Portland Architecture

The shame of Portland's West Hayden Island land grab

Map of West Hayden Island (courtesy Port of Portland)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

It's a plan the mayor's own handpicked experts have expressed reservations about. It's on an accelerated pace that even its tentative supporters question. And it may be a case of the haves taking from the have-nots that demonstrates Portland isn't as different and progressive as one might hope.

Last night, watching a hearing of the Portland Planning & Sustainability Commission about annexing West Hayden Island's wildlife sanctuary for an expanded deep-water industrial port, I thought of a moment from The Simpsons.

In an episode called "Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington," the family travels to Washington, DC for Lisa to compete in an essay contest. Tasked to write about America's greatness, Lisa begins enthusiastically but, after witnessing a senator accepting a bribe in order for a forest to be clear-cut, instead unleashes a diatribe of bitter commentary. The episode has a happy ending: because of Lisa's essay, the senator is arrested for bribery. I'm not sure the same fate awaits those pressing forward with annexation of West Hayden Island, nor should it. I don't think these are outright villains, but instead people who believe job and industry growth is priority number one. Given the recession of recent years, one can't blame that kind of thinking. Yet we shouldn't sacrifice values to choose a few potential jobs twenty years down the road.

The Portland metro area is said to have a shortage of deep-water ports, the kind that can service today's super-sized ships and barges. (Never mind that Vancouver can help solve that shortage - we're not allowed to think of the two cities on either side of the river as the same, or even having shared interests.) West Hayden Island has admittedly been eyed for decades as a place of industrial expansion. It was first brought into the Urban Growth Boundary in 1983, when the Port of Portland bought the land from PGE. In 1994 it was designated a Regionally Significant Industrial Area.

But West Hayden has also long since been identified as a critical natural area, both as it relates to wildlife and as a crucially important flood plain protecting the city from increasingly likely floods in the new era of climate change. Its more than 800 acres of forest, wetlands, meadows, and shallow water habitat near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers provide irreplaceable habitat for federally listed salmon and imperiled bird, bat and amphibian species. Bald eagles' nests are a common site there. Quite simply, West Hayden is the largest wildlife sanctuary in our Portland metro region.

Couple that with the fact that West Hayden is home to Oregon's largest manufactured home community, and you have a case of the Powers That Be making an appalling dual-front attack on both the environment and on a poor community.

And here I thought Republicans were in the minority of our city's political leadership.

Scenes from "Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington"

Last night's hearing before the Planning and Sustainability Commission, the only opportunity for public comment, was practically a caricature of self-serving moneyed interests pitted against community members fighting only for values and their homes.

Whenever someone testified in favor of industrial annexation, he or she came from an organization that would directly benefit from the environmental usurpation. A union representative whose colleagues would be hired for the construction on West Hayden spoke of "family-wage jobs," implying that trying to save endangered species directly resulted in his babies going unfed. A series of business and port alliance representatives, neckties removed from their black suits, sung the praises of industrial development and finished their remarks to the sound of silence from the packed audience or some poor unironic single clap. Whenever a homeowner about to be displaced or choked by diesel fumes pleaded with the council for mercy, or an environmental group leader pleaded for the accelerated timetable to be slowed down, a chorus of applause rang out from the commission chamber and its filled overflow-room.

The annexation of West Hayden Island would be troubling enough in its own right, but now Mayor Sam Adams is attempting to skip the unfolding process and bring about a City Council vote by the end of the year. Even those at last night's hearing tentatively willing to support the annexation admitted they felt blindsided and disappointed by the mayor's effort to seal the deal before he leaves office at year's end. Most of the community groups at the hearing, such as a group of Native American tribes with ancestral connections to the Columbia and to West Hayden, told the Planning and Sustainability Commission they had never been brought to the negotiating table until the deal was already done.

Adams argues that the process of annexing West Hayden has taken some thirty years, and that he's merely taking the needle off a skipping record. But the thirty years of gridlock on this issue ought to tell us something.

Consider the fact that in 2009, after the City of Portland initiated planning for annexation of West Hayden Island, the mayor's handpicked Community Working Group, charged with poring through studies and data to deliver a recommendation on Hayden, could not come up with one. The Community Working Group reported to Adams that it could not resolve the inherent conflict between industry and the environment.

The reason this has taken 30 years is that the city can't seem to accept the inherently incestuous, greedy nature of its actions. We keep revisiting the issue in hopes that the bald eagles won't be in the way, or that the flood plain isn't an ideal way to protect us from floods, and then blame the process itself for stifling the industrial invasion.

The West Hayden Island annexation plan is to take 300 of the remaining 800 acres for Port of Portland expansion. That may sound like a fair trade-off at first: wildlife still gets more than half. But think of those 800 total acres as the last toothpaste in a tube already squeezed to the limit. Aside from a few tiny parcels here and there, the city has already taken virtually all of the wildlife area that ever existed in the Portland area. If we take 300 of 800 acres remaining on West Hayden Island, we're not leaving more than half to wildlife and the floodplain. We're going from 98 percent of local wild areas claimed for development to 99 percent. We're squeezing the very last remnants out of the toothpaste tube and expecting no future cavities to form.

Today people from all over America are turning their attention to Portland as an example of the future of cities: a place where, unlike in Phoenix or Houston or Atlanta, we really do consider what ecologists call the "triple bottom line" of people, planet and profit. But here is a case where people and profit are ganging up on planet, and the charge is being led by leaders of our city. I pity the good people in the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, or the Planning and Sustainability  Commission, whose jobs depend on carrying out the mayor's plan even though the very names of their institutions call this into question.

It's not to say that Portland shouldn't be concerned about competing in a global economy. Today's world is far too interconnected economically for us not to make international trade, and the shipping that enables it, a high priority. But Portland may not even be able to attract the new generation of giant vessels to a deep-water West Hayden Island facility; its construction is being hyped as a risk-free endeavor enabling business that is guaranteed to come. But it's really a case of economic speculating. We can look to the real estate market of the past four years to see how speculation can be catastrophic. We can also look across the Columbia river for a solution here: Vancouver has additional space for deep-water ports, yet the city is seen as a competitor rather than a collaborator. Here millions of dollars and countless peoples' homes and livelihoods are at stake, and we're legally obligating ourselves to act deaf to the solutions around us.

The city talks of mitigation for West Hayden Island: the idea that the acreage and wildlife sanctuary lost here can simply be given back somewhere else. But as Audubon Society conservation director Bob Sallinger told the commission at last night's hearing, "Little pieces do not make a whole." We can't set aside thin strips of riverbank, or stitch together patches of trees here and there, and call it proper wildlife protection.

Then there's the mitigation offered to low-income homeowners. Asked by a commission member what could be done to compensate her and her disabled-veteran husband, a resident told last night's audience tearfully that mitigation was never truly possible, only partial compensation for condemning their home against their will. The resident explained how one of her ancestors was executed in Salem, Massachusetts in 1610 for suspicion of witchcraft - and how now, with West Hayden probably doomed, she could understand the feeling of being persecuted.

 

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Carol Coletta on the metrics and momentum of urban place-making

(image courtesy Portland Sustainability Institute)

BY JULIETTE BEALE

Last week marked the third annual Ecodistricts Summit, a gathering of planners, policy analysts, architects, engineers, academics, and students interested in learning or sharing more about sustainable community building. This year’s topics included sustainable neighborhoods, district development, energy planning and district/community financing, with case studies from Holland, Switzerland, Australia, and Seattle.

Carol Coletta, Director of ArtPlace – an initiative created by six major banks, several foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts – delivered the keynote address Wednesday night. Based in Chicago, ArtPlace strives to renew urban neighborhoods and communities through investing in the arts and culture. Coletta, who previously served as president of CEOs For Cities, opened by affirming, “It is the week of cities.”

Citing many sources from the New York Times to Business Week, she repeatedly emphasized that there is great new energy in urbanism. Today 40 percent more young people are living in cities than in the past thirty years. People are drawn to cities for their walkability, amenities, jobs, housing, and culture.

Not only do cities offer great lifestyle opportunities, Coletta reminded the audience, but they also make financial sense. Urban living saves people money. In New York City, to cite one of the strongest examples, $19 billion is saved each year from city residents collectively not driving. “We are in a moment when compact cites make more sense than ever and the market is saying bring it on,” she added.

Coletta went on to discuss how ArtPlace is accelerating the urban draw through creative placemaking. When surveyed about what connects them to their cities, urban residents were less likely to have schools and jobs at the top of their lists. Instead, social offerings, openness, and aesthetics were the key attributes. Coletta further suggested that what she called “distinctiveness” plays a critical role in place making. Citing the example of a Parisian Boulevard study where classic Paris streets were overtaken by globalized American shops, she noted, “When a place feels like everywhere it feels like nowhere.” 

For this reason, a major area of ArtPlace’s research is creating metrics for measuring vibrancy, diversity, and distinctiveness in cities and clearly demonstrating how the arts play critical roles in promoting these attributes. These metrics provide the basis for ArtPlace to issue grants to various arts and cultural organizations looking to renew their neighborhoods.

In closing, Coletta offered that the principles, metrics, and attributes behind the work of ArtPlace are very similar to Ecodistricts. These organizations need to draw from each other’s strengths to broaden their own guidelines and district thinking.

She also mentioned that Portland is positioned in a unique place: “If I had to praise Portland on anything it would be the unusual courage it takes to recognize your distinctiveness and lift it up and act on it.  Not many cities are willing to do that.”

As the keynote speech and the Ecodistricts Summit as a whole suggests, district-wide urban and sustainability initiatives are gaining incredible ground across the country and world-wide. Last week, the AIA Committee on the Environment hosted a Pecha Kucha night where Vince Martinez of Architecture 2030 shared information about Seattle’s 2030 District. The District’s plans include stringent building energy performance targets as well as district transportation and water consumption energy reduction goals. Other cities including Pittsburg, Cleveland, and Los Angeles are creating 2030 Districts. Will one of Portland’s Ecodistricts be next?

 

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Talking with PoSI's Naomi Cole about EcoDistricts Summit 2012

(Image courtesy PoSI)

BY MATHANGI MURTHY

This week from October 23 to 26th, the Portland Sustainability Institute will host the third EcoDistricts Summit. It is one of the few annual conference dedicated to district-scale sustainability initiatives. I recently spoke to Naomi Cole, the EcoDistricts Program Director of PoSI about the Summit, the EcoDistricts movement and what it has to offer this year.

Portland Architecture: Tell me about this week’s EcoDistricts Summit and what are the new and exciting events that are in store?

Cole: The significant difference between this year’s summit and the last year is that we are much more international in nature this year. We’ve got delegations coming from China, Vietnam, Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan. We had a decent international turnout last year but each year the geography has expanded quite a bit. When we started, our first year was pretty much Portland folks, our close advisors, then we expanded and became more regional, then national and now international. We have had many people from different countries reaching out to us and wanting to be a part of the Summit. So I think the key flavor this year is that we have got representatives working on EcoDistricts from all over the world.

We are seeing a lot more projects being called ‘EcoDistricts’ and we will be able to hear many of their stories being told this year. We will be able to understand more about what is working, what’s not working, lessons learned, how much of it is ‘greenwashing’ versus deep district-scale sustainability change.

Tell me about the progress on the five pilot EcoDistricts Projects. What are the lessons learned from them?

The five pilot projects are moving along at a relatively similar pace – slow and steady. They are all where we wanted them to be at the end of their three year pilot. So each of the districts has a leadership group; either a steering committee or a formal board. They’ve all got a Chair, in some cases paid staff. They have all gone through some kind of assessment to prioritize projects and they are moving into project development phase.

To give you a flavor of what some of the projects are- the Lloyd District is doing a Commercial Retrofit Program, Gateway is doing a project called Re-energize Gateway which is a much more grass-roots weatherization and solar production program. Foster Green is starting to develop urban mobile gardens at vacant lots along Foster Road. South Waterfront is just starting to develop a Smart Grid and Demand Management strategy. So, they are quite varied and are related to energy. But each of the districts has its priorities and is starting to develop its projects.

In terms of lessons learned, one of the overall things we have learned from the five pilots and other cities is that being really clear about the program expectations, roles and responsibilities from day one is essential. To give an example, if the city of San Francisco is going to start an EcoDistricts program, they have to be clear about what are they going to commit to their pilot neighborhoods and what are the stakeholders expected to commit to in return. This is important because we are still figuring that out with the City of Portland. Now the pilots are independent, they have a clear direction and leadership they are starting to have a direct relationship with the city. So our recommendation to other cities is to design the program first and then pilot it. We were piloting and designing the program at the same time in Portland instead.

If we can prove that EcoDistricts work well in highly diverse neighborhoods such as Foster Green and Gateway, then it is really a translatable model. Each of the EcoDistricts has defined ‘EcoDistricts’ differently for its own context. In Foster Green and Gateway, it is really about sustainability as a way to improve livability and meet basic needs like lower utility bills, create local jobs, provide pride and a sense of opportunity in creating and shaping your own community. We have goals in our EcoDistricts performance areas around equitable development, around health and well-being to make sure that whatever projects that come out of the EcoDistricts goals meet multiple benefits at once.

These are huge, complex projects and we hope that each project meets as many community benefits as possible. We worked really hard to be inclusive around engaging people and around shaping priorities. The kinds of projects coming out of communities such as Gateway will ultimately be reflective of a different set of interests than communities like Lloyd District which has a lot of commercial property owners. 

What EcoDistricts projects are in the pipeline for PoSI?

In terms of the projects in the pipeline, PoSI is launching a North American program. We received a grant from the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) to design the program and we did a thoughtful research and design phase for the North American EcoDistricts program. We worked with a group of 15 cities and advisors to design a North American program with the idea that PoSI would provide technical assistance similar to what we did in Portland. We want to help a handful of cities each year to launch an ecodistrict neighborhood.

Some of the most promising cities and projects that we are working with are San Francisco and Washington DC. San Francisco has three neighborhoods they have identified as EcoDistricts. Washington DC has four and they have got clear staff time allocated to this project. They are also benefitting from a lot of lessons learned from Portland and our failures. They are ultimately making smart moves and learning from our mistakes.

 

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Kilowatt Crackdown challenges commercial building owners to conserve energy, but is it enough?

Downtown Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In a ceremony last week at the Multnomah Athletic Club, Portland Mayor Sam Adams challenged a gathering of BOMA Oregon’s leading commercial building owners and managers (the organization represents over 30 million square feet of commercial real estate) to participate in the 2012 Kilowatt Crackdown, a two-year energy benchmarking competition for Portland metro-area commercial buildings.

As part of the City of Portland and Multnomah County’s ambitious goal to achieve 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050, Adams encouraged the group to join the the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance's BetterBricks (a sponsor of this site), the Portland Development Commission, the Energy Trust of Oregon and Clark County's Clark Public Utilities to lead the Portland-metro area in cutting energy use and costs.

“Portland’s large commercial buildings consume considerable amounts of energy, and many could use energy-efficiency upgrades,” said Adams.  “We’ve assembled a great partnership to create a valuable opportunity for Portland’s building owners to save energy, save money, and improve their buildings.”

After Adams' invitation, three large office-building managers pledged their participation: Unico Properties (owner and manager of U.S. Bancorp Tower, among many others), Langley Investment Properties, and the 200 Market Building.

The Kilowatt Crackdown is a public/private partnership to benchmark energy efficiency in office buildings throughout the Portland region ensures voluntary disclosure of energy information from local office building participants. It is the successor to a competition first launched by BOMA Oregon in 2006. The new partnership and two-year competition expects to double participation to about 150 while expanding geographic reach throughout the metro area. Participating buildings will benchmark energy performance through the Energy Star Portfolio Manager Tool and seek to improve their performance over time.

"Prospective tenants demand efficient, environmentally-friendly buildings and are willing to pay for it," said Scott Andrews, chair of the Portland Development Commission. Andrews is also persident of commercial realtor Melvin Mark. "Benchmarking for improved performance keeps us competitive in the marketplace, and will help us deliver on our economic development goals to foster the next wave of innovation in sustainable building."

By working collaboratively to establish innovative green building practices, the City of Portland has agreed not to mandate Energy Star disclosure. Disclosure will remain voluntary.

To give context to the figure of 150 office buildings in the Portland metro area (including Clark County, Washington) targeted by the Kilowatt Crackdown, there are over 10,000 office buildings that are over 5,000 square feet, and 17,800 total (according to figures supplied by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance). That means out of the total office buildings in the area that over 5,000 square feet, the Kilowatt Crackdown if it succeeds in signing up 150 participants would still only have benchmarking data for about 1.5 percent of local offices. But the competition has specifically targeted buildings over 40,000 square feet, of which there are less than 1,500 in the area. So rather than 1.5 percent of local offices, it’s arguably more like 10 percent.

How does this compare with other cities seeking to lead the way on sustainability? New York City recently began non-voluntary benchmarking effort that has acquired energy data from over 2,000 large commercial properties. But NYC is about 14 times bigger than Portland, so the Crackdown participant numbers are, when you scale it, not nearly as dwarfed by NYC's mandatory program as it might initially seem. But New York is also mandating benchmark data for municipal and residential buildings, and data currently exists for over 3,000 buildings.

Should Portland be mandating that its large office buildings provide energy data? Absolutely. But it's also a valid step to make it a voluntary process in the beginning, and it makes tremendous sense to partner with the industry before diving in to legally obligating them to participate. (The only troubling fact may be that PDC's chairman is also president of a commercial real estate company, Melvin Mark. It creates the potential for conflict of interest.)

“BOMA Oregon has worked with numerous legislators to successfully defeat mandatory reporting requirements on the city and state level.  And, together, we believe the building industry can manage itself, without government imposing any additional regulations,” said Susan Steward, Executive Director of BOMA Oregon, by email. “Building owners benchmark for a number of reasons: first, it’s the right thing to do.  Second, it saves money which will be passed down to building tenants.  And, third, it’s a win-win for the City of Portland and for the commercial real estate industry.”

So, it's a win-win if everybody does it, but if you make everybody do it, it's wrong? Hmm.

That said, Portland's business community has long perpetuated the idea that the city and its government are not receptive to local business, so enacting voluntary benchmarking measures first is a way to show that the city is as adept with the carrot as it is with the stick. If the Kilowatt Crackdown were the final word on office-building performance benchmarking, it might seem to be affecting a small segment of the market. But instead, it's the beginning of something larger. Ultimately all office buildings, or at least all the large ones, will have to disclose their energy performance, and possibly that of other resources too. Creating real market transformation ahead of regulation is a worthwhile move that will more than pay for itself.

 

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How three local designs made the AIA's Top Ten Green Projects list

PCC Newberg (photo by Stephen Miller)

BY JULIETTE BEALE

While Portland may have lost its lead as the most bike-able city to Minneapolis, and one publication now ranks ours as only the ninth greenest city in the country, we are arguably still at the forefront when it comes to green design, as evidenced by having three projects on the 2012 AIA COTE Top Ten list: the Mercy Corps Word Headquarters, Hood River Middle School, and Portland Community College’s Newberg Center. Earlier this week, The University of Oregon’s Architecture Department hosted a panel discussion featuring key members from each of these projects’ design teams.

The Mercy Corps World Headquarters, designed by THA Architecture, is a LEED Platinum project that combines an existing historic structure with a modern addition. Open offices were placed on the outer edge near the windows, in the historic portion, and core and service elements were located toward the center. In the modern addition, the entire East elevation is a curtain wall shaded by street trees.  The project has a 3,800 square-foot green roof, stack ventilation through the main staircase, and re-used timber stair treads.

Hood River Middle School Music and Science Building, designed by Opsis and set to achieve net-zero energy usage (generating as much as it consumes), is located within the context of a larger school that is on the National Historic Register. The building’s design demanded an acute consideration of the natural context, the historic fabric, and the school’s sustainable/ science curriculum. The project has a geothermal heating system with heat exchange recovery ventilators, a radiant floor slab, and high mass walls for thermal storage. Trusses and other materials were salvaged from the demolition of a buss storage barn previously located on the site for re-use in the new roof structure.   

Portland Community College- Newberg Center, by Hennebery-Eddy, is the first of six buildings planned for this newest PCC campus. A net-zero project like Hood River, the building’s envelope is insulated with structural insulated panels (SIPS).  Sloped ceilings leading upward toward skylights provide enough diffuse light to meet lighting needs during daytime hours. A series of louvers and dampers, located below windows, bring fresh air into the building.   Large stacks, located along the building’s central axis, naturally vent air, while a109-kW photovoltaic array generates all the space’s energy.

Panelists (from top) Alec Holser, David Keltner, Doug Reimer, Erica Dunn

One panelist was quick to note that all three Portland projects outperformed the others on the list, a good boost for Portland pride. Projects are judged on a set of criteria including light and air, water cycle, land use and site ecology, among others. Yet these panelists collectively suggested several other driving forces rooted in our well-established sustainable building culture.

