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.

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…

News earlier this week that New York’s venerable Cooper Union would begin charging tuition for the first time in more than a century was met with howls of predictable outrage and a good deal of genuine sadness. Something important is being lost.

But the announcement, as distressing as it was, raises a whole bunch of questions. The first one, obviously, is: why now? The school points to its $12-million deficit. But this painful decision follows ten years of relentless deal making by the school: Cooper leased the empty parking lot on Astor Place for the garish Gwathmey Siegel-designed condos; it built a $111-million engineering building, designed by Morphosis; and entered into a real estate scheme that made way for the Fumiko Maki-designed colossus going up on Third Avenue. During more than a decade of wheeling and dealing, it’s safe to assume that a fair amount of money changed hands.To paraphrase Clara Peller: Where’s the money?

Were all of these deals bad ones for the school? (Let’s not forget: Cooper owns the land underneath the Chrysler Building.) Did the school build glitzy high-profile architecture it couldn’t afford? It claims that the new facilities are not related to the push for tuition, but given the size and expense of running them, that seems dubious.

Ariel Kaminer reported in the New York Times that Cooper is shelling out $10-million a year in “payments on a $175 million loan the school took out a few years ago, in part so that it could invest money in the stock market.” Faculty and students are pressing the school for a full, fiscal accounting. They need to know: Is the end of free tuition really the school’s only option? Or just the most expedient?

The author and urbanist Daniel Brook has a fascinating new book out entitled A History of Future Cities. In it he examines three historic “instant” cities—Mumbai (Bombay), Shanghai, and St. Petersburg—along with that over-the-top 21^st century newcomer, Dubai. He looks at the economics, culture, architecture, and political forces that formed these cities; all of them grew rapidly, exploding, seemingly overnight.  Brook’s smart take works on two levels—as a kind of cautionary tale for today’s world and a helpful reminder that this phenomenon is not entirely new. The author will speak at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. on April 15 and at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on April 18^th.  Recently I traded email questions with the New Orleans-based writer. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Martin C. Pedersen: How did the idea for the book evolve?

Daniel Brook: The spark for the book came when I went to Mumbai for the first time, in 2005. It immediately reminded me of St. Petersburg, where I’d been previously, both in its architectural mimicry of Western Europe and in the overt attempt of its people to be Western-oriented cosmopolitans. The Shanghai piece came to me after a fortuitous conversation with the translator who guided me around a Southern California-themed gated community on the outskirts of Beijing, called Orange County. She told me she couldn’t understand why American readers would be interested in something as mundane as this suburban subdivision, so I told her, deadpan, that I thought American readers would be quite surprised to learn there’s a Southern California-themed gated community near the Beijing airport. “Yeah, that’s more of a Shanghai thing,” she replied. “They’ve been doing this down there for a hundred years.” Sure enough, when I read up on Shanghai, she was right. And when I got there, in 2009, I ended up visiting a subdivision called Columbia Circle that was built by an American real estate developer in the 1920s. It looked a lot like where I grew up on Long Island, which makes sense since that too was built by American real estate developers in the 1920s. I also wanted a new global city just beginning this process today, so I added Dubai, which is the most famous and dramatic of them. Read more…

The New Republic recently posted a piece on Make It Right entitled “If You Rebuild It, They Might Not Come,” accompanied by the provocative, Google-friendly subhead: “Brad Pitt’s beautiful houses are a drag on New Orleans.” The author, Lydia DePillis, argues that the project, however well meaning, has diverted resources that could be better spent in other parts of the city.

There are a number of things about this piece that really bugged me as an editor (it’s sloppy and unsourced early on, for one, and ends with a completely unsupported conclusion, which I’ll get to later on). But first I’d like to concentrate on the central premise: that Pitt’s 90 (and counting) Make It Right houses have failed to revive the Lower Ninth, which according to DePillis, remains “a largely barren moonscape.”

The news hook for the piece—as best as I can discern (maybe DePillis cashed in miles for a trip to New Orleans)—was the not-so-recent announcement by Make It Right that it would open up eligibility for houses to people “who didn’t live in the neighborhood prior to Katrina.” DePillis says there’s a (cliché alert) “Catch-22” to the announcement, since there is no real neighborhood surrounding the “futuristic” houses. (What exactly is a “futuristic” house?) No stores, no services, not even a fast food restaurant. None of this is news, and much of it is only partially true.

