Going global with green design
Oregon's builders, architects and engineers are urged to share successes and spread the sustainability gospel
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
DYLAN RIVERA
The Oregonian
Architects, developers and engineers in the Portland area have been trying to out-green each other for many years.
How do they know who is tops in sustainability among firms in the building industry? The most widely used measuring stick is the U.S. Green Building Council's system, known as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED. The system provides third-party certification for earth-friendly features in buildings and offers an accreditation that gives professionals six letters after their names -- LEED AP -- showing the world they've studied the LEED system.
Rick Fedrizzi, president of the U.S. Green Building Council, came to Portland last week and declared Gerding Edlen Development Co. the nation's most prolific green builder. He also honored Oregon Health & Science University's first South Waterfront building for its environmental achievements as a platinum LEED rating, the highest level.
He sang Portland's praises, but also, in an interview with The Oregonian, challenged the community to expand its influence. Here are excerpts, edited for length and clarity:
In Portland and Oregon, the development industry understands that we have more LEED certified buildings per capita than almost anywhere in the country; we have as many or more LEED accredited professionals as anywhere in the country. Now what? What does that achieve for us locally?
It adds the burden of responsibility to your shoulders in an immense way.
As early adopters and leaders in this arena, it is a moral responsibility for you to share that information with the rest of the world.
And we're seeing that. The fact that I walk into a session in Beijing and see a Brewery Blocks slide on the wall . . . they want to tell people what is happening in cities like Portland.
That transfer of information should be widely given away.
Would you like to see LEED accredited professionals in Portland go beyond platinum (top-rated) buildings?
Yes, well part of Cascadia (Cascadia Region Green Building Council) is developing the Living Building program. It's basically a zero-energy building with zero water. It's a magnificent idea they're developing.
Taking that to that next level and looking at what is out there in the future is a good thing. But what's most necessary for the world right now is to take what you've learned and through universities, through the Internet, through speaking engagements, through anything that you can . . . take that collected wisdom and transfer it across borders.
You were in China recently. How serious are they about developing, not the way America did, but using the green building method America's talking about now?
The ministry of construction is very serious about it. However, they're building so fast and so furious, for a number of reasons. The amount of globalization that's affecting their economy, the number of people moving to their cities every year. . . . Two New York Cities are popping up in China every year.
It's forcing them on this furious path to complete buildings.
So the challenge is to change their standards as they build?
The Department of Energy had sent a couple of people to work on the design of the Olympic Village. Even though they are not calculating LEED for new construction for their 47 buildings for housing, every one is probably at LEED Silver right now and with some coaxing could get to LEED Gold.
They never even planned to go that direction. They just wanted the best buildings. And they have a plan for use of the buildings after the Olympics.
They're not being certified. There's a consultant from Lawrence Berkeley Lab (at the University of California at Berkeley) who's been working with them. Should they choose to go through the rating process in a LEED-Existing Building process, they probably would very easily reach LEED Silver or Gold.
A lot of developers, even urban condo developers who you might assume are doing LEED projects, aren't. They say they're not registering with LEED even though they're doing everything LEED would require, in part because it can cost $100,000 to produce the documentation you require. How can you address those concerns?
If someone says "I did it anyway," I'd say, "Show me the proof."
I'm not going to go to a heart surgeon who says, "You know, I went through 11 years of studies at Yale, I just didn't stick around for the degree, I didn't think it was necessary." Do I want that heart surgeon opening me up?
As a consumer, if I don't have that information, I can't make an informed decision. If you can't measure it, then in fact you have nothing to tell me.
The fee is very low. One is for energy modeling -- which says exactly how the building is going to perform -- and the second fee is building commissioning, which means someone went through and said the filters and the motors and everything is working exactly as they say they are. So not only do you get what you pay for, but the building performs as it was stated to perform.
In an office building, a lack of commissioning can produce sick building syndrome -- it can be irritating, a lot of cold, a lot of flu. In a hospital, if you don't do commissioning, you can kill people.
If you're taking return air from the emergency room and dumping it into an operating room, you have the ability to infect great numbers of people and harm humans.
How quickly is Portland going to be passed by Los Angeles and New York, as design firms there have thousands of professionals LEED-accredited and we have a small number of design firms here, by sheer size of population and construction volume?
It's terrible because we oftentimes judge our success in numbers, as if quantity is the important metric.
You know what nobody's going to get right, certainly cities like Los Angeles aren't going to get right for a very long time, is the sense of place. There is no sense of place in Los Angeles except Santa Monica. A real sense of place is what's necessary.
We have to chop up these massive cities and turn them into communities where people know each other, where children can ride their bikes and women can walk their babies in carriages without fear of cars and traffic and pollution.
In 30 to 50 years you'll probably close your borders so people won't keep moving in here, because you'll have a sense of place that everybody wants.
As our lives become more complex and more confused, we're all looking for that place where our children can grow up with a little bit of what we had as kids, where there's this feeling of connectedness.
Cities like Portland -- in the United States, you could count maybe five of them that have such a strong connection to those ideals -- they're guaranteed a path to success in that area, whereas many cities will have to make mistakes.
I don't know how it happened here. Someone with vision.
Dylan Rivera: 503-221-8532,
dylanrivera@news.oregonian.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/o...450.xml&coll=7
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