For example, the clients of these projects were savvy and didn’t need to be convinced into adopting strict sustainable goals, panelists agreed.  For Mercy Corps, a sustainable building was in tandem with its official mission: “To alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people build secure, productive and just communities.” PCC Newberg’s President went to the design team with the goal of creating the most sustainable building possible.  At Hood River Middle School, the curriculum being housed in the new building was environmental, so the client wanted a sustainable building to showcase these technologies in an educational way.

Government and nonprofit incentives also helped projects along. The State of Oregon, for example, offers many financial incentives to promote green design. PCC-Newberg took advantage of the Energy Trust of Oregon’s Path to Net Zero program.  The project’s solar array as funded by a bond measure that stipulated 50% of project funds had to go toward solar technology.

Hood River Middle School (video courtesy Opsis)

Having a high goal such as LEED Platinum or net zero focused the clients’ attention and gave them something to rally behind, panelists also said. For Hood River Middle School, the building itself was to be a tool for sustainable education. Working with Opsis, they investigated all the ways net zero strategies could also be used in the classroom. Building energy use monitors are in visible locations for students. A portion of the wall was cut back to reveal the construction. Students were involved in the process of designing a living machine. 

David Keltner of THA mentioned that Portland is already positioned at a tipping point when it comes to our understanding of sustainable technologies.  For this type of project to be successful, panelists agreed, it demands an integrated project team of architects, engineers, contractor and client.  There also must be industry buy-in. “Engineering something that is not out there in everyone’s vocabulary is like designing a Ferrari,” Alec Holser of Opsis said. Having professionals ready to work together to find new approaches to meet these challenges was fundamental.  In the case of net zero, many of the technologies must solve two problems at once and then they need to work with the other strategies. There is a complex balance, for example, between daylighting and heat gains. The PCC innovative sloped ceiling helped spread the light of a standard type and sized skylight. 

Panelists were unanimous that net-zero projects are paving the way for future invention and innovation in materials and technologies.  As they become more of a norm, codes too will need to be updated.  Net zero water usage is difficult to achieve when water recycled on site cannot be reused in the landscape or restrooms.

Mercy Corps (photo by Jeff Amram)

A great lesson from these projects is that green buildings can be designed in a way that educates their users. Whether it’s building performance monitors or an architectural display of strategies on the facade, the more users learn, the more comfortable users become with these buildings. Through understanding there is change. When people know they are in a cutting edge building with passive heating/ cooling they have different expectations.  Erica Dunn of Hennebery Eddy cited that more people complain of being too hot when they have AC than when they don’t because they are mentally prepared for a greater range in temperatures. It’s really about common sense, Rob Reimer of Hennebery Eddy said. “It’s not about gadgets or gizmos. Just designing a smart building.” 

In the end, continually searching for new paradigms is critical for advancing the design discourse. For example, David Keltner noted there is always talk of reductions in energy use, but what about a consideration of new forms of energy production?  Our next step will entail a re-thinking that is even more outside the box. It will be interesting to see how this may shape the future of COTE Top Ten Green Projects.

 

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Warehousing the future: visiting Vestas headquarters in the renovated Meier & Frank Depot Building

Vestas headquarters (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

For more than a decade since it was vacated in 2001, the circa-1927 Meier & Frank Depot Building has sat vacant waiting for a suitor. Now, it's the American headquarters for Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas, thanks to an extensive renovation and the addition of a fifth floor overseen by GBD Architects and Ankrom Moisan Associated Architects.

Developed by Gerding Edlen, the company behind the five-building Brewery Blocks as well as numerous other Pearl District and South Waterfront projects (and also a ground-floor tenant of the new space), the Vestas headquarters is designed to meet Platinum-level LEED strictures and is a whopping 68 percent more energy efficient than a buiding designed to code. This comes from a variety of features including the building's thermal mass, its operable windows, its combination of operable windows and water-cooled ventilation, and downtown Portland's largest array of solar panels (enough to meet 12 percent of power needs).

Thanks to a 160,000-gallon cistern, the building collects enough water for non-potable use (flushing toilets, irrigation) that it uses 80 percent less than a conventional building and diverts 33 percent of Vestas' stormwater runoff away from the sewer system.

Overlooking I-405 from busy NW Everett Street, the hulking masonry building has always been more elegant than one expects from a warehouse. Now, with a fresh coat of white paint (resembling the white terra cotta of the classic AE Doyle designed Meier & Frank building downtown) and the boards removed from the windows, it has a handsome presence that is both unassuming and grand.

Vestas atrium and auditorium from fourth floor (photos by Brian Libby)

Inside, the Vestas headquarters is defined by and centered on a large multi-story atrium. Particularly when you're standing on the upper floors, the entire building feels connected as office workers circulate amongst glass-ensconced conference rooms, offices, and an auditorium with bleachers made from reclaimed wood salvaged from the bottom of the Willamette. Throughout the building, in fact, the wood helps soften the interior architecture and add texture. Most of all, though, the atrium itself makes the building feel special in how natural light permeates the building from the center radiating out.

The only place the atrium doesn't feel so compelling is on the ground floor. That may be because the building's second floor has been given over to parking. So when you're looking up at the atrium from the bottom, that sense of connection amongst the open floors surrounding the atrium is lost because the walls are sealed off. However, according to Patrick Wilde of Gerding Edlen, who accompanied me on the tour, that second floor could someday, as demand for space grows, be converted back to usage for humans and the second-floor able to join the atrium.

Views from Vestas rooftop (photos by Brian Libby)

The rooftop, despite having such a large solar-panel array and parts of it given over to plantings for an eco-roof, also provides a great place to hang out with a postcard view. The design put a common lunch room on this fifth-floor addition to give everyone a share of the panorama.

It's all but impossible not to compare the Vestas project to another renovated full-block warehouse down the street, one also developed by Gerding Edlen: the Wieden + Kennedy headquarters. Both are company headquarters, and both feature central atriums with bleachers that marry concrete and reclaimed wood. And each has something to offer versus the other. The Vestas design has more of a bounty of natural light: it almost feels like you're standing outside when in its central atrium. Office workers here will never get seasonal affective disorder, even in the longest stretches of perennially gray December and January days.

Yet the Wieden + Kennedy building, designed by Brad Cloepfil's firm, Allied Works, is unquestionably more refined in its detail and refinement. The concrete looks like marble in the W+K and the upper stories a kind of living sculpture of catwalks and carved-out space. One senses there architecture as a a true artistic composition. In this way, the Vestas headquarters feels bland by comparison.

But again, that doesn't mean Vestas isn't an overwhelming success - because it is. It just feels like natural light and sustainability were overriding concerns for the Vestas project, while the ambition for capital-A architecture drove W+K.

Besides the architectural details, simply by building a major corporate headquarters here Vestas helps make a kind of statement that hopefully can be backed up over time. The market for alternative energy sources like wind and solar has had dramatic ups and downs over the past decade, as a great leap forward in market share has been set back by the recession and the plummeting cost of fossil fuels like natural gas with the spread of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) techniques and its ability to tap previously unreachable reserves. Vestas has been laying off employees just as its big new headquarters is ready to unveil itself.

Yet standing outside the Vestas headquarters on a recent sunny afternoon, the building seemed to serve as a reminder to focus on the long term, one in which alternative energy plays an increasing role and in which Portland is a leading player. This city, despite whatever cultural cache it currently carries, is not an obvious choice for a corporate headquarters. We lack many Fortune 500 companies, we're not a center of financial wealth, and we lack major nationaly renowned academic institutions.

But Portland may be a suitable fit for Vestas, if not a kindred spirit. Like Denmark, where Vestas originated, Oregon is a left-leaning spot on the coast that's perhaps overshadowed by more populous neighbors but quietly harboring substantial ambitions in the burgeoning green economy, a place that eschews loud statements and prefers to just get on with a higher quality of life. Standing outside the Vestas headquarters feels like that future is more than just chasing windmills.

 

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Screened gem: Edith Green Wendell Wyatt federal building's transformation nears completion

Wyatt federal building (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

For most of its history, the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt federal building has been hiding in plain sight: a bland, nondescript office building across Chapman Square from City Hall. But for the past year, a remarkable transformation has been taking place as the building has had its entire facade removed and a new one of glass with metal screens (and eventually vegetation) taking its place.

Traveling regularly from home in Southeast Portland to downtown, I've watched the Wyatt for the past year with curiosity and, as of late, excitement. The new Wyatt building may be turning out as something special and exceptional, at least if the shading devices on its west facade are any indication.

The modernization of the circa-1974 Wyatt, which was funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and fashioned in a partnership between James Cutler (of Cutler Anderson) and SERA Architects, is part of the Government Service Administration's design excellence program for federal buildings, which used to favor sculptural excellence but has in recent times come to focus more on sustainable design innovation. It's set to achieve LEED Platinum certification from the US Green Building Council and is expected to achieve a 55-60 percent reduction in energy use compared to a normal code-designed building as well as a 65 percent reduction in potable water consumption.

Wyatt federal building and its west-facade sun screens (photos by Brian Libby)

The 18-story, 512,474-square-foot building is not only a rebirth of the original Wyatt, but the renovation itself is flourishing today near completion after initially being left for dead. It was originally commissioned in 2005, but lost its initial funding. The project was on hold for much of 2007 and 2008 before receiving the aforementioned ARRA funds in 2009.

Originally, Cutler and SERA designed a series of vegetative fins for the west facade, but in the renewed post-2009 project, it was revamped into clusters of slender metal rods going up to the 18th floor. The architects felt they couldn't afford the risk of the vegetative facade failing. The metal shading devices, though, will have vegetation growing on them, initially just the first three floors but, as the plants grow, stretching up the rest of the facade.

Although there are also shading devices on the buidings additional exterior surfaces, it's really the west facade that is the bold gesture (to address afternoon solar orientation and the lack of a building directly across the street), resembling a gigantic succession of icycles moving up and down the building. Cutler also endeavored to ensure that the rest of the glassy walls were as simple and uncluttered as possible, which draws ones eyes all the more to the west facade.

Wyatt federal building (photos by Brian Libby)

At the same time, the signature shading devices are not the only energy-efficient or visually arresting design move at the Wyatt. For example, a new solar array on the roof will offset up to six percent of the building’s energy consumption. The rooftop is tilted to point toward optimal solar orientation, giving this boxy building an angular top. An innovative elevator system will actually generate energy as it moves downward. The design also peels back, at selected intervals, the bones of the original building to reveal its original steel and concrete. One senses that this is a building with multiple stages of history. And as if its bold look and efficient performance weren't enough, SERA led a collaborative construction effort with builder Howard S. Wright that has reduced a 27-month construction period to only 14 months. Even the most reactionary, tin-hatted critics of government spending ought to offer applause.

Just down the street from the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt building, another landmark sustainable project SERA has co-designed, the Oregon Sustainability Center (in collaboration with GBD Architects) has faced difficulty. Its funding mechanism is in question after the state declined to offer up its share of the cost, and while the OSC may be even more impressive than the Wyatt in its sustainable performance (the project is designed to meet rigid Living Building Challenge strictures for net-zero energy and water consumption), renderings show something not nearly as visually compelling as the Wyatt despite considerable improvement over its original conceptual designs.

The Wyatt, in this way, may come to symbolize a relatively rare alchemy in the architecture of Portland or beyond: a leading-edge sustainable building project that also possesses, through its innovations, a striking beauty.

 

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Three projects by Portland firms make AIA Committee on the Environment's Top Ten Green Projects list

Hood River Middle School (photo by Michael Mathers)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Since it began in 1997, the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment's annual Top Ten Green Projects list has been the highest honor a sustainable building project can achieve. Though Portland seemed to be an industry leader, for much of the past 15 years there have not been many projects by local firms to crack the list until ZGF's Twelve West finally did so in 2010 (although GBD Architects' Gerding Theater was an honorable mention in 2007).

This year, however, Portland is dominating the list, with three projects by Rose City firms in the just-announced Top Ten for 2012: the Mercy Corps headquarters in Old Town, designed by THA Architecture; Hood River Middle School, designed by Opsis, and the Portland Community College Newberg Center, designed by Hennebery Eddy. Maybe it helped having local architect Clark Brockman of SERA Architects on the six-person jury, or perhaps the fact that two of the three honored projects achieve net-zero energy usage was more of a factor. Regardless, this should help cement the city's status as a national sustainable design leader.

Mercy Corps headquarters (photos by Jeff Amram)

The Mercy Corps building occupies a prominent position along the Willamette riverfront, on Naito Parkway at the west edge of the Burnside Bridge. THA expanded the historic Packer-Scott building to go from 42,000 to 85,000 square feet. There's a green roof atop the building, and eventually there will be an array of solar panels operated and studied by students at the University of Oregon's Portland campus next door.

Mercy Corps received a top-level LEED Platinum rating, as well as a very low EUI (energy use intensity) score of 36, less than half the average of an office buiding. Potable water use was also reduced by 40 percent compared to a space designed to code specifications.

PCC Newberg (photos courtesy Hennebery Eddy)

The PCC Newberg building is the first structure in what will eventually be a 15-acre multi-building campus. It is constructed from structurally insulated panels (SIPs) that reduce heat loss from thermal bridging and air infiltration. The buildinng is naturally ventilated with louvers and double dampers to prevent drafts. As reported in Eco-Structure, "When outside temperatures dip below 55 F, heat-recovery ventilators condition fresh air, and the concrete slab circulates 90 F water through a closed-loop radiant system in the slab that then radiates heat to the building occupants. In warmer months, ceiling fans provide a 3 F drop in ambient temperature and use a fraction of the energy of a traditional air-conditioning unit. A 109-kilowatt rooftop PV array meets the center’s remaining energy needs."

Hood River Middle School (photos by Michael Mathers)

Opsis Architecture's design for Hood River Middle School's new Music and Science Building is also net-zero for energy, thanks largely to its exterior envelope, be it well-insulated walls, triple-glazed windows, or detailing that prevents thermal bridging.

The main entrance, as Eco-Sructure also explains, "is purposefully sited at the inside corner of the building so that the mass of the concrete walls and a concrete slab shelter the entrance against winds from the Columbia Gorge. The thermal mass also buffers the interior spaces against seasonal temperature swings. Also contributing the net-zero-energy status is a tight envelope, a geothermal heating system, heat-exchange recovery ventilators, a radiant-heating system in the slab, and a 35-kilowatt solar PV system on the roof."

Besides its energy efficiency, all rainwater runoff at the new Hood River Middle School building gets collected and treated in a new bioswale, then is stored  in a 14,000-gallon underground cistern, and then reused for irrigation in the student garden. All told, some 123,000 gallons of water will be saved annually. As someone raised in the next town over from Newberg, McMinnville, all I can say is I wish the rest of this town's architecture, infrastructure and planning were of an equal design caliber to the PCC facility.

 

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Local groundswell for industry-wide 2030 Challenge

2030 Challenge targets (image courtesy Architecture 2030)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

As many now know, buildings are the primary source of energy demand and the main user of materials that produce by-product greenhouse gases. But since its creation in 2002, led by architect Ed Mazria, the 2030 Challenge (administered by the Architecture 2030 nonprofit organization) has steadily gained steam as a primary collective effort of architects to address climate change. Its simple rallying point is to for all buildings within 18 years of now to be net-zero in energy and other resource usage – to become carbon neutral at least.

The challenge asks all architects who sign on to commit to all new buildings, developments and major renovations they design being at least 60 percent lower than their regional or national code performance standards for fossil fuel and greenhouse gas emissions. At least half of this should be renovation of existing buildings.

The fossil-fuel reduction standard for all new buildings and major renovations is set to be increased to 70% in 2015, then 80% in 2020, 90% in 2025 and finally carbon neutrality by 2030. By which time—assuming the Mayans turn out to be wrong—I’ll be 58 years old.

Portland’s architecture and building community has played a pioneering role in advancing sustainable building, from having the most LEED-rated buildings per capita of virtually any US city much of the past decade to today taking a leading role in eco-districts and other expanding scales of change.

Representatives from about 35 Portland firms have signed on to the 2030 Challenge, including not only small firms and practitioners such as In Situ Architecture, Emily Refi, Atelier Z and Communitecture but also larger ones such as Ankrom Moisan, YGH, SERA Architects, Mahlum and GBD Architects, not to mention Award winning design studios and firms such as THA Architecture, Opsis and Hennebery Eddy and contractors like Green Hammer and even realtors such as Living Room, Redside and Realty Trust. (You can read the full list here.)

Another sign of commitment is how local organizations are leading the charge. Starting next week on February 10, for example, the Portland chapter of the American Institute of Architects will begin offering a 10-class series for architects seeking to become part of 2030 philosopy and practice. Classes will meet from 8AM-noon the second Friday of each month at the Center for Architecture (403 NW 11th Avenue). Registration ends at 5PM Friday, February 3, but should you read this post after that magic hour, your carriage need not necessarily turn into an organic pumpkin: last minute add-ons will be taken as space is available. Before long, phrases like "thermal envelope" and "load reduction" will be second nature.

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EcoFlats: bike-friendly and ultra efficient on Williams Avenue

EcoFlats (photo by Ben C. Gray)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Recently I toured the EcoFlats mixed-use apartment building, along North Williams Avenue in Portland with its co-developer, Jean-Pierre Veillet of Siteworks Design Build.

Williams Avenue, once the heart of a thriving African American community, is today well known as a popular bike route as well as a burgeoning retail area of restaurants, cafes and shops. The building deliberately aspires to cater to the cycling community and demographic. On the ground floor of the building, for example, is Hopworks Bike Bar. “Some 3,000 riders a day pass by Mr. Ettinger’s new brewpub,” the New York Times’ Linda Baker writes of Hopworks in a recent feature about the neighborhood and catering to cyclists. “It has racks for 75 bicycles and free locks, to-go entrees that fit in bicycle water-bottle cages, and dozens of handmade bicycle frames suspended over the bar areas.”

There are no automobile parking spaces for tenants, but the 18-unit building has storage for 30 bikes. “Cyclists are a great potential market for businesses that want people traveling at human-scale speed and will stop and buy something,” Roger Geller, the city’s bicycle coordinator, also told Baker.

Hopworks Bike Bar on the EcoFlats ground floor (photo by Ben C. Gray)

Eco Flats is one of 15 building projects aiming toward net-zero operations through a pilot program launched in 2009 by Energy Trust of Oregon. Co developed by Doug Shapiro, it was designed to use approximately 60 percent less energy than a building constructed to code stipulations. Veillet says actual savings have been higher, approaching 80 percent. In the ground-floor entry to the apartments via elevator, a flat-screen TV affixed to the upper wall conveys in real time the amount of energy being used by each unit as well as how much energy is being generated by a rooftop array of solar panels.

“It took two years to convince the bank, but it was filled with tenants in 30 days,” Jean-Pierre Veillet says. “This isn’t a political statement. It’s something easy we can do now that saves 80 percent of the energy.”

The building’s architect is Works Partnership, the Portland firm that has won a slough of design awards and acclaim over the past decade for both new buildings like bSide6 and renovations like the Eastbank Commerce Center. (Rick Potestio, another of the city's top architects, also contributed early in the project.) Curiously, though, you won’t find the EcoFlats in Works Partnership’s website portfolio. This doesn’t seem to be because Works has washed its hands with its client or that there was friction. It’s a successful project economically, and I would argue aesthetically as well. But Veillet (whose work includes the expansion of Portland restaurant Genoa as well as a pop-up store in Manhattan for clothier Nau, also featured in the Times), is a  blend of builder and designer, more so than just the contractor-led method the name Sitworks Design-Build would indicate.

Ecoflats (photos by Brian Libby)

“I respect Bill and Carrie as a architects. Bill is very dynamic with his design sensibility and capturing a building in the larger built environment. Carrie is brilliance in a bottle,” Veillet says of the relationship. “But EcoFlats is not a project that was fully under their control. I had the role of main contributor of funds, was heavily involved in design, ultimately responsible to the construction, and the promoter to the banks and PDC to gather their support. They are not a stamp-providing architecture firm and this one is a tweener. I provided the seed, they all helped it grow, then I trimmed the bush.”

From a visual, aesthetic point of view, EcoFlats looks just like what it is: a handsome although maybe not outright beautiful building that resembles Works projects like bSide 6 in the three dimensional quality of its façade, yet perhaps lacks the detail and rigor of a full-fledged Works Partnership piece of architecture. Yet this wasn’t something Veillet and Works fell into; at least from Veillet’s point of view, it was an intentional, pragmatic move that has resulted in exceptional efficiency yet reasonable rental rates.

