We received some good news from Washington today, via the AIA, which issued a strongly worded press release praising the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee for approving the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act.

The proposed law would encourage energy efficiency throughout the built environment. In a not-so-veiled reference to Section 433 , the AIA goes onto to say: “We are also pleased that the bill keeps energy requirements as they pertain to new federal buildings.”

The reason this isn’t great news is simple: Section 433 is still not safe from oil company meddling. According to congressional sources, when the proposed bill reaches the Senate floor, Senator John Hoeven (a Republican from North Dakota) may introduce an amendment that would weaken or eliminate Section 433. Or, failing that, he may introduce separate legislation aimed at gutting or killing Section 433. Stay tuned.

The chart demonstrates the steadily improving Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) for the building sector. At each interval measured, buildings have become more efficient. The gap between the most recent projected 2013 AEO, and the projected 2005 AEO represents the added savings gained through better building design, and low and renewable energy systems.

It wasn’t a masterwork, but it was the master’s work. Every day, hundreds of people walked by the gleaming space, but few may have realized its significance. A hidden gem in plain sight, the Hoffman Auto Showroom at 430 Park Avenue, opened in 1955. It was one of just three Frank Lloyd Wright projects in New York City. And now, it’s gone.

The sleek showroom captured by the astute eye of Ezra Stoller, 1955. Courtesy of Ezra Stoller © Esto / Yossi Milo Gallery

Wright’s bijou, as he described it,[i] was the architect’s first permanent work in the city, his first constructed automotive design, and one of his few interior-only projects. Realized during New York’s post-World War II commercial construction boom, it was the architect’s single gesture along the corporate corridor of International Style buildings designed by his rivals, the “glass box boys.”[ii] The showroom’s signature ramp was also one of Wright’s several design experiments with the spiral, culminating in the Guggenheim Museum.

The showroom was a bijou to me, too. It’s a character in my book, Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years, 1954-1959. I spent considerable time studying, visiting, and writing about it. Imagine my shock on a warm day last month when I walked by showroom and witnessed it being gutted. A woman in construction gear, standing in front of the open doorway waved pedestrians past clouds of dust and dumpsters filled with the showroom’s remains en route to a nearby dump truck. Read more…

“Architects have a greater ability to improve public health than medical professionals.”

That provocative statement was made by a physician, Dr. Claudia Miller, an assistant dean at the University of Texas School of Medicine, on a panel I moderated on healthy building materials during our second annual firm-wide Green Week.

From left to right:  HKS G Green Week 2 panelists Jason McLennan, Bill Walsh, Kirk Teske, Dr. Claudia Miller, and Howard Williams.

More than 800 of our co-workers heard nationally recognized leaders discuss everything from the impacts of LEED v4 to the latest in energy modeling software. In addition to Dr. Miller, the panel included Jason McClennan, founder and creator of the Living Building Challenge and CEO of the International Living Future Institute; Bill Walsh, executive director of the Healthy Building Network , and Howard Williams, vice president at Construction Specialties, a global building materials supplier.

Though the panelists – a designer, physician, manufacturer, sustainability activist, and a building certification creator – come with different skill sets and perspectives, their combined knowledge and collective purpose was clear: They made a unanimous call for cooperation and transparency from building product manufacturers. This is exactly the type of collaborative action our industry needs to shift the building materials paradigm from translucent to transparent, and from toxic to healthy.

Architects and designers can leverage their specification power to transform the building product marketplace, suggested Dr. Miller.  Like medical professionals, the design community has a duty to protect the public which has the right to know what’s in the products that surrond them. And the specifiers of those products  have the duty to select those that minimize impact on the environment and the people who occupy the spaces they create. Doctors can treat only one patient at a time, Dr. Miller added, while architects who specify environmentally responsible products help safeguard the health of a far greater number of people.

