – Worth reading the entire artcile: “THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment.”
• Dynamic Thermal Properties Calculator – Free excel tool, includes decrement, admittance and kappa values: “The motivation for producing this tool is a growing need among architects and engineers for more information about the thermal properties of construction elements other than just their U-value. This is needed to help optimise the passive performance of buildings and ensure a high level of inherent energy efficiency. Going forward, it is likely that far more attention will be paid to getting this right given the forthcoming changes to Part L and SAP. Another driver is the issue of climate change adaptation, which is starting to result in greater scrutiny construction materials and their thermal properties.”
• Climate change weather file generator – CCWeatherGen – Adaptation is flavour of the month: “The CCWeatherGen tool allows you to generate TMY2 or EPW climate change weather files with a few mouse clicks. You can produce ‘morphed’ climate change as well as ‘unmorphed’ present day TMY2 and EPW files from the original CIBSE/Met Office TRY/DSY format files. The CCWeatherGen tool is made available free of charge. However, it is solely distributed WITHOUT the required baseline weather files and/or climate change scenario data!”
• 2degrees : Discussion Topic – “BSI has announced the launch of its new Kitemark® scheme for Energy Reduction Verification (ERV) which will independently verify and certify those organisations that achieve a reduction in carbon emissions through lower energy use. The Environment Agency has approved the scheme as one of the Early Action Metrics that contribute to the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, the UK’s mandatory climate change and energy saving scheme.”

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These are my links for May 21st through May 24th:

• Two thirds of firms ‘unprepared’ for carbon legislation | ITworld – "At the moment most organisations are just using guess work," he said. "This can't continue. In the same way that financial auditors wouldn't accept guesses as to an organisation's cash position, environmental auditors are unlikely to accept guesses on energy use."
• Scotland should aim higher than clusters of urban lumps, complete with useless ‘gob ons’ – Herald Scotland | Business | Markets & Economy – "What might we better achieve with all this public money?<br />
  Well, in that final leaders’ debate Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg uttered the unfashionable words: “council houses”. Perhaps if we set-aside our prejudiced stereotyped idea of grimy estates, decent quality council houses are exactly what we should be spending public money on.<br />
  Clegg also raised the issue of VAT. Newbuild is zero-rated, but repair and renewal attracts the full 17.5%. This hugely tips the balance towards greenfield building sites, and away from refurbishing our existing stock. There are hundreds of thousands of empty properties lying vacant in our towns and cities.<br />
  Readjusting VAT to encourage the repair of these would deliver more homes for every pound invested, fortify existing communities, reduce car-dependency, and create more jobs (repair being more labour-intensive)."
• Green ArchiTEXT: Flavorpill: Brad Pitt and the Trouble with Vernacular Architecture – Interesting article on an issue I hadn't really been following – the re-building of New Orleans: "Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the designs of the Make It Right (MIR) houses in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward continue to transform the city and influence post-disaster vernacular in America. They also continue to stir discussion, and plenty of critique, from a broad spectrum of architects – certainly from preservationists, who complain the MIR designs are not New Orleans enough, and even from a few sustainability advocates who question whether these unique designs truly offer a cohesive sense of community, even whether they are replicable elsewhere."
• CIRIA survey – CIRIA is co-ordinating a programme that aims to assess the feasibility of identifying a widely acceptable method for construction contractors to effectively measure and report their project-based carbon footprints to clients and principal contractors. The first stage of the programme involves gathering information on current practice across the construction industry. We welcome responses to our questionnaire.
• GRIHA – Home – GRIHA, an acronym for Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment, is the National Rating System of India. It has been conceived by TERI and developed jointly with the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Government of India. It is a green building 'design evaluation system', and is suitable for all kinds of buildings in different climatic zones of the country.
• Security guard admits he hacked hospital PCs • The Register – Last summer, Federal prosecutors charged McGraw with planning a "massive" denial of service attack on the HVAC system. He allegedly scheduled it for the July 4 Independence Day holiday, when it wouldn't be uncommon for temperatures to exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit. He called it "Devil's Day."
• Green Building Certifications to Cover 53 Billion Square Feet of Space by 2020 « Pike Research – "According to a May 2010 report from Pike Research, space covered by green building certification programs will increase from 6 billion square feet worldwide in 2010 to 53 billion square feet by 2020. While LEED and BREEAM will continue to dominate the North American and European green building markets, respectively, Pike Research anticipates that newly developed programs in China and India will represent about 30% of all certified green new construction by 2020."
• Why Planting Farms in Skyscrapers Won’t Solve Our Food Problems | Food | AlterNet – Cox and Van Tassel decimate the arguments for vertical food. Very good article. As always with these ideas, ask what problem is it that they are trying to fix? What is the intention?
• PLoS ONE: Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America – Interesting paper: "The land-use intensity of different energy production techniques varies over three orders of magnitude, from 1.9–2.8 km2/TW hr/yr for nuclear power to 788–1000 km2/TW hr/yr for biodiesel from soy. In all scenarios, temperate deciduous forests and temperate grasslands will be most impacted by future energy development, although the magnitude of impact by wind, biomass, and coal to different habitat types is policy-specific. Regardless of the existence or structure of a cap-and-trade bill, at least 206,000 km2 will be impacted without substantial increases in energy efficiency, which saves at least 7.6 km2 per TW hr of electricity conserved annually and 27.5 km2 per TW hr of liquid fuels conserved annually. Climate policy that reduces carbon dioxide emissions may increase the areal impact of energy, although the magnitude of this potential side effect may be substantially mitigated by increases in energy efficiency."
• Passivhaus Refurb: Passivhaus and the planning system – Loving this blog: "The UK planning system does not fit well with the Passivhaus approach, which involves much more upfront, detailed design work than a traditional build. Normally, an architect produces an outline design with just enough detail to satisfy the planners; the point being not to commit more resources than necessary until after planning permission has been given. In any Passivhaus project, but particularly in ours, which is much more challenging because we are new to Passivhaus in the UK and because it is a refurb, more work is needed to be sure we would meet the Passivhaus standard before the planning application can be submitted. If we had submitted our plans earlier, we would have locked in window sizes and other variables that have a significant bearing on the building's energy performance. We have found getting down to the key Passivhaus standard for heating of 15kWh/m2 per annum quite difficult, without throwing silly money at some exotic materials."