EcoFlats (photos by Ben C. Gray)

What’s more, although the EcoFlats look is not a rigidly pristine one, it has a slightly rough-and-tumble quality that is not unsuccessful. The more I got to know the building, the more I came to like it.  That’s in part because of materials such as reclaimed timber used in the upstairs walkway, or ceramic-coated siding, a Japanese import that modulates the building’s temperature swings by absorbing heat or cold and ventilating it before the building core absorbs it.

I also particularly enjoyed the metal-mesh screens on the front facade and how they appear almost like drapery only more industrial. The facade here seems reminiscent to my eyes not only of Works' bSide6 but also Holst Architecture's celebrated Belmont Lofts.

And you can’t talk about the building of the EcoFlats without considering the timing: a so-called Great Recession in which government and nonprofit incentives exist for green projects but banks have been extraordinarily reluctant to lend. That Veillet was able to line up support and collaboration from the Portland Development Commission, the Energy Trust of Oregon to make his project both pencil out and receive funding is no small feat.

EcoFlats interior and back courtyard (photos by Ben C. Gray)

In the end, there are buildings that win awards for their sculptural quality, and others which find their prestige being certified by LEED or other green building rating systems, but both are a small minority of what gets built. I think of the EcoFlats as an efficient building like those with green certifications, and more than hinting at the kind of design presence on the street that turns heads, be they of passers by or design juries. If it’s more of a DIY version that wears its pragmatism on its sleeve, the EcoFlats also delivers ample helpings of both function and form, all at a time when the wheels of the building machine have been grinding at their slowest time in a generation. It’s hard not to hoist a mug of beer or pipe a bike wheelie in response.

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The Living Building Challenge is gaining ground

June Key Delta Center (image courtesy greenposting.org)

BY JULIETTE BEALE

As soon as I entered the June Key Delta Center on an otherwise dark, stormy recent evening, the mood shifted. As part of an AIA/Committee on the Environment tour, I was greeted by two warm, friendly ladies responsible for the fruition of this newly completed community center in Northeast Portland, Chris and Leah, along with architect Mark Nye. They enthusiastically described the building’s systems, reclaimed materials, cargo containers, and community gardens. It was exciting to hear how this former gas station was converted into a simple community building and achieved such strict environmental goals (it is the first building in Portland attempting to meet Living Building Challenge strictures) on a piecemeal budget. It was even more exciting to see how this collection of retired women, have become experts on green building and some of its strongest advocates.

First established in 2006, the Living Building Challenge is gaining traction as a critical benchmark for sustainability. The LBC is the brainchild of Jason McLennan, CEO of the Cascadia Green Building Council, who describes the LBC as a “philosophy, advocacy platform, and certification program.” The LBC is composed of seven “petals” or performance areas including site, water, energy, health, materials, equity and beauty. These are further broken down into twenty imperatives that must be met in order to achieve certification. The standard includes areas most practitioners are well versed in, but is very stringent- net zero energy, net zero water, and a red-list of commonly used materials, among other criteria. It also includes areas, outside the scope of LEED, that are more intangible and harder to quantify like supporting a just and equitable world, democracy and social justice, rights to nature, and beauty and spirit.

To date, there are four Living Building Challenge-certified buildings, which is quite a feat considering that a project must go through design, construction, and then be occupied for one year while meeting the imperatives. Another 100 projects are beginning in nine countries and 27 states. The Portland design and construction community is quickly lining up to take on the Challenge: 13 projects have commenced in Oregon, most of which are single-family residences.

Given the emerging enthusiasm around the Challenge, the Portland AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) has chosen this as its theme for 2012. To kick things off, the organization hosted a lecture on Peace Island Medical Center, a Mahlum-designed project striving to meet Living Building goals, as well as the aforementioned June Key Delta House tour.

For its annual Green Champions Summit, the committee hosted an evening on the Living Building Challenge with Eden Brukman, Vice President of the International Living Future Institute, which overseas the LBC. Capturing a different aspect of the Challenge, each event demonstrated that the LBC is at the cutting edge of sustainable building and demands new ways of thinking about the intersection of design, the environment, and the surrounding community. As one attendee at Brukman’s event described it, “The Living Building Challenge is LEED on steroids.” 

In his presentation of Peace Island Medical Center, Mahlum’s Erik Goodfriend discussed the rewards and challenges of certifying a small-scale medical facility. Sited near Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, Washington, a Living Building seemed like an appropriate response to the remote location’s finite natural resources. It helped that PeaceHealth, the client, strongly valued the environmental stewardship inherent to the Challenge and made this a design priority.   

The intangible petals, equity and beauty, which require a written narrative for certification, were easily achievable. Yet, other petals posed more difficulty, largely due to the programmatic needs of the medical facility. Daylighting the imaging spaces to meet the “Civilized Environments” imperative was not an option. Energy use and ventilation demands, in spite of rigorous sustainable design strategies, were still fell short of Challenge goals due to medical equipment loads.  In many cases, sourcing materials and appropriate technologies to meet the client’s budget was impossible since many of these are brand new and very costly.  Wastewater treatment technologies, designed to meet the “Water”, in the end, were not permitted. Ultimately, PeaceHealth used the LBC guidelines as a framework, but will only receive partial certification.

A recent Committee on the Environment lecture (photo by Juliette Beale)

In spite of this experience, Goodfriend remained optimistic about the LBC. He firmly believes that it should serve as the benchmark for sustainable building and that medical centers like Peace Island, will be able to meet the LBC in the future. Goodfriend remarked that we have the design principles to get us there so now it is a matter of placing emphasis on the innovation of new materials and developing precedents that open up avenues for revising the codes.

The Living Building Challenge not only demands innovation in sustainable design and technology, but it also forces designers to consider questions they may not regularly ponder as avidly as in school. Central to the Challenge is the question, “What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?” COTE’s Green Champion Summit focused on this question by presenting the “Equity” and “Beauty” Petals to a crowd of eighty architects, designers, and engineers. The audience was asked first to define the terms beauty, democracy, social justice, and natural rights. Then, they were asked to consider what metrics could be used to quantify them.  

There was much crossover in the definitions participants developed for these different categories reflecting the interconnected nature of the petals.  “Rights to Nature” touched on many site imperatives as well as the health imperative, “Biophilia.” Most people felt Rights to Nature should include day-lit views to the outside, healthy air, and basic access to resources.  A possible metric that was offered involved creating an inventory of environmental assets at the project’s beginning and making sure these were preserved through post-occupancy.

When it came to democracy and social justice, definitions were expressed more in the form of questions. Does the project exploit people? Who is being served? Is there a disparity in cost per square foot between the user group and visitors? The metrics developed were less about design and more about increasing the number of voices and stakeholders. There were ideas about having a minimum number of community members included or a minimum number of hours that key stakeholders must spend listening to the larger community.

Brukman, who collected these comments and plans to draw from them when writing the next version of the LBC, was particularly interested in the architect’s perspective on beauty. In conversations she has had with other professionals, most touch on the idea that there should be some community involvement in deciding what is beautiful, especially within the user group. But several architects present brought up the need for craft and craftsmanship with a possible metric being the number of craftsmen on a project.

It was COTE’s hope that people would leave the evening with more questions than answers.   “From a bigger picture standpoint it was interesting to focus the sustainable design conversation around somewhat intangible things,” co-Chair Erica Dunn said. “We have all heard the conversations on energy, water, and waste, but they are only a piece of being truly sustainable. And it is these intangible things such as beauty, democracy, and social justice that take the conversation beyond the four walls of the building to look at the building’s impact on the larger community.”

The Living Building Challenge forces people to consider these important questions. And it is these questions that compel us to think more deeply about the impact of our designs thereby opening new channels for discussion. To date, the predominant focus of sustainable building has largely been on the environmental impacts. By expanding this to include rights to nature, beauty and social justice, the LBC enlarges the design discourse to include underrepresented voices and elements. In so doing, as demonstrated by the June Key Delta Center and Peace Island Medical Center, all those involved become experts and proponents. The more advocates there are and the more that sustainable buildings connect to people’s spirit through their beauty and equity, the more likely it is that these buildings will be maintained for years to come. And that is sustainable design in the truest sense.

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Talking with POSI's Rob Bennett about this week's EcoDistrict Summit

Lloyd Crossing ecodistrict plan (image courtesy Mithun)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

This week from October 26-28, the Portland Oregon Sustainability Institute will present the second annual Ecodistrict Summit, which is the premier annual conference dedicated to neighborhood-scale sustainability initiatives. Recently I spoke with the head of POSI, Rob Bennett, who previously has worked as the founding director of the city's Office of Sustainability as well as for the William J. Clinton Foundation, about the conference and the broader ecodistricts movement.

Tell me about this week's Ecodistricts conference and the issues surrounding this movement.

The conference is our major event. We felt it was important to have a learning event around this notion of green neighborhood development. It’s one we’re passionate about. We think the neighborhood is an important geography for urban sustainability. It’s small enough where you can innovate but has import and scalability opportunities to move those ideas and strategies out and replicate them.

Meanwhile there’s this explosion going on internationally along green neighborhood development. What are the good ideas? What are communities doing to green their neighborhood? How are they approaching the link between people, infrastructure and buildings?

We rarely talk about the occupant experience in buildings. In neighborhoods, the neighbor or business, it’s so critical to the functionality and the livelihood of a neighborhood. We have good examples of long standing neighborhoods like Alberta and Mississippi, and dysfunctional neighborhoods too. So we’ve got a lot of work to do in Portland and elsewhere to kind of re-inhabit the neighborhood and make it one of the most important scales of cities. If you get your neighborhood right, you get your city right. That’s what Jane Jacobs talked about.

I always find interesting the psychological dimensions of place and that how we feel about our place in it is tied often to neighborhoods. I’m a Portlander and an Oregonian, but I also live in Sunnyside and live near Burnside and 28th. I need it to thrive for me to thrive. I need to get coffee and for my kids to go to school and to buy groceries and not have to get into my car to do it. It sets your life course. If you live in a neighborhood without sidewalks or a school not within walking or biking distance, or a store without fresh food, that puts you at a disadvantage.

So at the conference, we’re going to bring together over 100 leaders and professionals from around the world who are going to share their stories. We’re breaking it into a variety of topics and look at the district scale and what’s working in exemplary neighborhoods. We’ve got cities like Nagoya, Toronto, Stockholm, Mexico city, New Orleans, Detroit and Seattle represented. It’ll be interesting to see how district cultures.

How do you address equity and the notion that some neighborhoods feel left out?

I think the fundamental premise of ecodistricts is healthy environment, healthy community. We need to take a more measured and systematic approach to how we look at the neighborhood and the combination of projects and programs we bring. So it is messy. Any time you’re talking about community development and ecological health, it’s messy. We’ve decided to shine a light on five pilot neighborhoods and take them through a systematic approach to identifying performance goals and initiatives they want to put together. You’ve got to do this with the community and the city. And it’s early days for us. This is a long play. We’d like to see a shiny neighborhood, but that doesn’t exist. So these are really kind of organizing principles and a performance specification.

Rob Bennett (image courtesy POSI)

What have you learned so far?

A couple of early lessons. We’re working in diverse districts from Lloyd and South Waterfront that are dense with high quality infrastructure, and in Gateway and Foster/Green (Lents). What’s been interesting working out in those neighborhoods is there’s not an obvious sort of consolidation of power or leadership that would stake an ecodistrict idea and own it. It literally is a knitting together of community organizations, businesses, nonprofit interests. It’s really creating a tapestry of organizations that are rowing in the same direction.

I have to admit we worried this could be a disaster. But we decided with ecodistricts it’s important to identify strategies tuned to the people living there. We are less interested in prescribing an outcome as a performance model and a process. We are very committed to ecodistrict pilots having strong performance goals. But we’re also committed to asking, ‘How do you achieve those goals and what is the most important?’ To date we’ve had success out in Gateway and Lents. There’s been a lot of enthusiasm. In the case of Lents there’s at least a dozen organizations that have signed on. They see this as a way for them to envision a healthy and a positive future. They feel like they’ve got a tremendous amount of ownership. It helps create a balance approach to city planning. It’s driven by the city almost exclusively. This creates more of a balance with the communities and their needs. We’ve been encouraged by that.

Another issue is we’re insisting on local governance. For Portland to meet its sustainability goals, you can’t just have climate and land use policy at one end and a green building policy at the other end. You need neighborhoods to sustain their own performance. I see this as a community organizer as Neighborhood 2.0. If we get this right and figure out governance and find a way to raise money that stays in a neighborhood, this becomes the fundamental things neighborhoods do. It isn’t pet issues. They have a fundamental responsibility to make their neighborhood better. You’re no longer suggesting it’s the responsibility of private development owners or the city. I think we all buy in to that.

Might private developers feel threatened by people organizing to decide what comes in or out of their neighborhood?

These are supposed to inform broader policy conversations, but not to create additional levels of regulatory red tape. What we’re starting is with this notion of local governance, and then looking at footprints for energy, water, etc. through community needs assessment you’d start to identify key projects that need to happen. If the neighborhood is interested in being carbon neutral by X date, you find that it’s in the energy use in buildings and the waste streams. We need to get so much more out of building retrofit strategies and for our new buildings to be high performing and maybe having a shared energy strategy. It would be a toolbox for how they meet their goals. That says nothing about red tape or additional regulations. It does provide additional information to say, ‘Our new buildings need to be higher performing than the current code.’ If there’s any regulations that were to come from ecodistricts, it would be that we’ve found ways and strategies to do higher performing buildings or infrastructure that needs to get codified citywide.

Having worked in the neighborhood system, you’re always reacting to that development proposal or that parking issue. You’re never looking upstream and saying, what do we need for our neighborhood to be more sustainable? If you get your principles right and get clear about the kind of outcomes you’re trying to achieve, when those projects come potentially you have a fuller appreciation of that project in context. At the neighborhood level now you have land use committees and those reacting to design. If you actually had neighborhood organizations acting on outcomes and not a particular project, that may help to create a more sophisticated neighborhood governance.

What’s POSI’s role in the Oregon Sustainability Center?

I would characterize our role today as provocateur and cheerleader for the project. We’re really focused on making sure it’s a good ecodistrict project with multiple benefits to the district. What happens with the program? How does it achieve its vision of achieving sustainability that teaches and inspires and is a useful community asset? We’ve certainly got the crack sustainability team figuring out how to make it net zero and talented development people. We just want there to be a robust learning program within it: things like the smart grid or the energy management systems and how that can inform other buildings at PSU, how the wastewater treatment facility can be scaled to include adjacent development. The real opportunity is to create linkage throughout the rest of the district. It really is going to require the tenants to look at how they use energy, water, and how they look at the building.

What do you see in the future for ecodistricts?

The short answer is there are sustainability solutions that cities need to implement: bike infrastructure, district energy, smart grids, increased stormwater and wastewater management at the district scale. There are a lot of tools in the toolbox. We want to be continuing to push those strategies so they have a robust business case. We’re committed to the long arc of sustainability in cities and really pushing them like we are with district energy and we are about to with bike sharing. In our partnership with PSU we hope to bring more research capability to POSI and identify and validate best practices that are being applied globally and being able to catalog those so we can move that stream of projects more quickly forward. We’re tying to be a tip of spear organization that identifies compelling projects. The more quickly we can assemble teams, the better off our mission is served.

One thing in five years that would be revolutionary for the city is figuring out this notion of better neighborhood initiative. How do you unleash power of culture and technology to have markedly more high performing and livable neighborhoods? There’s all kinds of cases like peer-to-peer car sharing: I’ve got something, I don’t use it very often. I want to be able to rent it out to my neighbors and has a benefit to me, like with GetAround. You spend $100 and install yourself in your own car. This company enables you to share your car. Your phone basically becomes a calendar tool saying when it’s available. It’s a rental mechanism and door lock. It tracks mileage, fuel. States around the country have adopted insurance policies. Whenever you’re using the car, you’re using that person’s insurance.

There’s all kinds of technology like that releases cooperation. As resources become more scarce and we become more poor, which I think is happening, the desire to have material good but for less is going to be paramount. Fruit gleaning, composting, solarizing…there’s all this energy, neighborhood-based energy to do community projects that improve livability and connectivity. We want to figure out how to capture that in a more systemic model that unleashes the technology innovators with the impulses of community building and sharing. That’s fun. I don’t know where it’s going to take us. But companies like IBM, Cisco and Nike are all very interested in this. It’s all about technology linking to have a higher quality of life.

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Mayor Adams, GBD's Andersen and SERA's Petterson on the Oregon Sustainability Center

Oregon Sustainability Center lobby (rendering courtesy GBD Architects)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Last month in an article for Atlantic Cities, I wrote about the Oregon Sustainability Center and how Portland's (and Oregon's) investment in the project amounted to a kind of stimulus package that on a national level the government (log-jammed by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives) has abandoned.

As is often the case, I wound up with a lot more interview text than could be used in that story. So I'd like to share here a series of comments and observations from Kyle Andersen of GBD Architects and Lisa Petterson of SERA Architects, the two firms collaborating on the project, as well as Mayor Sam Adams, one of its chief proponents.

The $62 million OSC, if it goes forward, could lead to what would arguably be the world’s greenest office building, or at least the first mixed-use office to meet strictures of the Living Building Challenge. (Seattle currently has such a building under construction, but it would be smaller and with a single tenant rather than the group of tenants at the OSC.) It is designed to achieve net-zero levels of electricity and water usage. It may also become a provider of green energy for other nearby buildings, as part of one of Portland's first eco-districts. And the building may even come to transform the conservative commercial real estate market. Unlike the norm with Class-A office buildings, the Sustainability Center will ask tenants to share conference rooms and even storage space with each other instead of each tenant having their own; leases will be calculated in part on how much of it you choose to use.

My conversation with Andersen & Petterson began, however, with the notion of the Center as an incubator, able to nurture and grow Portland's broader sustainability community, both in terms of the private and public sectors. "The building is really intended to be a living laboratory," Petterson said."Think of someone at PCC taking a class in photovoltaics. They go to the OSC and they’re exposed to this wealth."

The OSC's south facade (rendering courtesy GBD Architects)

"It’s like there’s a fourth dimension, where people who have vision work well together maybe the same happens with people who share this ethic and this entrepreneurial energy," Andersen added. "There’s a story there in workforce training and businesses coming together."

Continuing the idea of the building being an investment in an industry, Sam Adams  said, "The OSC is the result of a community who was the first adopters of green building LEED approach to development and design. It’s radical common sense we’re talking about: creating buildings that are self-sufficient. The next wave I hope goes from sustainability to resilience. This will be one of the largest living buildings in the world. The point is to not be the only one or the first but to be the first of many."

Adams also addressed the building's cost, which may be - besides aesthetics - one of the main aspects of the project to draw criticism. In a time when there is already a glut of office space, the OSC would charge rents some 20 percent higher than the market rate. "Because we’re doing something that hadn’t been done before, this is an R&D prototype that will be replicable," Adams said. "It will be what building and construction should be in the future. There’s a premium to this building. But there was a premium for the first Model T, or for our first domestically made streetcar.There’s an entire strategy, an entire job creation strategy. What came first was the research in terms of how we as a region can export more to the world. Clean technology, athletic and outdoor, software development, and research & commercialization are our clusters. We have a world-class opportunity to export goods, services and get royalties. This will produce locally not just in construction but in the years to come the architects, the engineers, the workers will all be part of this. They’ll have expertise that no one else in the world has."

The OSC from an aerial perspective (rendering courtesy GBD Architects)

"We went through the same conversation 10, 11 years ago with Ecotrust," the mayor added. "It’s harder because of the recession. It’s harder because of the political climate, the need to balance budget. But standing alongside that is the need and the opportunity to gain market share. You do that by producing a product and an innovation that no one else has. Portland has been recognized as a sustainable city. We get 80 delegations a year from other cities to see how we do it. But they’re more than nipping at our heels. We don’t want to be the biggest city. I want us to be the smallest, scrappiest, most successful international city. And to do that you’ve got to invest in innovation."

One of the key ideas with the Oregon Sustainability Center is the idea of plug and play: that its technologies and materials can be changed easily over time as innovations continue. "The best spaces are precisely general," Petterson explained. "There’s enough structure that they feel strong, but enough looseness that they can change over time. "It’s adaption or lack of it that gets buildings dated. You need new technology but there’s no way to do it in an affordable way."

Buildings in America consume some 40 percent of total energy used, and most all offices are using energy at the same time - during business hours. Much of that power is devoted to heating and cooling loads. For the OSC, however, there will be a battery on top that "is used to shave peak load off the building," Andersen added. "The battery is charged at night time when the demand on the grid is at its lowest. Then conversely the battery is used to power portions of the building during mid-afternoon hours when the grid is at its peak load."

The OSC viewed from the southwest (rendering courtesy GBD Architects)

"In this country we’re building power plants for three days a year," Petterson added. "The idea is we’d have a bank of batteries under a big roof, getting power from the grid at night. When it’s your peak time."

