Category: Architecture & Urban Planning

UNDARK: Do High-rises Built from Wood Guarantee Climate Benefits?

Dual debuts in this critical investigation of cross-laminated timber — multi-ton panels built from lumber that are the hottest material in “sustainable” building. It’s my debut work for Seattle-based nonprofit reporting outfit InvestigateWest as well as my first article in MIT-based science magazine Undark, which co-published the finished product. 

Spoiler alert: CLT producers promote their building material as a climate solution because their giant wood panels can replace energy-intensive concrete and steel construction. My investigation reveals that the carbon accounting behind their claim is oversimplified, and too many journalists give short shrift to concerns from sustainable materials experts.

Take one study of CLT’s carbon footprint that VOX’s high-profile sustainability writer David Roberts called a “soup-to-nuts lifecycle analysis.” My look under the hood revealed a huge pile of nuts that’s left out: nearly all of the carbon flows into and out of forests harvested to supply CLT manufacturing plants with lumber. One of my expert sources calls that a “gaping hole” in the industry’s standard carbon-counting methodology. 

It’s a particularly egregious gap for CLT assembled from lumber from British Columbia, where timber firms remove far more carbon every year than BC’s fire and infestation-ravaged forests can regrow. 

Read it via InvestigateWest or Undark
Article republished by Grist and by NW nonprofit news outlet Crosscut

by pfairley

Seattle’s Bullitt Center Shines

The designers of Seattle’s Bullitt Center have overachieved. The designers set out to demonstrate that a six-story office building could generate all of the energy it needs, but after one year of operation, it is sending a sizable energy surplus to the local power grid, according to data released by its developer, the Bullitt Foundation. Consumption is simply far lower than what its architects and engineers projected for the 52,000-square-foot building. Instead of using 16kBtu per square foot—half the energy-use intensity (EUI) of Seattle’s best-performing office building—consumption during its first year was just 10kBtu/sf …read on at Architectural Record

by pfairley

Vertical Farming Grows Up

Community-gardening advocates have sold urban farming as a sustainable local alternative to industrial-scale farming and as an educational platform for healthier living. And municipalities are buying in, adopting urban ag to transform vacant lots into productive civic assets. In the last two or three years, however, entrepreneurial urban farmers have opened a new frontier with a different look and operating model than most community gardens. Their terrain is above the ground, not in it. Working with help from engineers, architects, and city halls, they have sown rooftops and the interiors of buildings worldwide. “There’s a lot of activity right now, and there is huge potential to do more of it,” says Gregory Kiss, principal at Brooklyn-based architecture firm Kiss + Cathcart. Continue reading “Vertical Farming Grows Up”

by pfairley

Listening to Building Occupants

The stats on occupant comfort are disappointing, and green buildings are no exception. Consider, for example, heating and cooling performance. Thermal-comfort standard standards stipulate that such systems should satisfy at least four out of five occupants. “Very few buildings actually perform that well,” according to John Goins with the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley. Out of the 609 buildings in CBE’s database, only 13 percent meet ASHRAE’s performance threshold; among those that are LEED-certified, 20 percent make the grade. There is increasing recognition that all that discomfort may be translating into a lot of wasted energy. Goins estimates that the average office building wastes 4 percent of its energy just by cooling and heating more than occupants want. The indirect impact could be even bigger when one considers how disgruntled occupants—who in most buildings lack an effective channel for requesting change—fight back against the machine. They may block air vents or plug in space heaters to combat excessive air-conditioning…

Excerpted from the May/June edition of GreenSource Magazine. Read the story at GreenSource.

by pfairley

Building-in a Force of Nature

Turbine House: Design by Michael Pelken & Thong Dang
Turbine House: Michael Pelken & Thong Dang’s residence with horizontal-axis wind turbine

As design teams work toward harnessing air flows around buildings, they are producing some intriguing structures. But just how viable is wind power as a source of on-site renewable energy?
By Peter Fairley

Wind power is the fastest-growing source of megawatts thanks to the jumbo-jet-sized turbines sprouting en masse worldwide. But it also has a significant presence in the city, where gusts regularly send umbrellas to landfills. Rather than considering it a nuisance, architects increasingly view urban wind as a renewable resource for on-building power generation.

Building-integrated wind power (BIWP)—wind turbines mounted on or incorporated within an occupied structure—may lack wind farms’ economies of scale. But like the leading source of on-building renewables—photovoltaics (PVs)—wind turbines offer some advantages in architectural applications. No roads get cut through wilderness to erect towers, and they deliver electricity without power lines and transmission losses. Wind turbines are also attractive to designers and clients looking to express a commitment to sustainability.

Such benefits provide potential for dramatic growth, says mechanical engineer Roger Frechette, principal in the Washington, D.C., office of Interface Engineering. “If there’s data showing that BIWP works and testimony that it’s a good thing to do, there will be an explosion,” he predicts…

Published in the April 2013 issue of Architectural Record Magazine. Read the whole story.

by pfairley

Life’s a ‘Paternoster’ (and then you fly)

Solon SE’s new paternoster lift. Credit Kevin Matthews / ArchitectureWeek.

“Don’t leave the planet to the stupid.” The corporate tag line from German solar module manufacturer Solon SE screams: ‘We reject complacency’ (not to mention gentility). It’s a slap-in-the-face warning to expect the unexpected, so I was looking for something completely different when I visited Solon’s one-year old Berlin headquarters on an architectural tour of Germany last week. I was not to be disappointed. What I found is probably the first cyclic elevator system installed anywhere in decades.

No pressing a button and waiting for a lift with this modern incarnation of a late-19th-C elevator design! In a cyclic elevator a string of passenger cars run by in a continuous loop. One simply steps into one of the open cars scrolling up or down through its adjacent elevator shafts and takes off. To your weary Canadian correspondent, presently immobilized in Berlin by an angry planet, the hassle-free transport offered by Solon’s cyclic lift was a source of almost drunken pleasure.

Unfortunately, it may also be quite stupid (so to speak). Continue reading “Life’s a ‘Paternoster’ (and then you fly)”

by pfairley