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
Tag: Green building
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”
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.
Peter Fairley 