Given some of the OSC's innovations, I concluded by asking the architects for some future trends in sustainable buildings.

"All buildings are going to look different depending on where they’re at," Andersen said. "And I think you’ll see improvement in the skin. You’re creating an environment that can be stabilized. It’s the buildings going up and down that become energy pigs."

"If you think about a typical building, you change out the lighting every 10-15 years and the mechanical every 20-25, there are very few that get new skins," Petterson concured. "The buildings get replaced instead. All the embodied energy of the concrete frame is lost when you make that choice. That’s why the envelope is the critical piece."

"In the future, skins of buildings are going to sweat and breathe and open and close," Andersen said, "using things like algae and photosynthesis to create energy. They’re making spandrel glass out of that now."

There may still be reason for skepticism. Personally, although the OSC has made great strides from previous incarnations, I still do not find it exceptionally pretty (although of course renderings are easy to misjudge). The building's ability to get funding from the state legislature may also still prevent it from being constructed, especially given that Adams is not seeking a second term and thus can only cheerlead it through next year. Yet to talk particularly with its architects about the building and, by extension, the future of sustainable design and construction, is to become inspired. If the world doesn't become a tropical swamp in the future with 7 billion people living at the poles and most of today's favorite island getaways under water, it will be because of the passion and smarts of architects like these showing us a different path.

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Building science and the home energy performance revolution

 

Passive House diagram (courtesy 100khouse.com)

BY ZACK SEMKE

Editor's note: In full disclosure, this post was written by an employee of Hammer & Hand, a Portland Architecture sponsor. But is not intended as an advertorial. Rather, it was decided that the company's pursuit and promotion of Passive House technology would be relevant to readers and, because one of Hammer & Hand's leaders also leads the nonprofit Passive House Alliance, part of a broader exploration.

As I've watched our home performance team conduct dozens of home energy performance audits and home energy retrofit services in recent weeks, I've been reflecting on how different the green building landscape is now versus just 15 years ago.   What's changed?  Our understanding of building science: how a building's various components interact with one another in a holistic system.

Today, building science experts are transforming the field of home performance energy audits and retrofits.  Backed by a rigorous understanding of building physics and dynamics, advanced building scientists can model, design and implement home energy retrofits that eclipse yesterday’s home energy efficiency improvements.

“The field of building science has grown up and is now driving reductions in home energy consumption that would have seemed impossible ten or twenty years ago”, explains Sam Hagerman, co-owner of Hammer & Hand, and President of the national nonprofit, the Passive House Alliance.  “The best building science technicians know how to harness this new power to the benefit of clients and the planet.”

The typical home performance technician not trained in advanced building science is forced to rely on a boilerplate approach in the field, applying prescriptive retrofit solutions aimed at satisfying the requirements of the latest governmental weatherization program.  While this approach does achieve some reduction in home energy consumption, it falls short on two counts: it squanders money on prescriptive home energy solutions that may not address the unique problems of a given home; and it results in energy retrofits that will likely become obsolete in 10 or 15 years, or whenever the next weatherization program comes along.

Advanced building science, on the other hand, revolutionizes home performance audits and home energy retrofits because it empowers the building scientist to optimize homes through a performance approach, using sophisticated modeling to tweak air tightness, insulation, ventilation and other building component variables to design the most cost-effective home energy retrofit possible for each unique home.  This leads to better solutions with bigger return on investment, and energy efficiency gains that are well ahead of the curve – retrofits that will stand the test of time.

“Everything is about optimizing”, says Skylar Swinford, Certified Passive House Consultant and building science team leader at Hammer & Hand.  “Take heat recovering ventilation systems, for instance.  I love HRVs because they conserve energy that would otherwise be lost in a home’s exhaust air.  But when we do the math, if the building science tells us that super-insulation is a more impactful investment for a given home, then we prescribe that ahead of an HRV, and switch to a more basic continuous mechanical ventilation system.  Each variable is scrutinized and fine-tuned for optimal performance.”

The Passive House movement, widely recognized as representing the cutting edge of building science and home energy performance, is a potent source of building science expertise for our leading building analysts and technicians.  So it’s no surprise that today’s most successful energy retrofit measures come straight from the Passive House high performance playbook, like:

• Aggressive air sealing to create a nearly airtight building shell.

• Continuous mechanical ventilation to provide constant flow of fresh air – often a heat recovering system for better energy performance.

• Intensive, high quality insulation, with low global warming potential – usually cellulose or water-blown spray foam.

• Computer modeling to optimize the performance and value of the home energy retrofit package.

“When we are smart about home energy performance audits and retrofits, and bring advanced building science to bear,” says Hagerman, “it’s a win for each individual client who receives better home performance for the money – greater comfort, safety, and energy savings.  But it’s also a win for society at large, because we’re taking full advantage of every retrofit to significantly reduce the energy consumption of our built environment.”

And that’s important if we hope to make a dent in global climate change or achieve energy independence and security.  Roughly half of US energy demand comes from buildings and the building sector.  And each time we don’t maximize the potential of an energy retrofit, we’re missing a critical opportunity that might not come along again for a long time.  After all, if we deliver an inadequate energy retrofit to a homeowner once, do we really expect that person to have the appetite for another retrofit any time soon?

We need to do it right the first time.  Fortunately, the building science is now there to make that happen.

Zack Semke is Director of Business Development and Chief Evangelist for Hammer & Hand

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Reinventing Portland Community College: a conversation with GBD Architects' Kyle Andersen

PCC's Sylvania Campus (image courtesy Portland Community College)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In the first decade after World War II, the G.I. Bill made it possible for a generation of former service members to obtain an education. And obtain they did, on a massive scale. A total of 2.3 million students enrolled in higher education programs in 1947 swelled to nearly 5 million by 1960. In many cases, it wasn't traditional four-year colleges this wave of new students attended, but one of the literally hundreds of community college and junior colleges built in that period.

Portland Community College's Sylvania campus came a little later, in 1968. But it is the oldest facility in the PCC system, as well as the largest. Like many community colleges in the area and in the nation, it has the institutional feel of the era from which it came, that of Brutalism: a subset of modernist architecture from the 1960s and 70s that was most often concrete in form and, while utopian in its idealistic intent, was often practically the opposite in reality: with banal, repetitive forms that today, despite their clean-lined geometry, feel oppressive for their lack of human scale, natural light and warm materials. In the hands of a few select masters, such as Louis Kahn, Brutalist architecture could be sublime. But walking amidst the concrete ubiquity of PCC Sylvania or, one yearns for the small forest adjacent to the campus. (Sylvan literally means "wooded".)

Currently, however, GBD Architects and Gerding Edlen Development are working with PCC on a group of initiatives, some being enacted as we speak and others on a future wish list, that will help the school potentially save millions of dollars in energy costs while giving PCC a new role in training workers the emerging green economy.

The E6/Net Zero Project, as it is known, seeks to transform PCC Sylvania both in terms of how it operates and how it feels to be there. If the school greenlights all of the sustainable investments recommended, it will actually become a net-producer of energy, generating more electricity than the campus needs. The plan also calls for the school to have close to net-zero water usage by collecting rainwater and recycling water.

Nowhere is the need for reinvention more evident than the central DeBernardis College Center building ("CC" for short), which houses administrative offices, a dining hall, the Women's Resource Center, the Multicultural Center, and more. It's the closest thing to a student union, but unless you're in a select few private offices, it could be noon or midnight and you'd never be able to tell inside the public gathering spaces. And environmentally speaking, although concrete holds its thermal mass like a basement and is thus energy efficient as a material, much of the wintertime heating and summertime cooling disappear through single-pane windows.

Students in PCC Sylvania's CC buiding (image courtesy Portland Community College)

"It's got solid bones," GBD Architects' Kyle Andersen says of the concrete-ensconced PCC campus in Southwest Portland. "This thing is so stout. It’s all columns and beams and waffle slabs. You like to stand back and say, 'What were they thinking?' The architecture really handles you. Now those things are called barriers, and they cause problems for people with mobility issues and it’s disorienting. We talked about removing those barriers and humanizing the space.There’s a lot we’re doing taking private offices away from the windows and create smaller impromptu meeting spaces."

Besides the mechanical and energy side of reinventing PCC Sylvania, the architects are looking at humanizing the campus, where an open area between the buildings in the middle is disjointed because of a convoluted series of passageways and raised platforms, seemingly one added to the other without a sense of the congruent whole. When one moves from the center to the other buildings, it's a matter of following another prescriptive concrete pathway. Then there's the fact that PCC Sylvania students arrive overwhelmingly by car, thus making a surface parking lot surrounding much of the campus a kind of suburban-style banality of asphalt. Along with building design, the challenge is to make people change the way they get to the school.

Although net-zero energy and water are goals, the initial work at PCC Sylvania will focus on 165,000 square feet of renovation for existing buildings, within the strictures of funding in place via a recent bond measure. There will also be new construction, for a child development center construction. But for the most part, Andersen says, "These buildings are 40 plus years old. It’s upgrading the technology, adapting them for new ways of learning."

"Right now we’re base-lining the buildings: measuring the buildings’ performances so we can measure their improvements," the architect adds. "That’s really what it’s about to reach that net zero: starting with energy efficiency savings, and adding alternative energy over time. We’re looking at wind turbines, PV, even fuel cells."

"Students, faculty, facilities people—there are a lot of participants in the discussion. It’s really about consensus building. We meet with them depart by department, document their needs, draw it up, and give it to the contractor to see if it lines up with our budget. If we get it lined up, we have a framework plan. And we do that for every building. We’ve got to prioritize so there’s the most economic benefit and environmental benefit to the campus."

Infographic of PCC Sylvania buiding age (courtesy Gerding Edlen Development)

In some cases, Andersen says, grand plans gave way to the need for band-aids. "The whole E6 thing was supposed to come in and do all these changes and modifications. But then you realize there are changes in the system themselves that need changing. Insulation was falling off," he explains. "There are these tunnels under the buildings, with pipes running through them. There’s valving that was stuck open. We’re insulating pipes and replacing valves. We found that the boilers were really low-efficiency. We found by the time it got to the swimming pool, the hot water dropped by 30 degrees. We’re also adding a de-humidification unit, and taking the waste heat to pump it back into the air or water. That thing will save a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in energy."

As changes big and small are made, students will be along for the ride, not just receiving a better Sylvania campus but learning the kinds of trades that will bring them jobs in the emerging sustainable economy. "The workforce training that’s going on at PCC is a key component," Andersen says. "You'll be able to how to take care of building commissioning, photovoltaic cells. That’s why community colleges are bursting at the seems, why enrollment at PCC Sylvania up 30 percent in last year or two."

Already ties are being made. Vestas, the wind-turbine manufacture that recently located its American headquarters in Portland, now serves as an adviser for the Renewable Energy Systems Program offered at the PCC Sylvania Campus. The program is part of Sylvania’s Electronic Engineering Technology Program. SolarWorld is also a long-time partner organization with PCC’s Microelectronics Program, housed at the Rock Creek Campus. Over time, these partnerships and initiatives can combine and be centralized at Sylvania -- even if there's a boiler to fix, parking to reconfigure, and a host of concrete buildings to re-imagine.

"Our path has changed considerably. It’s been totally modified," Andersen explains. "We’re having to put money in different places to get to the root causes. But we still have our sights on that net zero campus. It's just a question of how we get there."

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UO solar awning project reaches semifinals in national competition, seeks to bridge business-academic gap

Ihab Elzeyadi examines his solar awning (image courtesy University of Oregon)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

A University of Oregon architecture program team has advanced to the semifinals of the Clean Tech 2011 Open Business Competition, keeping them in the running for the $250,000 national grand prize and an opportunity to present before 2,000 attendees at The Cleantech Open’s Global Forum in November.

The mission of the Cleantech Open is to find, fund and foster “the big ideas” that address today’s most urgent energy, environmental and economic challenges. And Innovative Invironments, a Eugene start-up company with collaborations from University of Oregon architecture and business school graduates, advanced to the semifinals with its solar awning , which was developed at the UO High Performance Environments Lab (HiPE) by professor Ihab Elzeyadi.

Known as SolarStream, the awning is described as a three-in-one green building product, with its indoor LED luminaire, daylighting reflector, and PV shade. Its modular system is comprised of conventional photovoltaic cells and shading that attach to a building's exterior, providing shade to windows while reflecting light back inside. Elzeyadi and team tested the awning’s performance on the side of a university building and found that it generates approximately six to eight times the energy necessary to light the building. The awning also lowers temperatures inside, reducing stress on cooling facilities.

Solar awning on Onyx Bridge at UO (image courtesy University of Oregon)

“Our state and the entire region need new, innovative and high-growth companies now more than ever,” said Byron McCann, co-chair of the Pacific Northwest Cleantech Open. “It’s hard enough to start any kind of business, much less one in industries as complex and capital intensive as energy and sustainability. All of us involved are ready to roll up our sleeves and help these entrepreneurs and their innovations succeed.”

Semifinalists will present their final business plan and investor pitch to a judging committee of investors and experts, which will select the three finalists at the regional event in October in Seattle. Those finalists will compete with others from four regions around the U.S. for the national grand prize.

Besides the technical capabilities of the solar awning project, it also represents a potential new avenue of partnership between the University of Oregon and entrepreneurial efforts made by its professors and students.

“There is much uncharted territory between the scientific research that provides innovative new materials and the commercialization of those ideas into products,” writes Lee van der Voo of Sustainable Business Oregon, “But Elzeyadi and the university of Oregon envision another possibility for the eSolar Awning, a corporation representing UO and the laboratory, along with a commercial partner to manufacture products could lie ahead.”

"There's a potential to have a company that would really specialize in these exterior treatments for the building and the building facades," Elzeyadi told van der Voo. "It will take a little bit of two sides coming up with enough people who are interested to draft and design what that company would look like as an R&D company that would be tied to full scale production, and the university becomes part of that."

Elzeyadi's lab is in the process of converting into the Façade Innovation Technology Testing Facility, made possible with funding from Oregon BEST, the university, grants and donations. The facility will be actively testing a variety of sunscreens, windows, solar equipment and other building materials for commercial viability. “Essentially, it will provide a facility to practice on,” van der Voo adds, “one outside of an arena of live construction, where the price for failing can be high.”

Elzeyadi believes sustainable architecture remains rooted too much in best practices, without innovative thinking based in hard science. Many times people have done that to save them money" or simply because it's been successfully done before. The Façade Innovation Technoloty Testing Facility will help engender the necessary market transformation to elevate not just solar technology but a range of products, materials and methods.

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Air-tight architecture: Milos Jovanovic on shifting to Passive House principles

Shift House in Hood River (image courtesy Root Design-Build)

BY JULIETTE BEALE

On the second Wednesday of the month, the AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) invites the design community to bring their lunch to the AIA for an informal “greenbag” lecture. The talks are generally themed around green building and planning with past topics focusing on Net Zero Apartments and community energy production. Milos Jovanovic, of Root Design-Build, presented May’s talk on “Passive House Principles.”

Many Americans may find these airtight houses that are powered on the amount of electricity it takes to run a hairdryer to be cutting edge. Yet, the Passivhaus concept and subsequent Passive House Standards were developed more than twenty years ago in Germany.  The homes rely mainly on solar gain for heating and are passively cooled during warmer months. These passive strategies draw roots from vernacular building. Jovanovic showed a slide of a cluster of traditional homes built into an Icelandic hillside.  Like these homes with their heavy sod roofs, Passive Houses use high thermal mass and insulation to regulate indoor temperatures. Both types of dwellings are oriented to capture solar gain from winter sunlight.

There are only three main guidelines for achieving Passive House certification. First, primary energy use from electricity, hot water, and heating/ cooling must be capped to120 kWh.  Basically this requires that there be no mechanical HVAC unit. Instead,  many of these homes have solar hot water heaters and the spaces are heated passively by occupants, equipment, and solar gain. Second, and most controversial, the home must be airtight with no more than 0.6 air changes per hour. To achieve this, all penetrations must be carefully sealed and a Heat Recovery Ventilation unit (HRV) is installed to strictly control air exchanges. Third, space heating and cooling must each not exceed 15 kWh.  The HRV doubles to provide the extra heating and cooling needs.

Unlike LEED and its prescriptive system of credits, there are no rules, strategies or technologies specifically stipulated by the guidelines. To achieve the low energy use standards, however, typically demands the use of super-insulation, high thermal mass, triple paned glazing, insulated doors, an HRV, low energy appliances, and elements that help regulate the exterior climate such as vegetation and reflective surfaces. The Passive House Institute has developed its own energy modeling software where designers input the values from wall systems, windows, and foundations to determine whether the house is meeting the standards and which areas need to be improved.  This is followed up with in-field testing to insure the model’s accuracy.

Shift House in Hood River (image courtesy Root Design-Build)

In these days where climate change, peak oil, and fears of nuclear fall-out are growing concerns, Passive Houses sound like a great panacea to the energy crisis.  The typical Passive House uses a mere 15 kW per year.  When you compare this number to the average US home, which uses 130 kW per year, it quickly becomes apparent why Jovanovic sees this as the next revolution in the field of green building.

The economics of building and operating a passive house are equally intriguing.  A major goal for Jovanovic is to achieve Passive House Standards while on the budget of a typical home.  He is in the midst of doing this with Shift House, a 2,200 square foot Hood River residence with a budget of just $330,000.  The added costs associated with the efficient walls, windows, and doors are made up for by omitting the mechanical system.  Shift House is designed using quality products that last longer and need to be replaced less often to help reduce maintenance costs.  Lastly, the long term energy savings attributed to minimizing heat loss through the envelope help offset the more expensive cost of the wall systems.

Based on these points, I am a little surprised I haven’t seen more Portlanders rushing out to get triple paned windows or demanding architects use structural insulated panels (SIPs).  Yet as a practitioner in an office that has a great deal of respect for traditional details, I can see why we are skeptical of this technology.  Like the members in the audience, I found myself asking, “Where is the dew point in the twelve inch wall? How does the rainscreen get attached?  If the house must be airtight, how do you ventilate the roof? Can you really limit all thermal bridges? Are the windows operable?  Is the bathroom, at least, ventilated?”   

For many folks, the technologies are still a little unsettling.  Most of the products Jovanovic has used in his own projects, from windows to building tape, must be ordered from Europe. The construction practices and materials are new to contractors and require a learning curve. Jovanovic showed an image of a crane hoisting the large roof SIPs into place, a construction technique that appeared costly and cumbersome for a single-family residence.  After so much attention has been focused on Sick Building Syndrome, the concept of an airtight house, even with an HRV, still sounds like an unhealthy environment.  What will it take for us to shift our paradigm and be comfortable with these diagrams and figures?

Jovanovic patiently answered each of the questions from the audience with assured confidence. He described the architectural details and new systems he used in Shift House, that are frequently employed in other Passive Houses, in response to people’s skepticism.

In detailing Shift House, Jovanovic solved the problem of thermal bridges by separating the structural system from the insulation.  An eight-inch-thick structural insulated panel (SIP) forms the basis of the wall system by acting as both insulation and structure.  (SIPs are composed of two OSB panels with rigid insulation sandwiched between them.) A four-inch layer of rigid insulation is attached to the outside of the SIP to limit any thermal bridges at framing joints, openings, and additional structure. The combined layer of rigid and SIP creates, in essence, two cavities which can house mechanical, plumbing, electrical, and other structural elements. Siding and battens, making up the rainscreen, are attached by long screws that tie through the outer layer of rigid insulation and into the OSB panel of the SIP.  The overall wall system is rated at R-40.

The walls are not all that is super-insulated. A great deal of heat loss in the typical home is attributed to exposed foundation walls.  In Shift House, the concrete rat slab is topped with a vapor barrier and then a nine-inch layer of rigid insulation. A final skim coat of concrete forms the finish floor and adds more thermal mass to the structure. For the roof, twelve-inch thick SIPs are positioned into a gable form and a six-inch layer of rigid insulation is added to the outside bringing it to R-72, nearly double what is required by Code. Jovanovic noted that the roof is ventilated by an air gap between the outer layer of rigid and the standing seam metal roof, allowing the interior to remain airtight.

Many audience members expressed concern about the consequences of an airtight envelope. Jovanovic asserted that passive houses like Shift House have as much clean air entering as regular houses.  The only difference is that air is let in at a controlled rate by the HRV. Moreover, the house functions like the average American Home. There may be subtle differences in how the systems operate, but the outcome is the same. The kitchen range hoods must be vented with special systems, but they still vent to the outside. The windows may be triple-paned and thermally broken, but they are operable. In many cases, the materials cost the same as traditional products of the same quality. Jovanovic noted that Shift House’s European windows cost the same as Marvin’s triple paned line.  