I don’t know how much time DePillis spent in the Lower Ninth reporting the piece. Was it her first time? First time in a few years? If so, then I can understand how she might survey the vast, desolate sections of the neighborhood, and come to the wrong conclusion. But, if I can resort to a couple of clichés of my own, here’s the real scoop: it might not look like it to the casual observer, or to the visiting out-of-town journalist, but something is stirring in the Lower Ninth. DePillis cited the 2010 census figures for the neighborhood—“2842 (down from 14,000 in 2000)”—but she either ignored or just plain missed the most obvious development. And it’s one I see on a weekly basis: the neighborhood is re-populating.

Homes built by Make It Right. May 2, 2012. Photo: makeitright.org

It might not look like it to her, but the numbers clearly bear it out. According to Ben Horwitz, a demographer with the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center http://www.gnocdc.org/, “Our data on households actively receiving mail shows that there were 1,271 households receiving mail in July 2010 and that has increased 27.8% to 1,624 households receiving mail in July 2012. While we do not know the household size, it is reasonable to assume that the population in the Lower Ninth Ward grew at a relatively similar rate.” Read more…

When we started planning our “creative process” issue, it became obvious that we’d use the opportunity to circle back to Steven Holl, whose watercolors we’ve featured in the past and remain absolutely central to his process. Holl has published two books of watercolors, Written in Water (Lars Müller, 2002) and Scale (Lars Müller, 2012), and loves talking the role they play for him. In fact, the connection between initial drawing and completed building is often remarkably strong. The AIA 2012 Gold Medal-winning architect is an utterly disarming interview (it feels like you’re having drinks with him at a bar instead of conducting a formal inquisition). Our conversation formed the basis for the recent magazine article. An edited version follows:

Martin C. Pedersen: Your watercolors are famous. Are they always the first gesture on a project?

Steven Holl: Yes. And I have thousands of them. Do you know how many watercolors I have?

MCP: I have no idea.

SH: More than 10,000. I have these boxes over my desk. They go all the way back to 1977.

MCP: How did that start?

SH: I have always drawn. Drawing is central to architecture. I used to do pencil drawings. Around 1979 I streamlined it to the 5-by-7 watercolors. I decided to fix that format so that I could always have my sketches available.

MCP: Do you draw when you’re travelling?

SH: Yes. Every day. I did three drawings this morning between six and nine. I worked on three different things. I’m working on a big project in Dongguan, China. And yesterday we changed the entire concept. And you know what? A five-by-seven-inch watercolor pad will hold 5.5 million square feet. Read more…

Smog in Beijing, China

The recent news that China would impose a modest carbon tax in 2015 had me thinking about that country’s global environmental role. Up to this point, despite the various “eco-cities” in development there, that role has largely been relegated to poster-child-for-ecological- degradation. But here’s a perverse, unsettling, weirdly paradoxical thought: the political regime in China—autocratic, brutal, corrupt, nominally Communist, and quasi-oligarchic—may hold the key to the earth’s survival. A couple of years ago I asked the environmental activist and author Paul Hawken if a rapidly modernizing China would drag us off the cliff or maybe, eventually, lead us across the river:

“Although China’s form of governance is unacceptable and will bite it in the end, it can adapt faster to ecological exigencies than we can. They may be building coal-fired power plants at a blistering pace, but they do not have leaders who are skeptical of science, deny climatology, or doubt evolution.”

It’s true. Whether we want to admit or not, China has the size, the growing wealth, and (pardon the euphemism) the “political will” capable of leading us to a cleaner, greener future. While we’re likely to bicker, endlessly, the leaders of China possess the power to decree. As Americans, of course, we in different contexts abhor that power. But undemocratic China is likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future (the last thing we want, in fact, is an unstable China). Their ability to unilaterally decide, however flawed and ugly, does offer hope for rapid progress on the environment front. A carbon-neutral China by 2030?  It could conceivably happen if the exceedingly small circle of men who run that country of 1.5 billion decided: Enough is enough—even we can’t breathe! So, a note to China’s autocratic leaders: more environmental decrees, please (and while you’re at it, lighten up on the dissidents).

My Game Changers profile on Edward Mazria focused on the nature of the architect’s activism. How does an organization of less than five full-time employees have such a big impact? Ed’s genius was in reframing the issue of climate change as a design problem, with easily defined goals (not easy to achieve goals, but with a clear path forward). Just as important, Mazria’s group, Architecture 2030 encourages organizations to take ownership of the issue. There are no better examples than the 2030 Districts popping up all over the country. Each is a local response to a global problem. Recently I talked to Brian Geller, executive director of the Seattle 2030 District about the birth of his organization and the way forward.

