Although he left Portland about a year ago for the more scorched pastures of Arizona, Jerry Yudelson was for many years a fixture in our city's burgeoning green building movement, mostly for Interface Engineering. You don't meet many people with training as an engineer and in marketing, but that is Jerry's niche. He's trained more than 3,000 people in the US Green Building Council's LEED rating system and chaired the Greenbuild conference's steering committee for four years.
Jerry seems to crank out books like other people finish the Monday crossword. His fifth and latest makes an ideal reference material for any architect, builder or green building enthusiast's bookshelf. Published by New Society Publishers, It's called Green Building A to Z: Understanding the Language of Green Building.
(In the interest of full disclosure, he once hired me to help him on a publication about the OHSU Center For Health & Healing, a GBD Architects-designed project but in a collaborative environment with a lot of Interface-supervised very very efficient mechanical systems that helped make the Platinum LEED rating possible.)
One thing that struck me as funny in the book, but in a good way, is the mixture of technical terms, philosophical ones, and the more casual. For example, there are entries for brownfields, biophilia, biodiesel, certified wood, displacement ventilation, hybrid technology, and so on. But there are also these entries: 'cool roofs', 'question authority', 'paradigm shift', and my personal favorite, 'Unbridled Enthusiasm!' I say this not to tease Jerry, but just to point out the readable nature of his book. Which is helpful, because it would be very easy for a book like this to get overly technical...and gather dust.
Meanwhile, here's hoping Jerry is eventually able to exit the desert and come back to the green building capitol of America.
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