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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. "

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These are my links for June 16th through June 21st:

• The young generation with a new vision to build Britain | Art and design | The Observer – Fairly fluffy piece in the Observer on the new generation of iconoclast architects, more devoted to context, collaboration and sustainability than iconic buildings which celebrate individualism. Good quote from Patrick though: "Patrick Lynch is actively hostile to what he sees as the inevitable decline of modernism into what he calls the "idiot avant garde, which means that all your work ultimately looks the same, whatever the climate". He claims that younger architects are disenchanted with "the idea that technological progress equals artistic progress equals moral progress equals virtue, which leads to the kind of thinking that it's OK to go and build for a completely unpalatable regime and f**k up the planet for money, because you're working in your signature style and it's an expression of individual creativity"."
• BSRIA feature on new BREEAM In-Use measuring a building’s actual sustainability – Good overview from BSRIA: "With BREEAM In-Use the bulk of the work is carried out by the client in the form of an online self-assessment tool.
  If an organisation wants a formal certificate it can hire a BREEAM assessor who would assess the inputs into the online tool and certify the rating.
  the certificates have a limited validity. The certificates expire after three years for single asset assessments, and after just one year for portfolios and Part 3-only assessments.
  the development of BREEAM In-Use was driven by the need to assess a building within a few hours.
  BREEAM In-Use is also relatively cheap at just £100 per asset (a building).
  The plus points for the BREEAM In-Use scheme is that it links into other rating tools, which buildings are required to have anyway, such as Energy Performance Certificates and Display Energy Certificates. BREEAM In-Use is also advertised as being useful to gaining and maintaining ISO 14001 accreditation."
• New Planning Policy for Wales – Although Wales are only looking for 'Very Good' score in BREEAM, the energy still needs to be 'Excellent' (and I presume needs a PCR?): "Applications received on or after 1st September 2009 for non-residential development which will either have a floorspace of 1,000sqm or more, or will be carried out on a site having an area of one hectare or more, to meet the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) ‘Very Good’ standard and achieve the mandatory credits for ‘Excellent’ under issue Ene 1 – Reduction of CO2 emissions."
• CARBON REDUCTION COMMITMENT GUIDE LAUNCHED: British Property Federation – Confirms my iitial thoughts on CRC: "Hermes, which runs the BT pension fund, has undertaken a modelling exercise3 across its directly managed 103 properties. It found that during the first three-year period of CRC – where the price of carbon is fixed – it may be cheaper for the landlord to simply write-off the cost of carbon allowances rather than incur the administrative and legal costs of engaging with tenants, in effect taking away any incentive for tenants to reduce carbon. Although this situation is likely to change in year four when the price of carbon is no longer capped, it does mean that the scheme could fail to reduce as much CO2 emissions as it would with the benefit of tenant engagement. The government might then fail to achieve its ambitious carbon reduction targets by 2020."
• Architecture is most exclusive profession – Building Design – I initially toyed with ideas of doing architecture when at school. I didn't have A level Art (clashed with Physics) so ended up in engineering (probably much better suited to me). No pangs of regret when I see stats like this: "documents released by the Cabinet Office’s panel for Fair Access to the Professions show it costs more to qualify as an architect — over £60,000 — than any other profession. The panel also found newly qualified architects earned just over £20,000 a year, one of the lowest starting salaries in the professions."

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