While everyone in the green building community can be excited about Passive Houses’ energy efficiency, I can’t help but getting an image of a huge Styrofoam container with a house inside. How much embodied energy does it take to produce these walls in comparison to the energy they save? How many petrochemicals? Passive House Standards force designers to consider the environment and climate in which they are building in order to determine the best passive strategies. They allow for functional homes with beautiful spaces. I agree that in the near future it will be a necessity for homes to operate on the amount of energy Passive Houses use. Yet, it seems like an oxymoron that these homes are often built using materials derived from the same resources the homes are attempting to reduce demand on through their energy efficiency. I applaud Passive House, but hope that it evolves to include a standard that addresses embodied energy.

Juliette Beale is a designer with Portland's Emerick Architects and a member of the American Institute of Architects/Portland Committee on the Environment. COTE Greenbag talks are held the 2nd Wednesday of the month from noon-1pm at the AIA Center for Architecture, 403 NW 11th Ave.  The next talk, scheduled for June 16, is entitled “Urbanize and Insulate: The Development of a Fossil Fuel Exit Strategy ” and presented by Dylan Lamar of Green Hammer Construction.

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London's former deputy mayor assesses Portland's brand of urban green

Nicky Gavron (image courtesy Wikipedia Commons)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In Thursday's Daily Journal of Commerce, reporter Angela Webber talked with former London deputy mayor Nicky Gavron, who was in Portland to speak at the BEST Awards breakfast.

During Gavron's tenure, the city adopted its Climate Change Action Plan and introduced a congestion charge. She is now, as a member of the London Assembly, helping the city pursue a  goal of 60 percent reduction in carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2025.

The former deputy mayor also has an interesting biography. According to Wikipedia, Felicia Nicolette C. "Nicky" Gavron "...is the daughter of German Jews who had fled Nazi Germany in 1936 as pressure on the Jewish community was mounting. In March 2008 she claimed that her mother was chosen to dance before Hitler in the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympics, until the authorities discovered that she was Jewish."

Gavron first became interested in politics in the 1970s when she campaigned against the widening of the Archway Road in London. In an interview with the Guardian, quoted in the Wikipedia entry, she said, "It was in the days when everyone thought road widening was the answer, but the penny dropped for me that it was part of the problem."

Webber asked Gavron to assess Portland's reputation internationally.

"Portland is known as being the archetypal compact city, a city that had the foresight to invest in very good public transport very early on, and for looking at public transport in terms of the metropolitan area, not just the city," Gavron said. "You’re also known for the quality of your urban design and the livability city and the huge emphasis that you’ve put on making the city a very healthy environment to live in."

"Now, coming here, what I’ve discovered is how deep you want your greenness to be," she added. "I’m very impressed by your emphasis on growing food locally and on people eating healthily, and the emphasis you’re putting on eco-districts, something interesting I want to do in London."

"Portland’s also got something which I hugely admire, which is your economic development
strategy," Gavron said. "And I think it’s a focused, very good strategy. And I particularly admire the cluster policy. You’ve got this tremendous cluster of information and communications technology, plus you’ve got the green tech cluster. And if you marry greening the economy and investing and innovating in almost every part of the economy, but particularly with your clean tech – if you marry that to the information communications tech, you’ve got a sort of revolution.
You really are the vanguard of the green revolution. I think you’re unique placed to be a
pathfinder city of the future."

Webber also asked, "What would you recommend that Portland look at, from your outside
perspective and with your expertise?"

"I have never been in a major city where I’ve seen more and better public transport," the Londoner said. "It’s quite exceptional, but what you haven’t got in Portland is really good bike lanes. I’m not saying London has them, but if I compare you with Copenhagen, well … that city has much narrower streets, and 37 percent of people bike to work. I think you’re at about 8 percent – well, that’s good too. I really do think that Portland has huge potential to become a cycling city. There is lots of potential for that."

"I also think," Gavron added, "it would be great if you could introduce a minimum standard of energy efficiency across all buildings. Then above that you could allow people to go in for a deeper model of energy efficiency by putting solar on their roofs or sharing in a community energy scheme. I think you can do it as a pay-as-you-save model so that people don’t have to bear the up-front costs. In the end you have lower energy bills, but meanwhile you pay off what you’ve done, and if you move house and move flat, the next occupier picks it up. In London, we are requiring standards way above what you’re requiring here.In the future you’re not going to get the same value if you haven’t invested in your building being green. And people are going to demand it too."

"In London, we’ve helped facilitate it this with a better buildings partnership, in which the big
property owners have got together and formed a company. They’re looking at the tenant-
landlord disconnect, and the difficultly of how you actually get a really good model green
lease. Their idea is collaboration between tenants and landlords, working out the financial
mechanisms so the investment pays off for both. I think that’s quite interesting."

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Domes of the rock: visiting City Bible Church's concrete Rocky Butte complex

City Bible Church, Portland (photo by Brian Libby)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Apparently it's possible to live in Portland for decades and still, from time to time, stumble upon arresting, large scale architecture that makes you go, "Wow!" Of course, that which stands out does not always do so because of sheer beauty. But after a bad and unintentionally blasphemous first impression ("What the hell is that?), I can see some value in the concrete domes of City Bible Church. Bless them for keeping Portland weird.

Last week I'd decided to drive up to Rocky Butte to take a few pictures. You can see most of the Cascade peaks from there, as well as the city skyline, the Columbia and the Willamette. The panoramic view didn't disappoint, even as clouds covered the potential postcard-like setting around Mt. Hood.

Driving down the curved road encircling Rocky Butte, I was surprised to suddenly happen upon two giant concrete domes nearly the size of football stadiums. With a passenger in the car eager for a restroom, we decided to explore these mammoth cement bubbles at closer range.

Standing outside in the parking lot of what I learned to be City Bible Church, I was astonished at what, at least in my biased view, seemed to be the ugliest set of buildings I'd seen in ages. The concrete domes are completely windowless. Glass-walled entrances had been built onto the edges of each dome, and multi-story in height to add a substantial presence. But the glass was highly reflective, like some banal 1980s office building. The entire architectural enterprise seemed to be screaming, "KEEP OUT!"

City Bible Church (photo by Brian Libby)

What was this place and how did it come about? My first guess was that the church had purchased some pre-existing piece of Cold War infrastructure: some kind of satellite monitoring station, for example, or another industrial or military need for secrecy. Maybe there was some giant computer that took up the whole dome in the 1960s or '70s but could be the size of a laptop today.

As it happens, though, City Bible Church built the domes themselves, in 1991.

"We bought the property in 1981 and, as a church, you're not getting a big loan," explained pastor Robert Jamison in a phone interview. "Interest rates were 20 percent at the time. The domes themselves, the exterior construction is very inexpensive. Latex is inflated with air and tied rebar to the foam and sprayed concrete. Most everything was done with volunteers. Basically it was an inexpensive way to get a big piece of square footage."

"That 1980s glass, that was kind of what people did back then," he added.

Sanctuary at City Bible Church (photo courtesy Monolitic)

The two-story dome is 230 feet in diameter and 75 feet high, enough space for a sanctuary with seating for 3000, centered about a platform with seating for another 200. “That platform is probably bigger than many whole churches,” Johansen says. “Behind it, we have a choir room, orchestra room, bathrooms and a recording studio.” A large drape partitions the platform so two events can go on simultaneously, or the platform’s back portion can be closed off and only the front used. 

In addition to the sanctuary, City Bible Church’s two-story, larger dome houses a K-12 school, nurseries and offices. The smaller dome, also two stories, includes a gym, a commercial kitchen, additional classrooms and a library. On its thirty-three-acre campus, City Bible Church also maintains facilities for its Portland Bible College.

As I moved inside, it was possible to see what a generous amount of space there really was. There were theatrical spaces, a small expresso bar, and wide-open swaths of space that probably befit a large congregation such as this. And sure enough, when I talked to pastor Robert Jamison of City Bible Church, who had been present for the construction in 1991, getting maximum square footage for minimal budget without sacrificing energy efficiency was the reason for the unusual domed architecture.

"We’re on the Columbia River gorge, on a butte,” explained administrator Art Johansen in a 2000 article about the domes. “The east wind combines with ocean weather, so we do get ice storms – but they don’t affect the domes. In the summer we average in the upper eighties, usually with about a week of hundred-degree temperatures. Our winters are very wet and overcast. Heating is not much of an issue, unless we get temperatures below freezing with strong winds. We use air conditioning the majority of the time.”

Domes have a curious architectural history. Buckminster Fuller popularized the geodesic dome, with its utopian sense of organic space. In the 1970s, domed stadiums became commonplace as homes for sports teams and big concerts, from Houston's Astrodome to successors in New Orleans, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Detroit, Seattle and elsewhere. They are impressive for sheer volume, as well as for how they evoke a very simple idea we rarely think about: most all the buildings in the world are square and rectangular. To see a dome is, for all its concrete, to get the subtlest sense of a more organic architecture that mimics the curve of a hillside or the oval of the sun or moon. Plus, there's now a whole genre of videos documenting their demolition, like this one of Seattle's King Dome going down in 2000:

Buildings of vast windowless concrete are far from inviting. Most concrete domes of yesteryear have been demolished, usually in dramatic, TNT-fueled implosions. Yet precisely for that reason, it's not so bad to have an architectural example of this era.

What's more, despite the "keep Portland weird" mantra and our identity in the popular culture as a haven for goofy, earnest enthusiasts, we don't have much strange architecture. Sure, there's the occasional Paul Bunyon statue here or an old bar shaped like a jug there, but these domes stand out, both literally and figuratively. Pastor Jamison says people often see the domes from airplane flights coming in and out of PDX.

"There’s an instant recognition of the domes, but many people don’t know what we are. A laboratory? An airport facility? What? So they come in and find out," Johansen added.

City Bible Church (photos by Brian Libby)

There is a larger issue to be derived from City Bible's architecture. In the past, ecclesiastical design was about inspiring people through beautiful structures to feel a connection to God. Windows, therefore, were crucially important, be they colorful stained glass in traditional churches or the more transparent, expansive arrays of glass in modern projects like Phillip Johnson's circa-1980 Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California.

Increasingly, though, it's multimedia that has become more the vehicle by which worshipers feel that connection. For example, as big as City Bible Church's Rocky Butte campus is underneath the domes, this is just one of three sites the institution has, and wherever pastor Frank Damazio is speaking on a particular Sunday, people at the other two campuses watch him live via video simulcast.

"Technology has allowed all of these services to experience live worship and church life together, while allowing Pastor Frank to minister from any of the locations, and be viewed live on the other campuses," the City Bible website explains." Pastor Frank alternates between each campus on a weekly basis. If he’s preaching live at the Rocky Butte campus, he will be live on the big screen at the 217, Mill Plain and Pearl campuses."

In the end, these domes are not aesthetic wonders - and that's putting it kindly. But maybe the City Bible Church transcends my or others' notions of ugliness: as quintessentially weird Portland architecture that enlivens the collective urban fabric more than another, even far better looking glass box. And if these domes are successful in aiding occupants' desire for spiritual esctasy, who are we to judge? After all, given that Autzen Stadium is my designated church, I can cast no stones.

Notes from Willamette River Symposium #1

Map of Willamette industrial area (image courtesy City of Portland)

BY HEIDI BERTMAN

Last Friday, the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability held the Willamette River Symposium #1. It was part of a series of panel discussions intended to establish policy recommendations for the Central City 2035 plan.

The goals of the symposium were to review existing conditions, policy and the endorsed 2006 River Concept; identify ways to achieve development, access and vibrancy while protecting and restoring natural resources and watershed health; and build on the 2006 River Concept policy guidance to address ways to meet these new goals. 

In her introductory remarks, BPS director Susan Anderson called for a vision that will include the Central Reach as a commons and common resource shared by the whole community which will be passed to future generations.

The draft language reads, “The Central Reach will continue to be a highly urban, regional center with a waterfront that is the city’s main civic space and a regional attraction. Access to the river and public use of the waterfront will improve through new development and transportation improvements, eventually including changes to Interstate 5.” The document also calls upon Portland to:

• Ensure a clean and healthy river
• Maintain and enhance a prosperous working harbor
• Create vibrant waterfront districts and neighborhoods
• Embrace the river as Portland’s front yard
• Promote partnerships, leadership and education

The audience was overwhelmingly comprised of planners and people whose principal work is in planning and policy, not surprising but nevertheless dismaying since the main goal is to make policy recommendations that will shape how our city is built for years to come. Still, it is commendable that the city has any public planning sessions instead of reviews after-the-fact, as it is a dense and detailed process with many implications to daily life.

River Plan reach areas (image courtesy City of Portland)

Friday’s symposium was the first public discussion on the River Plan/Central Reach. The policy language for the Central Reach plan is guided by the River Concept, endorsed by the City Council in 2006, which was first used to guide the 2008 River Plan/North Reach.

The planning recommendations of the River Plan come principally from the background work of the 2001 River Renaissance Vision and the 2004 River Renaissance Strategy; the 2004 Willamette River Conditions Report; and the 1987 Willamette Greenway Plan. One is inclined to ask why there are so many plans. The simplest answer is that these are all living documents and, as such, reflect the current issues and priorities of the time in which they are created.

In fact, a distinct theme raised by panelists in Friday’s symposium was the concepts missing from previous documents. Infrastructure was one: At all levels of scale, the changes to or needs for infrastructure are integral to any plan and there is no strategic plan in place. Cultural concepts were another: As a group together as well as of the individual. So too was the concept of access, be it physical, visual, or economic. Then there is civic space, from the ideological (jobs, commerce, housing) and to the built (open space).

These omissions spurred a good deal of discussion. Civic space should be both indoor and outdoor and part of a system of spaces for the public, functional for smaller groups and individual use. It was agreed that we may not know what these civic spaces look like, but that it is important to consider the concept if we wish to have a vibrant urban and regional center. Currently, the simple definition of civic space at the Central Reach of the Willamette is the outdoor public open space which is more ceremonial and decorative than functional for the individual; people move through it or occupy it for a short time unless attending a large event. It is a literal translation of the front-yard concept but the scale and placement of it with respect to other types of space in the city and transportation connections limits the full realization of the concept in this form.

There were also comments by many panelists that were hard to disagree with. The plan needs to reference clear metrics to set policy and those policies for implementation need to be aspiration-driven as opposed to punitive. The use of "continue" in the main vision description for the Central Reach is an overstatement. It is not yet highly urban in use or form. There is no value statement on “urban” or a clear descriptor. “Urban” needs to be defined as "diversified urban with jobs, transportation, equity, access.” If the vision is for the city to continue being something, that definition should be clear and capable of describing an evolving environment.

Panelists also addressed a core issue which makes the planning process so difficult to understand, and which leads to the sometimes inconsistent statements from one document to another. Bob Sallinger, panelist from the Audubon Society, questioned the length of process from concept to strategy and plan. He cited the numerous changes in our region since 2006 and asked how the city might be swifter and expedite the planning process. It remains to be seen just how the process may be simplified or shortened but at least the topic is in the panelists’ and the public’s consciousness.

The Willamette River Symposium #2 will be held on Friday February 25 from 9AM-noon at BPS offices, 1900 SW 4th Avenue, Room 2500A.

Heidi Bertman received her Master's of Architecture from the U of O in 1998 and worked with Opsis Architecture before moving to ZGF Architects in 2004, where she is currently a designer.

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Van Jones on green jobs, national climate change policy

Van Jones (image courtesy Treehugger.com)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Last week an emerging national star of politics and sustainability, Van Jones, was in Portland to deliver a speech and advocate for green jobs.

After a speech at the University of Oregon's White Stag building, and just hours before President Obama's State of the Union, Jones met with about 30 business leaders, elected officials and renewable energy advocates "to share his perspective on policy and the political environment as it pertains to clean energy," as Christina Williams reported in the Portland Business Journal (which, weirdly, keeps its 'Sustainable Business Oregon' section on an entirely separate website.)

Van Jones, named by Time magazine as one of its "Heroes of the Environment" 2008, was also previously a special adviser to President Obama on green jobs. But resigned in September 2009 when a preposterous controversy arose over his past political activities. Jones had made a public comment disparaging congressional Republicans, who of course do the same thing in reverse from minute to minute. His name appearing on a petition for 911Truth.org, and last time I checked it is perfectly legal to hold conspiracy theories. (President Kennedy's assassination, anyone?) Finally, Jones allegedly had associations Marxist group during the 1990s. This, however, omits one key context: In 1990, Jones was 22 years old. I believe it was Winston Churchill who, rightly or wrongly (or half correct), said a young conservative has no heart and an old liberal has no brain.

More importantly than all this, the Yale Law School-educated Jones is also the author of The Green Collar Economy, which rose at one point to #12 on the New York Times bestseller list - something all but unheard of for a sustainable business book. Here's a short excerpt:

It takes energy to make anything and everything. So when energy costs go up, all prices tend to go up. At the same time, those very same steep energy prices eat into consumer confidence. They depress nonessential pending and discourage hiring. So consumers stop buying, employers hold back on making job offers, and tourists travel much less. As a result, the economy starts to stall—with all the attendant job loss and pain. Yet prices throughout the economy, driven by rising fuel costs, keep going up just the same. The result is that society finds itself stretched on the rack, with soaring costs and punging jobs puling the body of the nation in opposite directions.

The solution for the economy is simple: deliberately cut demand for energy and intelligently increase its supply…But all of that is a lot easier said than done.

So who will do the hard and noble work of actually building the green economy? The answer: millions of ordinary people, many of whom do not have good jobs right now. According to the National Renewable Energy Lab, the major barriers to a more rapid adoption of renewable energy and energy efficiency are not financial, legal, technical or ideological. One big problem is simply that green employers can’t find enough trained, green-collar workers to do all the jobs.

Let’s be clear: the main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun. Hundreds of thousands of green-collar jobs will be weatherizing and energy-retrofitting every building in the United States." 

In his talk last week, Jones was critical of sustainability as boutique endeavor, citing the cost of organic, healthy food at markets like Whole Foods (he cited the "Whole Paycheck" moniker). He also took on the regulation-laden and subsidy supported energy market.

Jones the environmentalist is not to be confused with recording artist Van Jones

"Every American should be able to be an energy producer, should be able to produce energy for themselves or with their community rather than be an energy serf," Jones said.

He also predicted that the likely next steps by the Obama administration would be establishing a national goal for clean energy production and a green bank to finance renewable energy investments. Sure enough, later that night in his SOTU address, the president called for 80 percent of the nation's electricity needs to come from clean sources by 2035. "It's a fight worth having," Jones told the assembled Portlanders. "Clean energy companies have gone down because banks are sitting on their money...We've got to be able to bring the private capital into play."

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Solarizing local homes, one quadrant (or two) at a time

Photo by Brian Libby

BY BRIAN LIBBY

North and Northwest Portland area homeowners looking to control their energy costs by using solar electricity have a new helping hand to guide them through the steps of a home installation: Solarize Northwest and Solarize North Portland, two new grassroots, community-based projects coordinated by Neighbors West -Northwest and North Portland Neighborhood Services.

The Neighbors West-Northwest Coalition is an initiative of the city’s Bureau of Planning and sustainability to promote direct civic participation by supporting community efforts at the neighborhood level. BPS provides a forum for community engagement and education, and is a catalyst for action. This innovative, interdisciplinary approach strengthens Portland's position as an international model of sustainable development practices and commerce. North Portland Neighborhood Services, located in the Historic Kenton Firehouse, is the neighborhood office that serves residents in the 11 neighborhood associations in the North Portland district. 

Solarize Portland neighborhood projects are designed to simplify the process of going solar and bring cost reductions through volume purchasing. Free workshops make the process easy to understand by covering topics such as the size of system to purchase, budgeting and financing, and how to get started.

Online enrollment for both group purchase projects is now open through March 31, 2011. You can view the schedule of free workshops in North Portland here and Northwest Portland here.

The launch of the twin Solarize projects is being assisted in a public-private partnership between BPS and the nonprofit Energy Trust of Oregon. The city is providing strategic assistance and coordination, and Energy Trust is providing technical assistance and cash incentives to help lower the upfront cost of the solar electric systems.

The new initiatives in North and Northwest follow two previous successful Solarize campaigns. Last fall’s Solarize Southwest was initiated by local neighborhood leaders who wanted to increase the amount of renewable energy generated in Southwest Portland with the side benefit of reducing carbon emissions that cause global warming. The project was structured so that the price of solar panel installation would go down as more neighbors joined the effort. 

"Solarize Southwest was perhaps the single most satisfying project I've worked on at SW Neighborhoods," said Leonard Gard, a project coordinator with Southwest Neighborhoods. "The shared experience of residents attending workshops together and installing solar energy equipment at the same time helped to create a strong sense of community amongst those who participated, and helped us fulfill our mission to the community: to empower citizen action to improve and maintain the livability of southwest neighborhoods."