McLennan, an architect himself and author of the Living Building Challenge’s chemicals Red List, empathized with designers who want to do the right thing but face some huge challenges when they try. He said he understood that the design community is daunted by the obstacle of sorting through volumes of lists, varying standards, certifications, materials evaluations, and possible greenwashing. “The reality of all of this must seem overwhelming to an architect on a deadline – you shouldn’t have to be a toxicologist to specify healthy building products,” said McClennan. “The paradigm is backwards. We shouldn’t have to go out of our way to specify healthy building materials. The opposite should be true.”

Williams pointed out that architects and specifiers have numerous resources at their disposal to ascertain which ingredients should be avoided without having to fully grasp the science. These resources include the Healthy Building Network’s Pharos Project with its comprehensive chemicals library of more than 22,000 materials profiled; the EPA BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability) 4.0 software and the S.I.N. (Substitute It Now) List, an NGO-driven project based in Sweden to speed up the transition to a toxic-free world.

Walsh reminded us that the volunteers of the Health Product Declaration Collaborative are working to remedy this challenge with their HPD Open Standard, a universal format that systemizes reporting language to enable transparent disclosure of building product content and associated health information. The HPD collaborative is comprised of a group of green building industry leaders who spent a year developing the standard, which launched last November.

A month later HKS sent an open letter to manufacturers requesting that they disclose the chemical contents in their products through the Health Product Declaration Collaborative. Since then, several other design firms have issued similar letters. The marketplace is taking notice. Manufacturers are reaching out to learn more about our goals.

In discussing concerns over VOCs, halogenated flame retardants and chlorine-based plastics, Walsh explained that “… we’re very early in the science of chemical impact, and the unknowns of the multigenerational impact of chemical exposure on people, but sunlight is the best disinfectant. We’re working toward a labeling-and-certification program that fully aligns with other systems, like the Living Building Challenge.”

While the chemical industry has been reluctant to open up, said Williams, there’s good reason for optimism. With the growing demand for greater ingredient transparency in all we consume and use from all sectors of the building industries, the voices of architects and designers, companies demanding green office space, policymakers, health and green advocates and, most important, consumers are being heard.

“I’ve had some extremely positive conversations with CEOs – there’s a noticeable market shift here and in Europe, especially in retail,” said Williams. He added that progressive companies like Google do not allow their workplaces to include substances on the LBC’s Red List.  Early on, he says his firm recognized the advantage of disclosing the chemical contents of its products.

All of us agreed that progress is being made toward improved transparency. And the power of actions taken by architects and specifiers will lead to more rapid change. A holistic approach to the problem among those pressing for the disclosure of product ingredients, consumer demand, manufacturers with credible and realistic answers from their supply chains all contribute to creating safer, cleaner products.

We as architects have the power to seek out and specify healthier building materials. It’s our fundamental responsibility as design professionals to do so. Simply put, 21^st century buildings must show a deep understanding of much more than energy conservation. Our buildings need to address the long-term wellbeing of life (human and otherwise) and the environment that supports all living creatures.

Kirk Teske, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, principal and chief sustainability officer at HKS, a design firm based in Dallas. He is president of the AIA Dallas Chapter. Find Kirk at kteske@hksinc.com, www.hksinc.com and @KirkTeske on Twitter.

Other points of view about HPD -

The furniture manufacturer.

The chairman.

The founder of the Healthy Building Network.

The sustainable healthcare design leader.

In a season of climate change, we’re plagued by more than high winds and rising waters, massive blizzards and hail storms, damaging surges and colossal floods. Though more and more of us live through these frequent disasters, we can’t seem to find ways to focus on the key question they raise about everything from protecting our coast lines and river banks, to where to develop real estate and where to find next the tax base. Distracted from these very real but hard to solve problems roiling around us, our ecological strategies remain unfocused, kept under our radar by a general lack of clear communication and public discourse. Here Kevin Shanley, FASLA, is CEO of SWA Group and a long-time resident of Houston, provokes us to think deeper than the next tweet. –SSS

Kevin Shanley, FASLA / SWA Group

Jared Green: You were recently in Washington, D.C. speaking at the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation on improving the resiliency of our coasts in an effort to protect them from increasingly damaging storms and sea-level rise brought on by climate change. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, this is an issue on the minds of just about everybody who lives on the coast. What were the lessons of this disaster?

