Benchmarks in Sustainability 1992: EPA launches Energy Star program, aimed at reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
1998: U.S. Green Building Council launches LEED Pilot Program (later renamed LEED-NC Version 1.0).
2000: Green Globes for Existing Buildings launched in Canada; the Green Building Initiative(GBI) acquires the rights to distribute Green Globes in the United States four years later.
2002: First edition of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart.
2005: LEED-NC Version 2.2 effective; GBI is first green building organization to be accredited as a standards developer by American National Standards Institute.
2006: Architecture 2030 Challenge issued; An Inconvenient Truth released.
2007: ASHRAE Standard 90.1 2007 released; An Inconvenient Truth wins Academy Award; Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize; Energy Independence and Security Act signed, requires all new and renovated federal buildings to reduce fossil fuel use by 55 percent (from 2003 levels) by 2010 and to be carbon neutral by 2030.
2009: LEED for New Construction and Major Renovation 2009 effective.
2010: Architecture 2030 goal: All new buildings and major renovations have reduced fossil fuel consumption by 50 percent.
2018: Al Gore’s goal: 100 percent of electricity is produced from renewable energy and carbon-free sources.
2030: Architecture 2030 goal: All new buildings are carbon neutral.
Leading the Academy
Vivian Loftness joined the Carnegie Mellon Faculty in 1981. “One of the main goals of my work is proving that quality buildings have positive outcomes in terms of energy, sustainability, health productivity,” she says. Loftness headed the school of architecture from 1994 to 2004 but stepped down to devote more time to teaching and research. (She does find time to be on the USGBC’s board of directors and lecture on sustainability around the world.) “I’m amazed at the impact of the LEED in promoting team design…very early in the design process,” she says, noting the contrast to the traditional model of architectural creation, which holds that the best ideas come out of the brain of an individual (at midnight or later).
Loftness sees today’s college-age generation as a driver of necessary change within the academy. “They’re demanding courses that cut across disciplines,” she says, even though unversities are still organized on discplinary lines. But one simple solution could change the playing field. “If Congress told NIH [the National Institutes of Health] and NSF [the National Science Foundation] to put 1 perfect of their budgets next year to…built environment issues, you would see building science pop up all over the country,” she says. “It would be across disciplines, and you could totally transform the mind-set.”
Monitoring the Practice
Long known for his interest in research, Philadelphia’s KieranTimberlake has begun doing independent performance monitoring on its buildings in the past two years. Installing the monitors is neither difficult nor expensive, according to Stephen Kieran. “They can be purchased online and delivered in a day,” he says. “We’re talking a few thousand dollars.” The firms staff—which includes environmental scientists as well as architects—is responsible for the installation, monitoring, and analysis of the data.
Making the connection between design assumptions and actual peformance is critical to Kieran’s concept of the profession’s role today. He compares archiecture to medicine, where diagnosis and treatment are just the start of the process. “The building is never ‘done,'” says Kieren. “It needs to be monitored and managed, and we can play an important role in makings suggestions on how to upgrade and tune its performance.”
Running the Buildings
Trained as a mechanical engineer, Larry Bridge has worked in facilities and real estate for Procter & Gamble (P&G) for 22 years. He’s currently in charge of some 1.5 million gross square feet of general office space that accomodates 4,200 people. That company’s headquartes complex in Cincinnati recently gained Energy star certification for its increasingly sophisticated set of energy-efficient controls and practices.
All of P&G’s green upgrades have been made as part of a standard maintenance program. They include better daylighting, through open office layouts, and automated systems that more tightly control everything from bathroom and conference room lighting to office temperatures, which can be tweaked a bit warmer in the summer and a bit cooler in the winter. “You’ve got acceptance from employees for automation and controls,” he says. “They’re bothered if they don’t see it.” Bridge views both renewable energy and better matierals as places for a lot more improvement. But it’s all part of a continuing process—for him and P&G.
“You build it, make sure it’s working the way it was designed, then you have to continually validate that it’s operating the way it should,” he says.
Crunching the Numbers
“Most people think I’m a mechanical engineer, but I’m not,” says Frankel, a Salt Lake City native. Prior to joining the New Buildings Institute, he worked for two Seattle-based energy consulting firms and “learned more about mechanical design than any architect has a right to.” At one of them, Paladine & Co., he was in charge of the firms third-party review of the first 75 LEED projects. Since 2006, Frankel has been technical director of the NBI, where’s he’s able to bring his expertise to national program and policy work for organizations such as AIA, the USGBC, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Energy.
“[The] NB is about translating the information that’s out there into something architects can use,” Frankel says. “There’s a critical need for that.” As one of the authors of the recent report ‘Energy Performance of LEED for the New Construction Buildings,” he doesn’t shy away from the more troubling results. Discussing some of the “scatter”—the buildings that are either underperforming or overperforming their supposedly green designs—he attributes these anomalies to the disconnect between design assumptions and the reality of buildings in operation. “If we had good feedback systems, the scatter would tighten down considerably,” he says.
Growing the System
An engineer by training, Brendan Owens worked for a half dozen years with a contractor who did energy service retrofits in the Washington, D.C., area. When he joined the USGBC six years ago, there were just seven staff members. “We were the people whose phone calls weren’t being returned,” he recalls of his first days with the nonprofit. He’s now own of ten vice presidents, and the rapidly growing organization has more than 165 employees.
“The thing that’s exciting about the conversion we’re having now is that it’s such an integrated discussion,” says Owens. He considers the LEED framework an essential building block for this evolving dialogue between the profession and the public. LEED 2009 is the next big step, but Owens considers the LEED-online that will debut with the revised ratings systems just as important. “We’re giving the market the tools to deliver an exponentially larger number of green buildings,” he says.
The Evolution of LEED