The group purchasing created a 15-25 percent savings below average prices. The discount, in addition to current available tax credits and Energy Trust cash incentives, gave Solarize Southwest participants significant cost savings. Southeast Portland, Northeast Portland, and Southwest Portland have all run successful Solarize efforts, collectively installing over 1 megawatt of residential solar energy in 2010.

Solarize Southwest was built upon the first Solarize project in Southeast Portland in 2009 that was developed together by SE Uplift and Energy Trust, and quickly became a model now being used by other neighborhoods in Portland, as well as the Cities of Pendleton and Salem.

The Portland metro area is seeing a significant increase in solar for both volume and non-volume installations. With almost eight megaWatts of solar power installed across the city, enough energy to power almost 700 homes, Portlanders have helped prevent 4,000 metric tons of carbon emissions. A total of 38 solar installations were completed on homes citywide in 2008. In 2009, that number increased to 123 (32 percent were Solarize installations). The growth of the local residential market has experienced a 400 percent increase in installations from 2008 to 2010. And now the City of Portland is nearing its goal for installing 10 megaWatts by 2012.

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Micro hydro in Gresham [updated]

Gresham sewage treatment plant (image courtesy Portland Business Journal)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In the current January 7 edition of the Portland Business Journal, Lee Van Der Voo reports that the City of Gresham has found a way to power about 80 percent of its sewage treatment plant's electricity needs (currently about $500,000 per year) through a unique micro-hydro project involving outfall pipes.

This is a great example of both state-of-the-art alternative energy technology and green power at its most primative. Centuries ago the site of a riverside mill with a giant wheel generating power by the movement of the water current was ubiquitous. In fact, watermill technology dates back to ancient Greece.

The City of Gresham's sewage treatment plant, at 201st Avenue and Sandy Boulevard, treats sewage for 108,000 people and releases 13 million gallons of treated wastewater to the Columbia River each day. The water falls through a 48-inch pipe and down a slope to the river. Now the city is placing a turbine in the water path.

The project would cost $800,000, with half of the cost funded by a state Business Energy Tax Credit and a grant from Energy Trust of Oregon. So by spending about $400,000, the City of Gresham will reduce its power bill at the treatment plant from $500,000 to $100,000. In other words, a one-time expenditure of $400,000 will allow for $400,000 in annual savings: a one-year payback.

Once added to the pipe, the water turbine will have a peak energy generation capacity of about 50 kiloWatts. But that will be augmented by the plant's solar power, adding about 419 kiloWatts. That is not a gigantic amount of power, but 50 kiloWatts alone is enough to power about five single-family homes annually. Even so, given the open-and-shut case for the money it will save, the treatment-plant turbine is the latest of many reminders how, even as gas prices have stabilized, green power is an irresistible opportunity to save money.

The idea for the treatment-plant turbine, said Dave Rouse, the recently retired Gresham environmental services director, came from the Oregon Association of Clean Water Agencies, acting on the results of a 2008 study funded in part by the Energy Trust of Oregon on whether energy efficiency and renewable power sources could drive energy needs at wastewater plants. Some might say it's common sense that a turbine producing energy from 13 million gallons of falling water is a no-brainer, but it took the proof of the Energy Trust study to move Gresham to take action.

Of course, if this is such a good idea, it begs the question: what about all the other cities with sewage treatment plants. Every city has one. What about Portland's? Eugene's? Salem's? What about legislation stipulating this at all Oregon water treatment plants? It starts with one entity like Gresham taking the first step, but initiatives such as these ultimately only do real good if they are followed like falling dominoes. And it's not as if water falling from sewage treatment plants is the only falling water that could be harnessed for turbines. Last time I checked, Portland lies at the confluence of two rivers. Is it time to bring back the water mill at an unprecedented mass scale?

This story also reminded me of some interviews I recently conducted for Oregon Business magazine as part of their recent 30th anniversary issue, in which business leaders from all around the state were asked for their ideas about the next 30 years. One person whom I interviewed, Gerding Edlen Development president Mark Edlen, focused on alternative energy:

"The holy grail I think for us is trash to energy," he said. "Renewable energy is a foregone concludsion. Processing sewage will be a foregone conclusion, and turning that into potable water. The notion of taking our trash and not just recycling but taking it and converting it into energy at a city level or community level will be a foregone conclusion."

Related to the sewage water Gresham is using, Edlen also said of the next 30 years, "Water’s going to be bigger than energy. I think we will more and more think about how natural systems happen and how we can work with them instead of against them."

Not that it exactly relates to alternative energy, but Edlen also pointed out how such technical and ecological innovation more broadly helps establish the city as it competes with the rest of the world.

"I see us being a city and a state where we will be leaders in new ideas," he explained. "I think that’s coming out of the sense of community we’re creating here. It involves leadership in urban design, in alternative transportation, deep leadership in sustainability - and not in just the built environment and energy but manufacturing, agriculture, even apparel, for example. As I look down the road 30 years, we are positioned up and down the west coast as being an affordable alternative and with a rich sense of community and well positioned on the Pacific Rim...I think the opportunities are coming out of these intstitutions along with the thought leadership and innovation, creativity, and the way we’ve built."

Energy efficiency and the rebound effect

LEED Platinum-rated OHSU Center for Health & Healing (photo by Brian Libby)

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, writer David Owen looks at a troubling potential conundrum of energy efficiency: the "rebound effect". The more efficient our cars, refrigerators and air conditioners become, the more of them get produced, and so the actual reduction in energy disappears.

There are all kinds of examples throughout history.

The Ford Model T, manufactured between 1908 and 1927, averaged between 13 and 21 miles per gallon. A century later, we've learned to use gasoline much more efficiently, but that has only led to bigger cars stuffed with energy-sucking electronic gadgets.

A refrigerator sold in America today uses three quarters less energy than the 1975 average, even though it is one-fifth larger and costs 60 percent less. Yet during this same 35-year time period, the global market for refrigeration has grown exponentially; moreover, far more people in the US now have a second fridge or freezer.

On a macro scale, this proves out too: Between 1984 and 2005, electricity production grew by about 66 percent despite economy-wide energy efficiency gains. Some of this can be attributed to population growth, but not all. Per-capita energy consumption rates also increased during this period, even though energy use per dollar of Gross Domestic Product fell by around 50 percent.

Owen's article is largely based around an idea called the "Jevons paradox" that dates to an 1865 book by Englishman William Jevons called "The Coal Question". At the time, Great Britain was the world's leading industrial, military and economic power. But Jevons argued that it couldn't last. The country's coal supply was rapidly depleting, and he postulated that even increased efficiency in the use of coal would not delay the process. "It is wholly a confusion of ideas," Jevons wrote, "to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth." The more efficiently we use power, the more power we'll want to use. This is also commonly known today as the rebound effect.

LEED Platinum-rated AIA Center for Architecture (photo by Brian Libby)

All this begs the question: what about buildings?

After all, few entities have been the focus of energy efficiency goals more than buildings. Together, homes and buildings consume more than a third of total energy used in the United States today. Locally and regionally, organizations like the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (whose BetterBricks wing is a Portland Architecture sponsor) have devoted millions of dollars to designing new buildings and renovating old ones so that less energy is consumed. And the design community has become a national leader in sustainability. Portland has more LEED-rated buildings than virtually any other American city, especially when you measure it on a per-capita basis. The first LEED Platinum-rated condo, large medical facility, and National Register-listed building are all located here.

Energy efficiency is also part of a national strategy, called "the fifth fuel" after coal, petroleum, nuclear, and renewables. In 2007 the United Nations Foundation called energy efficiency gains "the largest, most evenly geographically distributed and least expensive energy resource."

Is it a waste of time, energy, money and resources to design and build buildings with better insulation, more natural light, and smaller mechanical systems? I'm not completely sold on the Jevons paradox as it relates to architecture today, nor are experts unanimous about its relation to other current energy issues. 

For starters, as explained to Owen by Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University's Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, the rebound effect is minimal because energy is a relatively small part of the overall economy, between six and eight percent. Efficiency gains today have much less power to stimulate consumption than industrial manufacturing gains in the 19th century like Jevons wrote about.

More specifically as it relates to architecture, building green needn't be seen as a stimulant to building more. There is, perhaps, an argument that in our drive to weatherize homes we will spend as much energy on manufacturing and transporting new materials as will be gained from reduced heating and cooling. But what are we going to do, stop fixing up our buildings or building new ones?

The one area in architecture where the Jevons paradox could hold true is with air conditioning. Just as there are more refrigerators and freezers in use both overall and per capita today, wiping away much of the efficiency gains made from appliances using less energy, air conditioning is much more prevalent than in previous generations. It's part of the reason that regions and cities with very warm climates like Arizona and Nevada and the South saw large population influxes over recent years. Then there's the international spread of air conditioning to developing countries. According to Owen's article, between 1997 and 2007 the use of air conditioning in China tripled. In india it's expected to increase almost tenfold between 2005 and 2020. Owen cites a 2009 study saying air conditioning already accounts for 40 percent of the electricity consumed in metropolitan Mumbai.

Even so, the rebound effect with air conditioning - overall use eating up efficiency gains - is not an argument for the ineffectiveness of green building and architecturally oriented energy efficiency. On the contrary: if millions more people are using AC, it's even more important that this happen in buildings with tightly sealed thermal envelopes (without leaks, in other words) so the AC be utilized as efficiently as possible. Therein, perhaps, lies the broader answer with questions of the rebound effect. Maybe it does exist, to a degree, but if so, that's an argument to fight for efficiency gains all the more.

If there's a lesson to be learned from hashing over the Jevon paradox and the rebound effect as it relates to energy efficiency, perhaps it's a matter of re-learning a bit of common sense: all the efficiency gains in the world don't matter if we don't also curb demand. And yet reducing demand is the last thing any economist wants to hear. The 2000s decade was largely about creating exponentially larger demand for real estate by relaxing home ownership financing rules. And even if we hadn't got carried away building new suburban cul de sacs and urban condos over the last ten years, the population here and especially in other countries continues to increase. All those bodies need electricity of some sort.

Yet there are things we can do on the demand side. Jimmy Carter was the last American president, more than three decades ago, to tell us to be smart about little things like turning the lights off in rooms we don't occupy. Behavior can be adjusted on the macro level, and that's as important as technical advances in efficiency. It's just that having more efficient air conditioners, TVs and refrigerators has to be coupled with anti-sprawl planning, mass transit, and other factors. And then there's the question of energy taxing. Price is as much a determinant of energy or other product/service use as efficiency. As even Jevon would have acknowledged 135 years ago about coal, how efficiently we use anything is merely an extension of how much we want or need to use it.

Architecture 2030 founder Ed Mazria headlines Greenday Forum

Ed Mazria (photo by Jamey Stilli)

It must be autumn because the art and design events are suddenly coming at a fast and furious pace. So on the heels of the Architecture + Design Festival, the EcoDistricts 2010 conference, the Green Champions summit, and various homes tours comes another lecture, but one very much worthwhile: by Architecture 2030 founder Edward Mazria.

Mazria is speaking as part of the daylong Green Day Forum at the Gerding Theater, an annual event that brings together Northwest regional leaders in green building, sustainability and climate change to explore carbon mitigation in the built environment. This year's conference, entitled "Marking the Milestones, Adding Momentum," will focus on the benchmarks that enable the industry to evaluate progress and impacts, and will take a critical look at how we measure the momentum of building sustainably and the resulting market transformation. The conference, hosted by the Earth Advantage Institute will highlight innovative strategies that seek to bridge industry gaps and scale up efforts to mitigate climate change.”

Mazria’s Architecture 2030 is a research organization focused on reducing the impact of the built environment on global warming. This comes on the heels of an already distinguished career of award-winning architecture and planning projects spanning thirty-five years. He is the author of numerous published works, including The Passive Solar Energy Book.

Seasonal solar orientation illustration from The Passive Solar Energy Book

Most recently, Mr. Mazria has reshaped the national and international dialogue on climate change to incorporate building design and the building sector. He developed and issued the 2030 Challenge, a measured and achievable strategy to dramatically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and fossil-fuel consumption by the year 2030.

The annual 2010 Sustainable Design Survey of 240 design industry leaders in the U.S. by the Design Futures Council ranked Architecture 2030 first among industry leaders in 'leadership and resource deployment' to move sustainability issues forward in the U.S. and identified Mazria as one of the nation's leading 'role models' for green and sustainable design.

Mazria’s lecture also comes at a key time. This week code and government officials meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina voted to improve the 2012 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) standard by 30% beyond its 2006 strictures, as called for by Architecture 2030 and by a large coalition including the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Mazria's Rio Grande Conservatory in the Albuquerque Biological Park

 “This is the first step on our way to carbon neutral buildings by 2030,” said Mazria. “The next steps include timely state and local government adoption of the new code and improving the IECC code standard by 50% beyond 2006 IECC in 2015.” Doing so would meet the next energy reduction target called for by the 2030 Challenge and by legislation passed in the House of Representatives (HR.2454) and in Senate Bills S.1462 and S.3464.

At the meeting, government voting representatives also rejected efforts by some to weaken the IECC’s efficiency standard by allowing less building improvements in exchange for more efficient equipment. “Efficiency shouldn’t be an either/or proposition,” said William Fay, EECC Executive Director.. “We need to improve the efficiency of both our building envelopes and our equipment.”

Admission to The Green Day Forum is a bit steep at $125 ($69 for students), although that comes with not just Mazria's lecture but a full slate of speakers including Umpqua Bank's Brian Alfano, Portland State University urban studies professor Loren Lutzenhiser, Portland Development Commission board member and Glumac president Steven Strauss, and the Energy Trust's Kendall Youngblood. Besides, Mazria's own words may be all the motivation one needs:

"Every time we design a building, we set up its energy consumption pattern for the next 50 to 100 years."

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Notes from the first EcoDistricts summit

What an eco-district might look like (rendering courtesy Portland Sustainability Institute)

It's the word that has been on everybody's lips this week in the architecture and sustainability communities: eco-districts.

About 300 people attended the EcoDistricts Summit 2010 at Portland State University this week to discuss the idea of accelerating sustainability gains by ramping up from individual buildings to whole neighborhoods. Activities included a series of roundtable discussions, panel sessions and skills training.

Concurrent with the sessions, the city announced the locations for its first five eco districts: Lents, South Waterfront, Portland State University, Gateway and the Lloyd district. Each of the five is already one of the Portland Development Commission's urban renewal areas, thereby allowing easier collaboration and coordination. This neighborhood-scale sustainable development will be focused on livability, green infrastructure, community decision making. 

The Portland Sustainability Institute, host for the summit, will initiate eco-district development in two districts in the coming year: Lents and Lloyd. In Lloyd there has already been a “Declaration of Cooperation” among businesses and the mall owners, and in Lents POSI is in process of hiring two people to work in Lents to “do a deeper dive on the engagement process because it’s our deepest and biggest district,” Cole explained. 

The Oregon Sustainability Center is a catalyst for PSU eco district. The building will generate all its own power and treat all its wastewater. Is there a chance for water treatment or alternative energy to serve the neighborhood beyond just the building?

At the at a Thursday meeting of the American Institute of Architects' Committee on the Environment event, Naomi Cole of PoSI broke down eco-district policy and financing into what she called “hardware” (buildings and infrastructure) and “software” (community engagement, social marketing). There are also nine performance areas: equitable development, place making, social cohesion, air quality & carbon, energy, access & mobility, water, habitat & ecosystem function, and materials management. 

"The idea is you start with an existing city, and you layer in a green infrastructure," Cole said. That can mean anything from bioswales and green streets to green buildings, community gardens and pooled alternative energy sources "People have access and mobility. You layer in habitat and natural infrastructure. It gets more green and lush."

Other cities have created such districts already, such as the Living City Block in Denver, the Green Impact Zone in Kansas City, EcoCity in Cleveland, Seattle's 2030 District, Dockside Green in Victoria, Southeast False Creek in Vancouver, and Treasure Island in San Francisco. But most all of these are new developments. To make an eco-district work in an existing urban neighborhood means dealing with barriers such as multiple owners, existing infrastructure that isn't green but not at replacement level, and a lack of assessment tools or finance mechanisms.

At the same time, Cole admitted that there is an element of unknown and that there are limited resources. “There’s hundreds of different projects that can come out of each of these eco-districts," she said. "But we don’t know what theyr’e going to look like.”

A panel discussion at the EcoDistricts Summit (photo by Brian Libby)

At the EcoDistricts summit itself, I attended a panel discussion called "Integrated Design at the District Scale" with Clark Brockman of SERA Architects; Alan Hipolito, executive director of Verde, a nonprofit devoted to promoting economic equity for disadvantaged communities; Alisdair McGregor of the internationally renowned engineering firm Arup; and Bill Reed of the Integrative Design Collaborative.

Initially there were interesting ideas explored such as Brockman's emphasis on flexibility to achieve sustainable solutions. He mentioned the GSA (Government Services Administration), with which SERA Architects is working on the Edith Green Wendell Wyatt Federal Building renovation. The GSA, Brockman said, is "driving us to this paradigm of improvement every single week." But the clients seek desired outcomes, and don't enforce rigid means of how to achieve them. That's up to the designers.

However, the talk took a somewhat unexpected turn. It was seemingly supposed to center around the collaborative process necessary between architects, builders, engineers, and building owners and occupants to achieve successful sustainable design and how this approach could be applied to whole districts. But Hipolito's presence on the panel turned the conversation in a different direction. He asked a rather bold question: "Are eco-districts just another word for gentrification?"

The crowd laughed a little, but it was a serious question: When investing dollars and attention toward a holistic combination of new buildings, green infrastructure and potentially shared power, will that simply become about attracting private-sector investment and newer, more affluent residents to a neighborhood, or will there be what Hipolito called an "equity component" to eco-districts, a promise to use such means for aiding struggling communities? After all, an eco-district can sound a lot like urban renewal to a resident who fifty years ago lost his or her home and neighborhood to initiatives like the South Auditorium district or Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Quarter. Why not make eco-districts part of an anti-poverty strategy?

In another panel discussion, John Knott, President/CEO and co-founder of Noisette Company echoed some similar concerns. "Until we all buy in and change behaviors," he said, "it doesn't matter how many green bldgs we erect. The people make the difference." Knott also pointed out how over last 30 years the US as a whole has actually been disinvesting in the social and environmental health of our cities. The health of all people, whether rich or poor, is our shared responsibility, he said. Green buildings are good, but they aren't the end-all, be-all. All must understand the unique heritage and history of a neighborhood or district, and hold forth a common vision to which they can contribute. "I heard this week that the definition of sustainability is, 'Your well being is our well being,'" he added.

Looking at the five districts chosen, three of five (PSU, SoWa and Lloyd) are in the central city, where there is already much investment. Lents and Gateway are both home to much more diverse residential communities and many economically disadvantaged households, so eco-districts there could further the work already being done by PDC with its urban renewal areas there. At the same time, these latter two neighborhoods are also key transit nodes that are already part of Metro's 2040 Plan. What about some of the other neighborhoods that are struggling, like Cully?

Panel member Bill Reed was skeptical of Hipolito's suggestion. "Equity is not a checklist item," he said. "It's a relationship." An eco-district, he added, is about access to healthy and sustainable food, soil and water. It's not social welfare.

Still, Hipolito's argument for equity in eco-districts gave me pause. I thought about  aspects of greenery and access to non-automobile transit that are already lacking in certain urban neighborhoods. Drive to outer southeast toward Gresham or outer Northeast toward the airport, and you'll find many, many neighborhoods without sidewalks. Aren't walkable neighborhoods a fundamental aspect of sustainability? Once you get outside of affluent neighborhoods like Irvington, Laurlehurst, Eastmoreland and Ladd's Addition, the tree canopy dissipates greatly. Could more sustainable good be done by, say, expanding the tree canopy city-wide, or restoring cancelled TriMet bus lines, or building sidewalks?

That said, we have to start somewhere. It makes logical sense for eco-districts to exist first in urban renewal areas for streamlining resources. And it's not as if these five districts will be the only ones; expansion will come. The knowledge gleaned and lessons learned in these first five eco-districts will also help the city and its private-sector parters do a better job with eco-districts in the years ahead. Still, Hipolito's message is a valid reminder that even the most innovative and proactive sustainable thinking and implementation has a responsibility to do more than just cut carbon, reduce energy bills or even transform concrete jungles into green infrastructure. Until people far beyond the realm of city staffers, the design industry, academia and the upper classes benefit from initiatives like eco-districts, the transformation will have been incomplete.

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Getting our goats

Goats on Southeast Belmont (photo by Brian Libby)

I first received word of the phenomenon in an excited cell-phone call from my girlfriend a few days ago. "Remember that vacant lot on Belmont where the Monte Carlo burned down? There are a bunch of goats there now, grazing on the weeds. You've got to come see this."

One might have thought the presidential motorcade had just driven by given the excitement in her voice.