Kevin Shanley: There are several lessons. There are real-world lessons and then “should-be” lessons. The real-world lesson is that everybody is at risk. These storms don’t just happen to Florida or Bangladesh. They can hit New York City. The storm could have hit Washington, D.C., with disastrous results. We’re not ready.

The other lesson we need to learn is quite important: we forget really quickly. Katrina happened, now eight years ago. Some structural changes were made to the levee system, but all of the really great plans to re-build New Orleans as a more sustainable community, a better community, a more integrated community came to nothing. In Houston in 2008, Hurricane Ike was a near miss. The SSPEED Center at Rice University is involved with this and has been working to make sure we don’t forget what happened with Ike. If Ike had come in, it would have been a disaster ten-fold Katrina. It didn’t, so we were lucky. It swerved about sixty miles to the east and it literally wiped the Bolivar Peninsula clean, virtually every structure on the peninsula was gone. It went up Chambers County, an agricultural community, and created huge damage, but relatively light because there’s nobody there, which is a lesson to learn.

Hurricane Ike damage at the Bolivar Peninsula / Bryan Carlile, Beck Geodetix

The challenge after Sandy is to ask ourselves what’s the next thing that’s going to distract everybody? In 2001, Houston was hit not with a hurricane but with a really amazing tropical storm called Allison. It dumped thirty inches of rain in twenty-four hours. It flooded seventy-five thousand homes and ninety five thousand cars. It was an amazing flood. It actually tracked all the way up to Canada. Post-Allison, many good things started to happen and a number actually did happen. There were bigger policy changes and changes that many of us were working on, but then in September 2001, guess what happened? The national attention, the local attention, everybody’s attention totally changed and a lot of policy-changing momentum was lost. Read more…

The American Gas Association is at it again. If you recall, about a year ago the organization pushed unsuccessfully to repeal Section 433 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.  According to that provision, all new federal buildings and older structures undergoing renovations of more than $2.5 million are required to drastically slash their use of fossil fuel. The law sets rigorous but wholly realistic (given today’s technologies) targets culminating in the total elimination of fossil fuels by 2030. As I pointed out in a blog post a year ago, it represents nothing less than the federal adoption of Edward Mazria’s 2030 Challenge.

That groundbreaking piece of legislation is currently threatened. A new energy bill is circulating through Congress called the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2013. According to durabilityanddesign.com, the proposed bill, sponsored by Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Rob Portman (R-OH), “would promote greater use of energy efficiency technology in commercial and residential buildings…”

But of course in the loopy, cynical, alternate reality of Washington, there’s a catch: the AGA is now pushing to include an amendment in the new bill, or introduce separate legislation, that would weaken or eliminate Section 433. Last week more than 350 of our leading architectural, engineering, design, consulting, and construction firms presented a letter to Congress protesting the move. It’s a veritable who’s-who of the built environment, with one conspicuous absence: the U.S. Green Buildings Council.

What gives? When asked about their glaring absence, Roger Platt, Senior Vice President Global Policy & Law at the USGBC, responded, “I wouldn’t read a thing into not being on that particular letter. We’re fully in support of all federal policies that have helped make the vision of the 2030 Challenge so consequential, including those in Section 433. We’re in continuing communication with Rep. Wyden’s office and many other members of the committee, and will be sending in our letter. This is a crucial debate. In our communications, we’re also looking at the short term consequences of the attacks on sustainability that this Senate debate has provoked, not the least of which is an effort to ban the use of LEED by the Federal government.” Read more…

Peeking into the toolkit of a digital designer you’ll find an unruly mess of apps and code, a reflection of the rapid changes now taking place in the field. From the beginning of the digital boom SOM, the architecture firm, has witnessed this development, not as a mere bystander, but as a creative partner. As early as the 1980s, the firm has been collaborating with digital specialists like IBM; back then, info modeling options were sparse and keeping up-to-date with innovations typically involved updating your AutoCAD. Fast-forward to the present, and the floodgates have been released.

