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…

From LEED, the Cool Roof Rating Council, the ENERGY STAR program, all the way up to the U.S. Department of Energy, there is widespread belief that white reflective roofing systems, even on buildings in northern cities like New York and Chicago, are more efficient and cost-effective than dark roofing.

Based on studies done at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, for the past 15 years white roofing systems have been the system of choice because it was believed that they also reduce global warming and the “heat island effect,” in which dark-colored building materials raise the ambient temperature in urban areas by a few degrees in summer.

But architects, engineers, building owners, and roof system designers, who were not consulted on the Lawrence Berkeley studies, are finding that reflective membranes are not always a panacea for energy savings. Moreover, a study done at Stanford University, which uses the latest advances in atmospheric computer modeling, shows that white roofs may actually increase, not decrease, the Earth’s temperature. White roof membranes have high reflectivity that directs heat upward into the atmosphere and then mixes with black and brown soot particles, which are thought to contribute to global warming.

Other studies show that white roofs increase average space heating use more than they decrease average air conditioning use in northern climates. Since owners have to spend more money heating their buildings with a white roof, they must consume more natural resources, thus increasing global warming. Read more…

Entrance:  As visitors enter the new Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, they will be surrounded by lush landscaping that is built into the structure itself. The 250,000 square-foot complex is intended to act as a demonstration of ecological and sustainability principle, with the building harnessing energy from water, sun, wind and even museum visitors to power exhibits and conserve resources.

“There is no Plan B, because there is no Planet B,” said UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon at Stanford University earlier this year. In the decades since we first glimpsed Earth suspended in space and seemingly without boundaries, we’ve been learning to become aware of the fragility of life. We now know that the planet can quite happily continue without us. Bacteria and probably cockroaches will survive most disasters, but with a population of 7 billion and growing, it’s not so evident that our species can do the same.

Promenade: The open plaza of the new Patricia and Philip Frost Museum of Science will lead visitors to the Energy Playground and the adjacent Jorge M. Perez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County.

Life depends on energy for every necessary exchange. At each stage of that exchange, some energy is lost as heat or as increased disorder or entropy. Most of this energy comes from the sun. Life depends on how well we manage this exchange.

We live in that very narrow interface where conditions are hospitable to human life and, as the sun slowly runs out of energy; if we waste it, we hasten our demise. Of course, in geological terms, this is a long way off. We can, however, address the issues here and now and see what we can do to make our planet a great place for more of us to live – hence the importance of earth sciences.

Evening signage: At night, the new Museum of Science will be illuminated with various colors of light and signage, reflected on the planetarium and building structure.

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We had modest goals when we first took on the “ideas competition” to design the office building of the future. All we wanted was to use the tight deadline—the discipline and structure that comes with a competition—to organize our ideas about the future of office buildings. In the beginning we saw this as a way to engage in an internal debate about a myriad of related topics. We began as we always do, asking many questions. This time, though, we went beyond our usual inquiry:  Will there even be office buildings in the future?  How will people want and need to work in an office 15 or 20 years from now?  What impact will technology have on design and engineering?  But we never once asked, “What will it look like?”

As principals, we calculate the risk against the rewards for our architecture practice. Naively, we guessed that this project would involve a few weeks of work for those staff members who weren’t fully employed on other projects. Our economic risk would be minimal. Our reward would be a 10-minute presentation to show our developer clients, inspiring their thinking about office buildings. With no clear vision of what could happen, we nevertheless pushed our team to reach for something beyond what they already knew.  If we were going to enter this competition, then we were in it to win. Go big or go home.

The effect on the office was profound. We took the opportunity to look over the horizon, unfettered by the normal project restrictions and, in the process, energized everyone. Suddenly they all wanted to get involved. We engaged the best engineers to contribute their ideas. We decided to do a video (which we’d never done before).  Most importantly, we would allow ourselves to dream. Suddenly the risk expanded far beyond a monetary risk. Now we were taking an emotional risk as well, pouring our hearts and minds into a collaborative effort and then, perhaps, ending up being disappointed with the outcome. When we announced to the office, over champagne, that we had been named one of four winners nationally, everyone cheered!

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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.

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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.

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Interior lighting has a profound influence on our psychological and physiological processes, so say researchers. Light affects our hormonal and chemical balance, sleep patterns, productivity, and mood. With the incandescent bulb on the verge of extinction and the global push for energy efficiency, we continue to seek environmentally friendly lighting alternatives. But some new lighting technologies, such as the CFL bulb, contain mercury and other hazardous chemicals while they emit UV radiation, which could pose long-term health risks including cancer, depression, diabetes, and fatigue. As we spend some 90 percent of our time indoors, we need to find other design alternatives that promote a healthy interior and protect the environment.

Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese art and science, can help. The practice suggests that the strategic placement of light sources in a room can improve our health and wellbeing. The proper distribution of electromagnetic radiation transmitted by light is fundamental and Feng Shui strives to enhance quality of life by channeling positive (Qi) energy to create a perfectly balanced environment. In addition, the shape, material, and color temperature of a lighting fixture should be carefully considered in order to promote wellness. I designed the fixtures in this blog, following by Feng Shui principles, to counteract some of the most common illnesses that affect millions each year.

Depression Lamp Sketch and Photo

With an estimated 19 million Americans diagnosed with depression, an accent lamp may be ideal to counteract this psychological disorder as it focuses energy in a specific area of the room. The lamp would feature two nodes of linen burlap fabric encased in glass and connected by a stainless steel frame, in order to boost self-confidence and mental strength. According to Feng Shui, glass exhibits properties of slow, sinking “water” energy, also seen in those who are depressed. When glass is used in conjunction with linen fabric and a 4,000K LED lamp, the glass functions to cool down anger and stress. The north side of the living room and the southeast corner of the bedroom are optimal locations to achieve balance and reduce exposure to electromagnetic energy. Read more…

Here is a simple idea: Hoist up a 20 pound bag of soil or rocks and let gravity’s pull turn that bag into a source of energy— energy enough to produce illumination.

Gravity Light is taking this idea and using it to solve a problem: the lack of electricity and its light in developing countries. In industrialized countries, we take illumination for granted. The opportunities that come with lighting up the night—reading, conversations, doing homework— could easily be encouraged with some smart design and can have profound implications for quality of life, especially in education.

GravityLight: lighting for the developing countries.

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Three years ago, faculty and students from three schools came together to form the Empowerhouse Collaborative. The participants—Parsons The New School for Design; the Milano School for International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at The New School; and Stevens Institute of Technology—joined forces to compete in the US Department of Energy 2011 Solar Decathlon. We wanted to change the way affordable housing is designed and developed.

This December 4th we realized our goal, joining Habitat for Humanity of Washington, D.C. (DC Habitat) and the D.C. government to celebrate the dedication of Empowerhouse, a new home for two local families in the Deanwood neighborhood of Washington. This was also a celebration of a series of firsts in the district: the first net-zero-site, the first Passive House, and one of the first low-impact residential developments.

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