When I made my way to the two-acre vacant lot at Southeast 10th and Belmont, there were not only about 50 goats grazing there, just as Valarie said, but there were almost as many people gathered around the perimeter of the chain-link fence encircling the lot.

As Molly Hottle reported in Wednesday's Oregonian, the goats are owned by Georgia Stiner and her company, Goat Rental NW of suburban Damascus. They came to the Belmont lot at the behest of Vancouver realtor Killian Pacific, which is charged with maintaining the vacant lot. Initially Killian planned the usual array of gas-powered, smoke-belching, eardrum-piercing mowers and weed whackers, but the person they hired, Brett Milligan of Free Association Design, came up with this more sustainable alternative. (Milligan also works for landscape design company GreenWorks.) Not only are the goats easier on the environment, ears and nose than industrial equipment, but their digestive systems render the seeds they eat sterile, so there will be fewer weeds here next year. (Of course Milligan had to convince Killian that the goats would not cost any more than mowers. Gotta stay true to that bottom line!)

Stiner told the paper that her goats have been hired all over the metro area, sometimes at sites where loud lawn equipment can't be used and other times just when people are looking for a more sustainable solution.

On Milligan's Free Association Design blog, he also has lots of interesting knowledge to share about the goats themselves. A brief example:

"The goats themselves exhibit an amazing repertoire of behaviors, moods and proclivities (constant entertainment really); some of which seem predictable.   For example, heat has a major effect on their appetite.  As we saw in the first couple days, in warm weather they slow down and don’t eat nearly as much.   As herding animals by instinct, they tend to stick together and form social subgroups within the herd.  In a short time its easy to tell which ones are fond of each other and which ones have issues.  The patterns of how they collectively move (the repeating cycles of foraging and resting) seems unpredictable and slightly random.

Although common knowledge says that goats will eat anything, they undeniably have specific preferences when it comes to vegetation.  They selectively graze rather than mow; covering the terrain many times over in the process of eating it down.  The field seems to offer a culinary menu similar to a stocked refrigerator or pantry.  There are those things that get eagerly consumed at a fast rate (in this case seasonally procured fresh green clover, grass and blooming flowers), followed by things that are less immediately appetizing – like desiccated seed stalks and thistles.  They’re edible, but not delicious.

This menu is affected by weather conditions and seasons.  As other contemporary applied research in herding/grazing practices has demonstrated, by simply modifying the timing of grazing to optimum specifics of local conditions, massive regenerative effects can be achieved.   A key question for us right now, is when is the best two times of year to bring the goats to this site."

 

More than the sustainability of the goat-grazing, though, I find it interesting the degree to which people have flocked to see the goats on Belmont.

Goats on Southeast Belmont (photo by Brian Libby)

After all, if you think about it, you can see animals anytime at the Oregon Zoo, and much more exotic ones at that. But I personally never go to the zoo. It seems depressing to keep animals native to Africa, Asia or elsewhere in the world locked up in cages in rainy Portland. Granted zoo officials have endeavored over the decades to make the enclosures more habitat-friendly. But I'll never forget the site on my last zoo visit of an elephant gently but persistently butting its head against the bars of its cage. It's still a prison for them.

In the case of the goats grazing on Belmont or the other bits of nature sprouting into the city like chicken coops, it feels more natural because these are animals already in abundant numbers in the agricultural areas surrounding Portland. It may feel like a bit of a novelty to have goats munching grass with the downtown skyline visible in the background, but not so absurd as having giraffes and lions. And it doesn't feel as contrived or over-nostalgic as an animal presence like the police department's officers riding horseback. The goats may not be completely free to roam, but they're basically being allowed to do what goats do: eat and hang out.

Graphic courtesy David Badders/The Oregonian

These farm animals are slowly but persistently helping to break down traditional barriers between urban and rural locales. The same thing is happening with the green infrastructure being introduced into the city by way of small bits of nature like bioswales and eco roofs. The old notion of the city was as a concrete jungle, devoid of greenery. But it doesn't have to be that way. Slowly, over time, we can introduce more and more of the natural world back into the city, uncovering old creeks and swales initially buried in concrete and inviting birds and mammals back into our zip codes. It's not to suggest that we should all be joining hands and singing "Kum-ba-ya" over a few goats chewing weeds, but clearly people respond to having a little nature around them.

"They've been out here two weeks," Milligan told The Oregonian. "I thought things would kind of die down in terms of public interest, but it hasn't at all." My girlfriend has even started leaving home early in the morning to make sure she gets to visit the goats.

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Talking green energy, commerce with author-activist Paul Hawken

Paul Hawken (image courtesy Clarkson University)

Paul Hawken is one of America’s most respected environmental thinkers, as well as a successful entrepreneur, journalist, and best-selling author devoted to changing the relationship between business and the environment, and between human and living systems.

Hawken has founded numerous ecologically-oriented businesses while continually writing and teaching about the impact of commerce upon the environment, often consulted by world leaders on economic development and environmental policy. Hawken also coined the term “comprehensive outcome”, or full-cost accounting (that takes environmental considerations into economic calculations) as well as the concept of triple bottom line standards for sustainability.

He is the author of six books, including The Next Economy, Growing a Business (subject of a 17-part PBS series) Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution with Amory Lovins (described by President Bill Clinton as one of the five most important books in the world today), and the landmark The Ecology of Commerce, the latter of which was voted in 1998 as the #1 college text on business and the environment.

I spoke with Hawken a few months ago after he addressed the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum in Portland.

Q: A recent study found this region could achieve most of its future power needs over the next 20 years through energy efficiency. What do you see as the accompanying challenges and opportunities carrying forth this message to the public?

A: I think the demand side is still not well understood. 20 percent of all oil consumed was during the Bush administration, 50 percent during the last 20 years. But sometimes energy efficiency measures like double-glazing and insulation and sealants just don’t carry the day. You can’t write a big press release about a breakthrough in a sealant. Demand side is also very decentralized, so you’re not going to get a charismatic corporation that’s going to soar its stock values.

But the most energy we’ll ever get in the whole US is from building retrofits. It’s not going to be any other source. There is no other source that can supply as much energy as that, because it pays every year, delivers energy every year in the classic megawatt way. 

So why isn’t the retrofitting wave bigger, or why don’t people fully understand the opportunity?

What I see missing is a real lack of organization and communication that really collages jobs, energy, security and prosperity. That circle has not been drawn up in such a way that the so-called person on the street without background in any of those areas can understand that is the way towards security, saving money, and creating jobs—those cascading benefits. People touch upon it, everyone from President Clinton to Van Jones. They talk about it in ways that are true and helpful and even inspiring. But I think it takes more than that to actually really make the case. It takes hard data, hard metrics, hard measurements that really show everything from individuals to institutions to governments to businesses and building owners and really where the money is.

There’s no job that creates more dollars per job than retrofits. It’s mostly labor and little material: it’s more labor intensive than material intensive. And yet the amount of energy per hour or per unit of work put in is the highest yield of any type of activity, including creating new power plants. Right now it’s just a lost opportunity.

In the building industry, a lot of attention has gone to new buildings, to living buildings, to Platinum this and that. But we can only build so many new buildings. We don’t even really need so many new buildings. The technology that we really need to be most interested in is retrofit technology. How do we make existing buildings as efficient as the best LEED Platinum building, or better? How do we make the first net-zero retrofitted buildings? Those opportunities are, I think, lacking because the case hasn’t been made well at a national, congressional levels or any other levels. It has been made, but I don’t think it’s been made in a very compelling way. 

As I recall in the Northwest, saved energy costs 1.4 cents a kilowatt-hour. In California it’s 1.3 cents a kilowatt-hour because of variations in temperature and climate. So where can you get energy for 1.4 cents a kilowatt-hour? Nowhere in the world. And yet, there it is, and there’s more of that here than any other form of energy.

I just feel like whether it’s a coalition of groups, with businesses and nonprofits…there needs to be a coming together of people who want to do it, care about it, benefit from it, and really make the case powerfully, intensely and passionately so the public understands that we have, basically, five Saudi Arabias (worth of equivalent energy to oil) sitting in our buildings.

How much does the average person need to reduce his or her energy consumption?

Well, In order for us to make this transition, we cannot go over 2000 watts per person. That’s your total energy budget for the day. [The 2005 US average is 7,885.9 watts.]

People want to make a contribution yet often face disincentives. A renter, for example, living with drafty windows and an old furnace, may be bound by an owner unwilling to make those upgrades. Or a company’s efforts to green its supply chain can face a number of impediments.

There’s obviously disincentives. As a renter, maybe you’d be able to justify it if you thought about it, but you don’t really have the metrics to really understand what the payback would be if you were to change out the windows and the fueling system. What would be absolutely necessary to me is to get those incentives lined up so it’s a no-brainer, so the payoffs and the rate of return on investment are there. Right now the banks have their knickers all tied together. And so it seems to me that we have to look at what former governor John Kitzhaber has proposed here, and others, which is inter-generational financing. Basically we’re talking about spending money to save a lot of energy in the future and create jobs now. And yet nobody will finance it. A select few like Shorebank will, but it also tells you what everybody else is doing. 

But the financial benefit is there.

If you look at the whole systems numbers, there is reward there. There is savings. There is a return on investment that is better than a CD or probably any equity investment. You’d have been better off changing out that furnace or those windows. It just isn’t apparent. 

Looking ahead, what kind of future do you see for solar, wind and other alternative energy markets? Or what barriers do you see for those industries in making positive progress?

I think you’ll see a real growth in solar thermal, excepting that the siting issues are so complicated. It’s going to be slowed down by that. I think you’re seeing some breakthroughs in terms of storage, whether it’s molten salts or others. So I think solar thermal is going to be hampered by the fact that it’s centralized. Centralized means big footprint, and big footprint means permitting issues and all that sort of stuff.

What about wind?

I think wind is going to continue to get better and better, but it’s already running against what you’d call the best limit. You’re not going to get a lot more efficiency out of them. You can only make them bigger, which has its own problems. And there are some technologies coming that will be effective. But the biggest movement you’re going to see, or are seeing, is in solar photovoltaics.

But not necessarily silicon-based photovoltaics?

A square meter of land receives the same amount of energy in a year as a barrel of oil. Sunshine could power the whole world with 70 minutes a day. We have more capacity to make solar than the world needs.

Five and a half days of newsprint printed in the world, if it was printed as solar film, would be enough to substitute for all the energy needed in the world, once you get it up and wired. That’s how close we are.

But I think you’re going to see a move away from silicon because it’s too expensive and it’s too energy intensive, and towards thin film. On the PV side, you need intense energy to make it. It’s not really renewable and sustainable. It’s kind of like a dirty little secret.

There’s still a place for silicon panels because they can approach 100 percent efficiency. But you’re going to see thin-film probably creep out to about 12 or 14 percent over the next 10 years or sooner. But the cost of production is severely reduced versus silicon with very little heat and cheaper materials. What we’re working on is a little different from all those. It is thin film, and it’s printed like Nanosolar, but it can be self-assembled, all of the semiconductors are nontoxic, there’s no heat at all. Right now we’re looking at raw material production costs for a finished a panel at about 75 bucks. There’s nothing to it. You don’t need something that weights 15 pounds to collect a square meter of photon-particle waves. 

I don’t think there’s any question that within five years solar power will be the cheapest electricity in the world. No question. I put hydro aside, because what really is the price of hydroelectricity? What do we really lose in the Columbia in the Snake with salmon runs? The meter is cheaper, but putting that aside, whether it’s renewable or non-renewable, I think the cheapest energy in the world is going to be solar photovoltaic. And I think it’s thin-film technology that more than any other that will be able to ramp up the quickest in terms of replacing carbon-based energy. You still have storage problems with solar, but if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on solar photovoltaic.

How low on fossil fuels is the world getting today?

20 percent of all oil consumed was during the Bush administration, 50 percent during the last 20 years. The biggest oil field discovered 30 years ago. It took 31 years to bring that field up in the Caspian Sea. Now there’s a field in Brazil. It’s 16,000 feet down. There’s almost a mile of salt. We’re talking 200-300 billion dollars to get down there, and it’ll be gone in 16 months.

But we also need fossil fuels to make the transition away from. We’re in the “red green dilemma”. We’re going deeper to get water, we need more electricity and fuel. As we materialize in the world, we need more copper, zinc, iron. The problem is we’re in the marginal areas in terms of minerals as well. The first class mines have been mined out. These demands…the faster we go, the faster we’re going nowhere. It’s taking more energy just to stay where we are. The transition has to be really well thought about.

What you said about hydroelectric power and uncalculated environmental costs resembles a term you first coined several years ago, the “comprehensive outcome” principle: - taking account of the entire result of an event or process to all parties, not just the immediate participants.  Has much progress has been made in this kind of economic reform?

I think progress is being made everywhere. I think the question is whether the rate is speeding up as fast as the rate of degradation. The answer still is no. That increased understanding, though quite phenomenal, is masked heavily by the media. If you watch it, you’d think nothing’s changed. Because it is advertiser-driven. It’s masked heavily by the US Congress. Are we up a creek without a paddle? I don’t think that’s true. If those are your sole sources of information, I can understand the confusion. What I see in my work with governement, NGOs and corporations is an explosion of understanding and literacy that is systemic, that is systems based, that is looking at, as you say, comprehensive outcome. I see a generation coming out of specialized schools like Bainbridge and more non-traditional high schools and coming out with clear understandings of the problems at hand.

What do you enjoy the most about your job and what, if anything, keeps you awake at night?

It’s always great to go out in the world, like today, to meet people and find out that prior books had helped people. When you’re writing, you’re alone and sometimes it’s kind of a lonely thing. But the thing that probably most excites me is working with John Warner and Janine Benyus called OneSun. There are 1.6 billion people in the world who don’t have electricity, and we think we can provide a very inexpensive form of electricity that, with microfinance, would cost them pennies a day to run all the basic needs they would have in terms of a laptop and cell phone and lights and ceiling fan and whatever else. That’s the most exciting thing right now. What I love right now is the singularity of what I’m doing.

If we fail, which we might, at least I’ll still feel good about it. I’d rather fail at something important than succeed at something that’s trivial. But I think we will succeed. And we’re having a lot of fun doing it.

The capacity for human beings to mobilize can be quite astonishing. I work in a building that was built by Bechtel during World War II for shipbuilding. At a certain point they were turning out one per day, a 7 thousand ton steel boat, using unskilled workers, no computers, just blueprints and pencils. That capacity is there. What’s missing is that sense of peril or imperative that would drive us to do that. I say, “Bring it on.” We have the capacity and the science to do this.

 

Fixing and preventing defective buildings: a conversation with Western Architectural's Eric Hoff

Lofts @ The Round (image courtesy Western Architectural)

As the Portland area has burgeoned in both density and its commitment to building green over the past decade, a whole generation of new buildings have gone up with advanced facade and envelopes that often fail to deliver the efficiencies or even simple basic operations they were designed for. This has kept one Portland firm, Western Architectural, busy even as the profession has experienced a big decline in business.

Western provides what's called forensic architectural services. That doesn't mean they're doing chalk outlines or tracing DNA at crime scenes. Instead, they investigate construction and design defects in problematic existing buildings, such as the much-maligned Round at Beaverton Central, and advise firms on how to prevent their buildings from leaking water and air.

"Doing over 200 projects a year on the forensic side, we see a lot of stuff," says Eric Hoff, Western's president. "We have a large knowledge base of, ‘Here’s things you can do, and here’s things you want to do, and why.’" Did I mention Hoff testifies in a lot of court cases?

Lofts @ The Round post-renovation (image courtesy Western Architectural) 

"As an architect, it’s not like the old guild days where architects are all talking to each other with that knowledge of things that do and don’t work. It doesn't seem to move around well in the profession. All the young designers want to be the new great whoever, and they haven’t seen a lot. We see a lot of design come out where you can tell it looks great, but then it makes you say, 'Have you thought about this?'"

For The Round, Western helped design a new facade that replaced an existing metal facade. "The detailing of that is different from conventional siding," Hoff adds. "Typically the holes are found where you make a hole in the skin. There were also other areas because of the way the siding came together. It’s not an easy way to detail."

Lofts @ The Round post-renovation (images courtesy Western Architectural) 

For tenants of The Round, Western Architectural is validating the commitment they made and have thus far regretted. "They've invested heavily into condominiums plagued with shoddy craftsmanship, plummeting values, sky-high association fees and persistent court cases," Brad Schmidt wrote in The Oregonian in an August 14 story on The Round. "They've opened businesses in buildings with spendy rents, cramped parking, slow elevators and striking vacancies. These people admit the Round has a long way to go, but they're careful to defend their home. At the Round, frustration is mixed with hope. "

On any facade, the biggest risk of water and air leakage or unwanted temperature transfer comes where it is penetrated. "When you’re trying to bring different materials together, they’re usually difficult to interface together and to make them tight. It’s how you detail those connections. It’s been our experience that regardless of the materials there can be problems in how you get them to come together."

An increase in these sorts of connection problems has come from more mixed-use buildings, where the ground-floor retail has a different material feel from the rest of the facade: usually more glass. Green buildings can also create more facade penetrations through exterior materials such as sun shades and light shelves. "Usually those are structural attachments and penetrate the skin. There are ways to deal with that, but it’s things you have to think about. ."

It's not at all to say that Hoff is anti-green building or innovation. His point is simply about execution. He estimates that more than half of all LEED-rated buildings are not performing as efficiently as designed - and hopes Western has a niche making sure they do. What's more, Hoff says certain sustainable inventions such as rain-screen facade technology will ultimately better enable buildings in this climate to survive our rainy season.

The green building world is injecting a lot of new products into the market place. It’s such a rapidly evolving technology that it’s difficult to get buildings put together well that do function well. The profession is learning right now. It's just that on our side, we basically get to see all the problems."

Examing the attic ceiling using a camera scope inserted from the roof (image courtesy Western Architectural) 

Many clients, though, have come to hire Western or other facade experts before the design is completed. "They can be running ideas by us. 'Where do you see there could be issues we need to pay attention to?' They’ll talk about the materials they want to use and we’ll talk about our experience in the past with it. Sometimes I’ll say, ‘You need to tell me what you’re trying to do here because the drawing as I see it the building is going to leak.’ Then we can eliminate the issues before they happen.  You can draw an awful lot of stuff that you can’t build. What you can do with a pencil you can’t necessarily do with sheet metal strips, or afford to do it."

And as Hoff understands, for all the extra difficulty that may come with innovations, sustainable or urbanistic or otherwise, it's always worth it for us to push the envelope - pun intended. It's also necessary, though, to have firms like Western Architectural assuring the envelope bends but doesn't break.

Meier & Frank warehouse to be renovated for Vestas headquarters

Meier & Frank warehouse (photo by Brian Libby) 

As reported by the Portland Business Journal's Erik Siemers, wind turbine manufacturer Vestas Wind Systems announced today that the company will lease the circa-1927 Meier & Frank Delivery Depot warehouse at 14th and Everett in the Pearl District and renovate it into a 172,000-square-foot headquarters.

Portland developer Gerding Edlen had bought the warehouse in October 2007 for $15 million and planned to start renovating the building in May 2008 with GBD Architects responsible for a LEED-rated design. But plans were scaled back when the economy crashed.

The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. That means the renovation's design will have to adhere to regulations regarding the maintenance of its historic character. But that's something Gerding Edlen already has experience with: the Portland Armory was renovated by the company with the help of GBD Architects into the nation's first National Register-listed, LEED Platinum-rated green building.

The $66 million project is expected to generate about 600 construction jobs. 

Vestas received both state and city incentives, including $1.25 million in state tax credits and another $1 million from the state’s strategic investment fund. The city will give the company a 15-year, interest-free loan for $8.105 million. The company is expected to repay the loan within five years. As part of the agreement, the company, which employs 400 locally, must add at least 100 jobs within the next five years. Once built out, the building will have room to house 600 workers.

Construction will begin in October. Vestas plans to move to the building in early 2012.

Two years ago, the Danish company announced it would build a $250 million, 600,000-square-foot new North American headquarters in the South Waterfront. That building, which was to have been designed by Portland firm Ankrom Moisan, could have eventually housed 850 employees. But Vestas mothballed the plan in April 2009 when the economy collapsed.

Since then, there were rumors that the company might relocate its North American headquarters to Denver, where it has its manufacturing operations and is planning a research and development. The company told the Business Journal it also looked at sites in Texas and around the Portland area before deciding on the Meier & Frank warehouse.

According to Gerding Edlen's announcement about the Vestas project, the building renovation team includes GBD Architects (as lead architect and architect of record), the firm Gerding planned for the 2008 renovation, but will also include Ankrom Moisan Architects and Peter Meijer Architect as well as engineering firms  Glumac and KPFF and builder Skanska.