Kids are now writing their own code for school projects and the position of ‘programmer’ in archi-firms has been virtually absorbed by the designers themselves. In essence, the barrier for entry into developer circles is almost zero. SOM, now in collaboration with CASE (a building information modeling consultancy based in New York City), are now faced with the question: “Why are we inventing tools that already exist?”

This collaboration has given birth to a new interface, AEC-APPS, described as “part Wikipedia, part GitHub,” which will create a library of digital tools for both users and makers alike. Additionally, there is also a strong social component that makes it easier to find the perfect tool, and begins to outline the collaborative mentality among the BIM community, much like that of contemporary programmers. Through crowd sourcing from members, users not only stay informed but also feed a community voice that, if loud enough, could sway software vendors to the demand of the users.

Read more…

Following an “introduction” in parts 1 and 2 were a series of posts exploring the evolutionary “origins” of our responses to built environments and then, more specifically, “The Mind that Encounters Architecture.” This next series explores what happens in “the body that responds.”

In their innovative study, Body, Memory, and Architecture, architects Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore spell out how the experience of architecture originates as a body’s responses – how architecture is, in a sense, a “body-centered” art. They distill our enormously complex human nature into convincing insights, and the ways they trace out their significance make their insights immediately available to apply in practice.  The basic ideas, once they have been stated, may seem simple and obvious—fact, they have been exploited brilliantly by artists, designers, and critics.  Yet the power of the insights to steer designs into more satisfying, humane environments – from grand monuments to livable communities – is more often mysteriously neglected.

This is a mystery to me because generations of educators and students have had readily available Geoffrey Scott’s extraordinary The Architecture of Humanism.  The first of many popular editions was published in 1914.

The Architecture of Humanism

In clear and persuasive language, Scott describes the pleasure, the “delight,” we can take in the art of architecture – the line, mass, space, and coherence of the form itself – as we transcribe the compositions of physical contours “into terms of ourselves and ourselves into terms of architecture.”

“The whole of architecture is,” Scott says “invested by us with human movement and human moods, given clarity and value by our intellect.”  And he summarizes this way:  “The humanist instinct looks in the world for physical conditions that are related to our own. For movements which are like those we enjoy, for resistances that resemble those that can support us, for a setting where we should be neither lost nor thwarted.  It looks, therefore, for certain masses, lines and spaces, and tends to create them and recognize their fitness when created.  And, by our instinctive imitation of what we see, their seeming fitness becomes our real delight.”  This, he says, is “the natural [spontaneous] way of receiving and interpreting what we see… This is the humanism of architecture.”

He describes how, without conscious effort, we follow lines of paths and sculptural gestures, tracing out with moving eyes their orientation, extension, and interpenetration until resolved.  And, within our bodies, we sense the movement as an eloquent line “speaks to us.”  And mass, its contours and dimensions in light and shade, is sensed – like a human body – in terms of its unity, stability, and proportions, and at the same time its pressing weight, balance, and support, as if they were forces we feel acting on ourselves.  Likewise, the configuration of spaces are sensed in terms of the body’s potential movement or repose – open-ended or enclosed and secure – with the resulting clarity and pleasure, or contradiction and confusion. Read more…

In our last Green Team post, we discussed the challenges brought on by the frequently slow pace of construction and the benefits of installing temporary landscapes during the waiting period. Here, we continue our commentary about time and the landscape, focusing on the challenges of matching contemporary materials and furnishings to historic sites.

Landscapes do not exist in isolation. They occupy a very specific spatial context. The materials of a landscape—furniture, paving, lighting, plants, etc.—are in constant conversation with their environs. So, the process of material selection typically requires that a landscape architect look beyond the project’s boundaries to understand how the materials will be integrated into the larger context. Sometimes, we want a material to fit in. At other times, we want it to stand out or contrast with the surroundings. A sensitive approach to material selection that allows for the preservation of a site’s character while modernizing other design features is often required when working on historic locales.