Brian Geller, executive director of Seattle 2030 District

Martin C. Pedersen: Ed Mazria calls his group, Architecture 2030 a “seeding organization.” Your effort in Seattle is certainly a good example of that.
Brian Geller: It’s true. It’s interesting to note that when your “Architects Pollute” issue came out in 2003, I was in architecture school in New York, and it was something I vividly remember. That story had a big impact on me, on deciding where I wanted to go with my career.

MCP: How did the Seattle 2030 district begin?
BG: It started about three years ago. I was working as a sustainability specialist at ZGF Architects. I was working at the Seattle office. Bob Zimmerman, the managing partner of the office, had just come back from a conference in Chicago and was telling me about this de-carbonization study that Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill had worked on. Bob said: “It sounds fascinating. I’m surprised that Seattle hasn’t undertaken something like that.” I took that little nugget back to my desk and was thinking it over. It sounded like a great idea. But I thought that if we wanted to do something like that here, it seemed that a study was not the right approach. So I made this map. I started with Seattle’s steam distribution map. We’ve got a small district steam utility here in downtown. They were in the process of building a biomass boiler that would reduce the carbon footprint of their entire operations by 50 percent, and the heating-related carbon footprint of the two hundred buildings attached to them by half as well. There was other great stuff going on, too. There were a number of large building owners undertaking portfolio-wide certification, putting together important tenant engagement programs. The city was about to pass a disclosure ordinance, requiring building owners to benchmark their properties and disclose some of the data to the city. All of this stuff was happening, but it was happening somewhat siloed. So I took their map, put on the ten largest property owners and managers that I knew downtown, who were all doing cool things, and went to a few people in the city, and other architects and engineers, and said, “Look, this is what they’re doing in Chicago. They’re doing a study. But if we did something like this here, and instead of doing a study, invited these people on this map in, we would cover a lot of downtown. We could get all of these large entities measuring their progress the same way, united around one set of goals.” I told them, “You’ll get a lot farther together than you would on your own.” They’d learn a lot from each other. They wouldn’t be duplicating efforts. Hopefully, they’d be generating more work for everybody in the city. People liked the idea.

Read more…

In the course of reporting my piece on Edward Mazria, I had a very interesting conversation with Andrew C. Revkin, for years an environmental reporter for the New York Times. Today he writes the paper’s Dot Earth Blog and also teaches at Pace University. A big admirer of Mazria, Revkin has an altogether clear-eyed view of the environmental road ahead. An edited version of our talk follows:

Martin C. Pedersen: First off, what’s your role at Pace?

Andrew C. Revkin: I am Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at the Academy for Applied Environmental Studies.  And I co-teach three courses. One is a new course I’ve launched called Blogging a Better Planet. In the spring I co-teach a documentary production course, where we do films on sustainability topics, and an environmental science communication course.

MCP: You’ve been aware of Ed’ Mazria’s role in the environmental movement for a while. How would you characterize it?

ACR: His case—and it’s a good and simple one—is that buildings really matter. He’s trying to shift how we design them, and how we design architects, as well.

MCP: How does his advocacy differ from someone like Bill McKibben http://www.350.org/?

ACR: I think Ed is focusing on things that are imminently more doable. Bill is very good about building movements around numbers, but has not adequately articulated how you get there. In other words, besides yelling at fossil fuel companies. That may be something that needs to be done, but it’s not a path that will actually change a lot of things. Ed is working in a space where there’s a lot to be done, both on existing structures and on new buildings. There’s huge potential to make big gains.

Read more…

Photo by John Goodman

Ada Louise Huxtable wrote a blistering critique of the New York Public Library’s renovation plans in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. For fans of Huxtable and critics of the plan, it is a glorious evisceration: sharp, analytic, well-grounded in the history of both the institution and the glorious building itself. The piece reminded me of Phillip Lopate’s January 2006 essay for us, which declared Huxtable our finest architecture critic. What’s remarkable about yesterday’s piece—and hopeful for all of us youngsters in our 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s—is this truth: Lopate’s declaration still applies, seven years later. Huxtable may not write as often as she used to, but it’s hard, if not impossible, to detect any diminution of her clarity, grace and power.

For those of you who missed it, Mark’s Lamster’s excellent cover story on libraries appeared in our October 2012 issue.