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…

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…

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.

When we secured an interview with Supreme Court justice Stephen G. Breyer, we decided to take full advantage of it. So, in September, in addition to dragging along our photographer, Webb Chappell, to the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse in Boston, Susan Szenasy and I also brought a  videographer to film it. We weren’t entirely sure how we would use the resulting footage, but it seemed like an opportunity too good to pass up.

Metropolis Interviews: Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer from Metropolis magazine on Vimeo.

We were in Boston for two reasons. Breyer has an office at the Moakley Courthouse and is usually there when the Supreme Court is not in session. Prior to being nominated to the high court, he served as an appeals judge in Boston and played a leading role in the architect selection process for the courthouse (the eventual winner, Pei Cobb Freed).

As it turns out, Breyer was an incredibly gracious host, greeting us downstairs in the rotunda, even buying the assembled crew coffee from the cafeteria. We spoke for an hour in his office, and then Breyer invited his former colleague, Judge Douglas P. Woodlocke, to accompany us on a tour of the building. Our intrepid videographer, Ken Richardson, shot as much of the courthouse as our limited schedule allowed, and then our editor, Julie Rossman, did a wonderful job of taking those images and weaving them into a compelling whole. Justice Breyer’s passion for the Constitution, for the importance of architecture in the public realm, and for good design, is palpable.

The industrial designer Dan Sturges may have more perspective on electric cars than anyone in the automotive industry. He began working on what he calls “small local vehicles” as early as 1988. He founded trans2 in 1991 and four years later commercially introduced the first “neighborhood electric vehicle (NEV).” Given this long history, Sturges is a firm believer in the potential of EVs, as well as an utter realist. Currently a faculty member of the graduate transportation and design program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he is also collaborating with Clean Tech Los Angeles to create a transportation think-tank modeled on the MIT Media Lab. An edited version of our far-ranging talk (in preparation for my story on BMW in the October issue of Metropolis) follows:

Martin C. Pedersen: Some sort of mainstreaming of electric vehicles seems to be occurring. You’ve been working on and studying them for a while now. From your perspective, is that what’s happening?

Dan Sturges: Yes. Every major car manufacturer has some type of electric car program either commercially available or in development. Obviously there are numerous ways these products can be designed. You see a lot of range, from pure electric vehicles to plug in hybrids. I think a lot of people believe electric drive is certainly part of our future. The question is, what technology is the winner in that space? Is it one of those that I mentioned, or is it fuel cells?

Read more…

For my recent story on BMW’s new i-3 electric car, I interviewed a number of transportation experts, including the legendary (and altogether charming) industrial designer Don Norman, who as it turned out currently serves as a consultant to the German automaker. Norman, the author of eight books and more academic papers than even he can count, was limited in what he could talk about concerning his client, but he did offer some fascinating insights into the future of cars and urban mobility:

Martin C. Pedersen: You consult for a number of companies, including BMW. What are you working on these days?

Don Norman: Obviously, I’m not allowed to talk a lot about what I do for BMW, but I can say that I’m working on electric vehicles with them, mostly in Munich, and a little bit in Mountain View, California, where they have a technology center. We’re working on a whole bunch of concepts. They’re also pulling me into issues involving today’s vehicles. I’ll tell you one of the big issues that they’re faced with—and it’s not a secret. All of the companies have this problem: cars are getting too complex. People can’t figure them out. I did a review for one of the car magazines. They brought a Ford to my house with the new Microsoft control system. We sat and reviewed it. It was overwhelming. We couldn’t figure out how to get half of the stuff to work. The same goes with BMW. They loaned me a new 5-series car. The guy sits down with me and we go over every single component of the car. Everything seemed sensible and straightforward, but it took between 30 and 40 minutes. When he left, I couldn’t remember anything. In fact I couldn’t even start the engine.

MCP: Your role, as they keep cramming more technology into these cars, is to help simplify them?

DN: We’re looking at a lot of things. The electric vehicle (EV) raises special questions. One of the main issues is range anxiety. BMW launched the Mini Cooper series two years ago. They produced 500 electric models and they asked UC Davis to do a study. Most of the drivers ended up loving the car. They had all sorts of concerns that turned out not to be true, especially about range.

Read more…

A couple of weeks ago we received news that Lance Hosey, a former director with William McDonough + Partners and author of a new book, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (Island Press), had been named chief sustainability officer at RTKL, the global architecture, planning, and design firm. We wondered: what is a chief sustainability officer? So we reached out to Hosey, who was travelling in Asia, and asked him about his new job, the future of sustainable architecture, and his first impressions of China.

Martin C. Pedersen: You were just named chief sustainability officer for RTKL. What does that mean exactly?

Lance Hosey: I’m RTKL’s first CSO, a position we defined to signal the strategic importance of sustainability. Last year, market watcher Ellen Weinreb put out a study on the emergence of this role in a variety of industries (“CSO Back Story”). The first CSO appointed to a publically traded company was at DuPont just eight years ago, and there still are fewer than 30. So this is a nascent position in business, and there is little consistency in how it’s defined, but it demonstrates the evolution of sustainability from an ad hoc practice adopted informally among project managers to a more strategic policy among senior management. I believe I’m just the second CSO in a large architecture firm, and my role at RTKL is to help develop ways to stimulate more innovation in all of our work.

MCP: What did you find attractive about the position?

LH: With a thousand people in a dozen offices on three continents and millions of square feet under construction every year, RTKL represents enormous leverage on the marketplace and a powerful platform to promote change. With even modest improvements in the performance of our projects, we can have a significant positive impact on the built environment. We plan to take full advantage of this position by martialing RTKL’s considerable talent, opportunities, and resources in new directions. Architects don’t necessarily think of size as an advantage, but with hundreds of people exploring new ideas, the potential rate of innovation can be astounding.

Read more…