Contrary to what you might believe, contemporary furnishings can sometimes blend seamlessly with historic elements. This was true for our project at St. John the Divine, a massive and unfinished 1892 gothic cathedral in New York City. Our modern day challenge was to design a playground adjacent to this cathedral.

Children’s play equipment is typically bright, showy, and clunky, made to appeal to kids. So it may seem that playground equipment has little in common aesthetically with a gothic cathedral, but we argue that they actually share structural similarities—the steel frame of the play equipment and the buttresses and arches of the church.

The play equipment in the foreground reflects the gothic architecture of the adjacent cathedral while providing multi-faceted climbing surfaces.  Photo: Mathews Nielsen

Our design team worked with a playground equipment manufacturer to create clean, minimalist play pieces, their forms echoing the gothic arches, while providing plenty of child-friendly interactive forms and surfaces. The use of a single dark color created harmony between the equipment and the cathedral. This design element was extended to the fence at the perimeter of the play yard, enhancing the impression that both elements look like they belong. Read more…

The Bruner Foundation team wrapped up our site visits to the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence finalists with a trip to The Steel Yard in Providence, Rhode Island. Submitted by Klopfer Martin Design Group, the Steel Yard is an ongoing redevelopment of an historic steel fabrication facility into a campus for arts education, workforce training, and small-scale manufacturing.

The landscaped courtyard—“The Yard”—provides space for fabrication and events.  Photograph: The Steel Yard

Along with Congo Street Initiative and Inspiration Kitchens, the Steel Yard incorporates the rehabilitation of existing buildings and the use of recycled materials; like Via Verde and Louisville Waterfront Park, it is a brownfield site. The unseasonably cold weather we’ve experienced on most of our trips persisted during our visit to Providence. While the outdoor courtyard was quiet, indoors, people were occupied with creative metalworking and craft making while we met with staff, board members, program partners, community representatives, and funders from the Steel Yard.

Welding classes and workshops are offered. Photograph: Bruner Foundation

Located in Providence’s Industrial Valley along the Woonasquatucket River just west of downtown, the Steel Yard occupies the site of Providence Iron and Steel Company, a 100-year old business that closed in 2001.The property was purchased by two graduates of Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), who lived in the adjoining Monohasset Mill artists’ live/work complex. The 3.5-acre site, with its gantry cranes and rough brick and metal buildings, became an ad hoc community and gathering space for people interested in creative, industrial arts. Read more…

I recently learned about Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s concept, “soft fascination.” According to the Kaplans, environmental psychologists, “Experiencing environments that encourage soft fascination provides opportunities to think through situations and make decisions; to reflect on prior experiences and make sense of them; and to develop ideas that can be implemented in the workplace or in personal life.” The environments they mention can usually be found in nature. This is precisely what artist and designer Michele Oka Doner does. She immerses herself in the natural world and comes back with questions and answers that fuel her creations. Case in point is her new design for a landmark pavilion in the recently incorporated City of Doral, in Miami-Dade County.

Pavillion Elevation. Rendering by Local Office Landscape Architecture

A Miami Beach native whose inspiration is heavily influenced by her city’s abundance of nature, be it from the ocean or the flora, Oka Doner has left her mark on her home town, in projects like “Walk on the Beach,” the mile long floor installation that greets passengers at Miami International Airport.

When Armando Codina who, with his daughter Ana, is developing the Downtown Doral project, went looking for something that would make a statement about the new independent municipality, he was searching something that “would give it a heart.” Having chosen Oka Doner, he says, “She was the natural artist to do something special in our new city, so the selection was easy,” Codina explains. “Michele is a world-renowned artist whose roots are very much a part of the history of Miami–Dade, having grown up in Miami Beach,” he adds. Read more…