Speaking briefly today with Gerding Edlen president Mark Edlen, I was told that the design will include a large central atrium that will fill the old warehouse with natural light - something that preliminary indications seem to show will be approved by those in charge of maintaining the integrity of historic landmarks protection.

The local economy, especially the building industry, is still floundering. But Vestas staying in Portland is a big financial boon, as well as a chance for the Pearl District's biggest remaining empty, unrenovated warehouse to be given new life.

What's more, the renovated M&F warehouse will give Portland's greenest developer and at least of its major green architecture firms an opportunity to demonstrate how the most sustainable way to build is to renovate an existing building.

Hayden Island and big-picture thinking

Aerial photo of Hayden Island (courtesy Army Corps of Engineers) 

The emerging debate over the future of West Hayden Island may be a bellwether of the Portland area's values and approach to city building in the future and possibly even an argument for a regional port authority.

The approximately 1,200-acre Hayden Island, located on the Columbia River between Vancouver and Portland, saw its east side developed decades ago. It is home to the Jantzen Beach shopping center, large hotels, residential communities and boating docks.

The western portion, however, has remained undeveloped.

"Its 826 acres of  wetland, grassland, forest, beaches and shallow-water salmon habitat represent some of the last intact wildlife habitat on our otherwise developed and degraded urban river system," write Audubon Society conservation director Bob Sallinger and Willamette Riverkeeper executive director Travis Williams in a July 28 Oregonian editorial.  "Its location at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers places it at a critical juncture for migrating fish and bird populations. It is also entirely in the flood plain - in 1996, the entire area was underwater."

"If we are serious about restoring ecological health to our urban landscape," the op-ed continues, "this is the last place we should be considering converting to industrial terminals and parking lots."

The Friends of West Hayden Island also note the island has "81 species of birds (including nesting pairs of bald eagles and heron), nine species of mammals (including deer and beaver), four species of amphibians (including a rare variety of painted turtle), nine species of butterflies, large forests of native cottonwoods, federally-protected wetlands, and shallows for juvenile salmon."

The island also "contains the natural regional flyways for migratory and year-round bird populations that use both east-west and north-south flight patterns, and is the centerpiece of the 150-square mile ecosystem," the Friends' website also notes. "This includes Vancouver Lake, the Smith-Bybee Lakes and wetlands, Sauvie and Government Islands, and the confluence of the Upper Willamette and Lower Columbia Rivers systems."

Deer at West Hayden Island (image courtesy Friends of West Hayden Island) 

Industrial expansion is what the Port of Portland and the city's own long-range planning have in mind. West Hayden Island was added to the region’s urban growth boundary in 1983 for marine industrial purposes. No industrial development is in process for the island currently, nor is it currently even within City of Portland boundaries. But the City could annex the area and create zoning for industrial use as stipulated 27 years ago.

Last Thursday (August 5), before a council chambers so full it had to be partially cleared to comply with the fire code, Portland's City Council authorized staff to plan for building 300 acres of marine terminals on West Hayden Island. The council voted 4-0, with Commissioner Randy Leonard absent, to authorize further planning. The Bureau of Planning & Sustainability is charged with developing a proposal by December 2011 for annexing the island and identifying 300 acres for deep-water terminal development. 

In an Oregonian report by Scott Learn, Commissioners Amanda Fritz and Nick Fish stressed that decision isn't final. "What we are agreeing to is a road map for the second phase of analysis," Fish said. "This does not call the question on whether we go forward on annexation." 

The council also ordered further study of how to best use existing Port lands, options for restoring the undeveloped portions of the island, a possible new bridge from the island south to North Marine Drive, and opportunities for increased coordination with the Port of Vancouver.

In other words, the Council seems to be preparing to go forward with industrial development while covering its bases by showing that other options have been explored.

Expanding the industrial zone into West Hayden Island would cost taxpayers an estimated $100 to $150 million in new public infrastructure. But one can't discount the economic argument for expanding the port's industrial terminal area. The Port of Portland says expanding into West Hayden could bring an estimated 1,200 jobs, although that would be over a 10 to 20-year period.

But Sallinger of the Audubon Society questions those numbers, because they're from the Port itself, the agency arguing for the expansion. He told Learn that City of Portland should hire consultants independent of the Port to study whether the Port can redevelop its own lands instead of expanding and whether other Columbia River ports have room to meet projected demand.

On the Port of Portland's website, the following arguments are also made for expansion:

"Local waterfront industrial land is needed. There is an identified scarcity of waterfront industrial lands within the City of Portland per the city’s industrial atlas and inventory and the City’s Draft Economic Opportunity Analysis. Additionally, the city’s “Portland Plan,” a required land use planning process that is currently being conducted, identifies the need for 600 acres of industrial land within city limits."

"Regional industrial land is needed. Our regional government, Metro is considering urban growth boundary expansion. To comply with state law, more industrial land must be found within the urban growth boundary. Annexing and zoning WHI would help address the region’s industrial land shortage and establish environmental resource protection levels."

West Hayden Island (image courtesy Port of Portland) 

It gave me pause that the Port is advocating for expansion. The text I drew from on the agency's website also acknowledges the environmental concerns and resources in West Hayden Island, but I still question if it's right for a public agency to make the case for its industry.

On the other hand, there is some geographical perspective we must keep in mind: The proposed 300-acre development would take up less than half the island, leaving the rest for restoration. "This is not development running amok," Bruce Halperin of the Oregon Trucking Associations, told City Council (as quoted in Learn's article). "Of course, it would be nice not to develop the land at all, but our economic and social needs don't afford us that luxury."

Then you have the question of the Columbia Crossing and how this whole plan fits together. Are these planning and exploration efforts by various panels and government working groups talking to each other? Isn't there, or shouldn't there be, a comprehensive plan for this whole area? Unfortunately, that becomes difficult because this is such a jumbled set of jurisdictions, a place where city boundaries end, then the river separating two states, two cities and two counties. It's like a multi-headed beast.

Meanwhile, the Port of Portland has already been spending decades dumping on West Hayden Island contaminated toxic dredge material on the island, they were outraged.

The port maintains the contaminants - lead, zinc and DDT - were found at very low levels. "Throughout the process it has been deemed as safe for human and natural resources," said Josh Thomas of the Port of Portland in a KGW story. But Department of Environmental Quality officials said that the low level contaminants could cause long-term harm to wildlife, especially birds.

"It’s a relatively low level of toxicity but it is absolutely contaminated," Sallinger told KGW. He sees a potential conspiracy involving the Port. "Our concern is that the Port of Portland has intentionally contaminated West Hayden island with contaminated sediments from the Portland harbor super fund site under the pretense the site was going to be developed."

I also found compelling an online Oregonian op-ed by Hayden Island resident Ellen Seminara, who addresses numerous practical concerns: 

There's only one way on and one way off the island, and it's used by all who live, work and shop here. Imagine your own neighborhood and what life would be like for you if several thousand people had only one way in or out every day. It's already difficult for me to get home after 3 PM every day. Is there any plan to improve access on and off the island to accommodate the additional cars and trucks that this project purports to create? 

The current bridge is already overburdened. Traffic is often backed up from the bridge past the Rose Quarter for large blocks of time during rush hour or when the drawbridge is up. This brings interstate commerce and travel to a halt, leaving all those cars and semi-trucks idling. It's a huge waste of time and fuel. What effect will dumping 1,200 new cars and an unknown number of large semi-trucks have on this problem? 

Every time we have a big rain there are giant lakes of water that accumulate in the streets. By the end of winter we have enormous potholes all over the island that need filling. Does the city have a plan to remediate the roadways to accommodate all this extra heavy traffic?

She also has had a first-hand view of the wildlife there, and of the community eroding:

We watch the moonlight reflect on the water and delight at seeing blue herons and osprey hunt for food. This is a quiet and beautiful place to live, but our quality of life seems to be diminishing. We recently lost two family restaurants. One has been divided into two bars, and the other is likely to become a strip club. The only park and playground on the island has been shut down all summer, forcing me to go all the way to Peninsula Park to find toddler swings.

"It's been wonderful to watch the revitalization of the Kenton neighborhood just two exits south on I-5," she concludes, with a nod to Mayor Adams' area of residence. "I'd like to see Hayden Island benefit from this level of attention."

Several years ago I interviewed the head of the Central Eastside Industrial Council for a Daily Journal of Commerce article, and I remember the overriding feeling he had that ordinary citizens in the general public don't appreciate how important industrial land is to the economy. Our society used to devote much of our waterfronts to shipyards, ports, warehouses and train tracks in order to move goods throughout a region. To a large extent that's of course still true today, and as a left-leaning environmentalist I feel a responsibility to try and fairly recognize those industrial needs. 

At the same time, this is part of a multi-generational transition. Societies have rediscovered the public and environmental value in allowing waterfront spaces to be preserved naturally, to let important natural parcels serve act as wildlife habitat, wetlands, flood plains and other kinds of mostly concrete-free settings. It's not just an empty touchy-feely emotional response born from daydreams about Bambi and Thumper frolicking amongst our Subarus and Starbucks, but a valid recognition of how necessary natural systems are for a region's overall health and prosperity. After all, Portland's economy has been enhanced by the city's popularity and reputation for progressiveness in sustainable thinking. If we start to let that erode, does that put us a step closer to being some overgrown eyesore?

Port of Vancouver (photo by Brian Libby) 

I say let West Hayden Island stay a natural area, and instead merge the Port of Portland and the Port of Vancouver into one regional body. After all, it's silly to expand Portland's industrial acreage into a natural deemed important to wildlife and the environment when the city across the river in Washington has that amount of land and more.

As enumerated in Scott Learn's Oregonian article, the Vancouver port has about 350 acres available for new terminals in its Columbia Gateway project. The Port of Portland says West Hayden Island, which it owns, is the only place it can develop large new terminals, and the 300-acre footprint is the smallest it can go. Aren't these guys and gals talking to each other at all? You have one river separating the two cities, and then you have one calling for cutting trees and laying concrete when the exact thing that's needed is available with people eager to develop it just across the water?

I've tried to be empathetic to the economic value in having proper industrial space, but when I try to look at the whole picture, I see an prominent piece of mostly untouched natural land at the confluence of the state's two biggest rivers, all in an otherwise urban setting, making all the more inherently valuable. Then I see one city looking to claim that land as if it's their only alternative when another entity is all but jumping up and down and waving its hands with a solution. If we're going to spend the $100-150 million that West Hayden Island's industrial infrastructure would require from the city, I'd rather devote it to a new bridge connecting the Island with Marine Drive. Like Ellen Seminara the Hayden Island resident says, having just one way in and out of there for all the residents, truckers and shoppers makes it more of an island than the Columbia ever has.

A new green roof for Ecotrust

Sedum plants on Ecotrust roof (photo by Brian Libby) 

When the Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center (commonly known as the Ecotrust building) opened in 2001, it quickly became known as a landmark of sustainable design. The brick and stucco warehouse, initially built in 1895 as the McCracken Warehouse, was the first historic redevelopment in the United States to receive a gold-level LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) designation from the US Green Building Council.

With a rehab designed by Holst Architecture, Ecotrust also quickly became a center for Portland's sustainable design community, with the city's Office of Sustainable Development headquartered there as well as progressive retailers like Patagonia.

Besides its other sustainable features, Ecotrust also was also pioneering in the use of its green roof, with plantings covering more than half of the building's roof in order to reduce stormwater runoff and provide extra insulation.

But as it happens, Ecotrust's green roof had problems - not more than any other green roof of its generation, but lacking some of the key elements that have come to comprise healthy green roofs since it was originally constructed. "It was installed at a time of burgeoning knowledge but lack of experience," says John Crumrine of Enviroscapes Northwest, the company that created the new green roof. In other words, the Ecotrust roof never malfunctioned, but new technology and understanding of how to make them work means that it was time for it to be replaced.

Ecotrust roof (photos by Brian Libby)  

This of course begs the question: If Ecotrust is a symbol of sustainability, how sustainable is it to re-do a green roof less than a decade after it was put in? But then again, one wants the green roof to function as well as possible, and some lessons have to be learned the hard way, through trial and error.

The main difference between the old green roof and the new one is its built-in drainage and filtration system, but it also has separate layers between rock and soil, something the lack of also caused problems in the old system (seen in accumulated pools of water).

The roof only supports about 14 pounds per square foot and the soil is only a few inches deep, which limits the type of plantings that can go there. Enviroscapes selected a sedum plant with fleshy leaves but, crucially for a green roof, doesn't leave behind any flammable debris. One can actually plant sedum by simply tossing handfuls of it onto the soil - it actually digs its own roots without being embedded in the dirt.

Ecotrust building (photo by Brian Libby) 

The average cost of a green roof, Crumrine says, is about $11-13 per square foot. The City of Portland provided about $5 per square foot in tax breaks, or about a 40 percent reduction in cost.

As for the benefits of this new roof, like any, Crumrine says the primary one is it will extend the life of the roof membrane by about 2 to 3 times because it's not exposed to UV radiation or extremes of hot and cold. This is also a highly visible roof, on a building associated with advanced thinking in sustainable design and construction, not to mention a popular destination for people to hang out or even have weddings. So it matters that the greenery is sprouting.

Sustainable economics, temperatures and cities

Photo by Brian Libby 

This week, as Portland sees its first 90-degree temperatures of the year, recent media stories testify to how the way out of the Great Recession is through sustainability, alternative energy and planning.

Nathalie Weinstein reports in Tuesday’s Daily Journal of Commerce on a report released by Earth Advantage showing new homes in the Portland metro area with third-party sustainability certification were sold for more money.

Homes built between May 1, 2009 and April 30, 2010 that were certified with either Earth Advantage, Energy Star or LEED for Homes sold for 18 percent more (on average) than homes without a certification. Existing homes that received a certification sold for 23 percent more.

I’ll bet most of those green homes did not have central air conditioning. Granted, with Portland’s moderate climate it’s easier to accomplish that here and maintain comfort for all but about 11 months of the year. But could America really ever wean itself off air conditioning?

Numerous national outlets have also taken note of a new book by Stan Cox called Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer). In a Q&A with the National Post of Canada, Cox says air conditioning has shaped U.S. presidential politics, shifted populations, altered our sex lives and thickened our waistlines.

Cox is on to something. Between 1993 and 2005 our use of electricity [in the U.S.] for cooling residences and retail space doubled over that period and that, over that same period, more or less, we doubled our use of petroleum energy used in cooling automobiles. The mass migration that has occurred in America to Sun Belt states has been part of that phenomenon. One needs air conditioning in Las Vegas, I’d approximate, about 25 hours a day, 375 days a year. Phoenix slightly more still.

Cox isn’t suggesting we get rid of air conditioning altogether. “Focus on people cooling rather than building cooling,” he tells the Post. “An example would be going back to the single room air conditioner. Have it in one room of the house and if things get too bad, turn it on and cool the room. Rather than, imagine our current scenario, say, in the American Sunbelt, where a husband and wife get up in a 3,000 square foot air-conditioned house, get into two air-conditioned cars and commute to an office block that has been sitting there, getting cooled all night in preparation for the workday. Meanwhile, back home, that 24,000 cubic feet is being cooled with nobody in the house.”

If air conditioning isn’t as necessary or ubiquitous here, designing buildings that can survive in hot climates is still an expertise we need. Portland is a leader in sustainable design, and as much promise as their may be in solar, wind and other alternative energy, it’s through buildings that better heat and cool themselves efficiently and passively that America will wean itself from fossil fuels. 

As best I can tell, it would take an extraordinary green building to keep one cool on a 95-degree day without air conditioning.  It would require top-notch insulation, the help of external shading from trees or human-made devices.  And even then, it’s difficult to imagine just walking away from such an effective technology.  Even so, the days are gone when one can expect to simply blast refrigerated air into poorly insulated, sieve-like architecture. 

In an economic climate that is shaky at best, and with the threat of a second recessionary dip seemingly growing, green design and construction projects represent a lone bright spot amidst an industry with skyscraper-high unemployment rates.

The government has acted accordingly, with the Obama administration embracing sustainability and alternative energy endeavors. On Saturday, for example, President Obama announced that the Department of Energy will award $2 billion to two solar energy companies, Abengoa Solar and Solar Manufacturing, to build solar plants that will collectively create about 1,600 new American jobs with over 70 percent of the construction components and products manufactured in the United States.

Now more needs to be done on the single-family home front. While there are some tax incentives for items like solar hot water heaters, high-efficiency boilers, and energy-efficient windows, I can’t help but believe more could be done to encourage market transformation, such as rebates for the kind of third-party verified green homes that are already proven to hold better sale value. Or a gas tax that could be used to fund other weatherization projects at residential, commercial and institutional levels.

Make no mistake, though: There seems to be not just an economic transformation happening today but a cultural one. Take for example another article, in last Wednesday's New York Times, about how auto dealerships around the country, particularly those of domestic auto brands,  are being converted into a range of other uses. 

The Times article cited a report by CoStar, a DC-area commercial real estate research firm, that since early 2009 about 2,300 auto dealerships have closed around the country as new car sales plunged more than 40 percent and the government forced General Motors and Chrysler, to end longstanding franchise contracts. The closings put 70 million square feet of buildings and land on the market. Some of the former dealerships are becoming other auto dealerships, but others are becoming schools, retail centers, even lumber yards.

I wonder if there’s a bit of a vacuum happening here, though. Ultimately we can’t just design sustainable individual buildings; we need neighborhoods that are interconnected, where a mix of housing, retail, offices, parks and other spaces mean most anything one needs is only minutes away—and preferably by some means other than car. If all these auto dealerships are becoming available, and if the economy is transforming all kinds of other industries right now, shouldn’t there be some kind of concerted, collective effort to make sure we are planning sustainable cities as well as sustainable buildings? Sustainability-focused architects often compare an efficient building design to a living, organic organism. If that’s true for a building with scores or a few hundred people, it’s even truer for a city of millions.

Commercial real estate's looming crisis and Architecture 2030's renovation solution

Washington High School, photo by Brian Libby 

Since America's economy was gravely threatened by the mortgage crisis that caused stock markets to plummet in late 2007, we have come a long way back to stability. But the crisis may not be over yet.

The economic storm of the last two to three years was fueled before largely by home foreclosures. But commercial real estate transactions have dropped a staggering 90 percent since 2007, and because commercial real estate (CRE) loans typically have three to ten-year terms, between now and 2014 approximately $1.4 trillion in real estate property loans will come due and require new financing. Many of these loans were originated in the commercial boom years of 2005-2007 when property values were exceptionally high; since then, commercial property values have fallen more than 40 percent, resulting in higher loan-to-value (LTV) ratios. As a result, building owners will have difficulty refinancing, even if their property is performing well. 

Commercial vacancies also continue to increase. In addition, the construction industry has lost over two million jobs, including 35,000 last month, mostly in the commercial sector.

To restore credit capacity and liquidity in the commercial real estate market and create an estimated 1.3 million construction-related jobs, Architecture 2030 recommends implementing what the nonprofit calls the "CRE Solution", a three-year commercial building tax deduction for meeting the energy reduction targets of the 2030 Challenge.

Architecture 2030 was established in response to the global-warming crisis by architect Edward Mazria in 2002. The nonprofit's mission is to rapidly transform the US and global building industry from the major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions to a central part of the solution to the global-warming crisis.1

Besides creating  1.3 million jobs, the CRE Solution claims it will increase after-tax cash flow and property values, and reduces loan defaults; increase commercial real estate investment value and CRE sales (narrowing the gap between the bid and ask price of CRE property); decrease building energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and operating costs; and generate billions of dollars in federal, state, and local tax revenue.

How will this be accomplished? By focusing on energy efficiency renovations and additions.

Graph/image courtesy Architecture 2030 

"This market tends to be less responsive to economic changes than the new building construction market, which is more volatile, responding to the ups and downs of the economy," the CRE Solution white paper reads. "In contrast to new buildings, the value of commercial renovation has remained fairly constant throughout the recession. Over the past five years, from 2005 through 2009, commercial building renovations and additions have averaged $73.4 billion, totaling $69.1 billion in 2009. This provides a substantial existing and stable market for incentives, since it is much easier to conduct additional renovation work and add new space when construction is underway than it is to initiate new construction work."

As it happens, here in Portland there is already some evidence of a move toward renovation in the commercial real estate market. Nathalie Weinstein reports in Monday's Daily Journal of Commerce on efforts by prominent developers like Art DeMuro of Venerable Properties, Brad Malsin of Beam Development and Mark Edlen of Gerding Edlen all targeting rehabs over new construction. Although that has always been the stock and trade of Malsin and DeMuro, the system could be set in place for more renovations.

Weinstein reports that DeMuro has been trying to restore and transform the former Washington High School in Southeast Portland, built in 1906:

"Mired in budgetary woes, Portland Public Schools, which owns the building, doesn’t have the school’s redevelopment high on its agenda. And possible funding from Portland Parks and Recreation to remake the school into a community center died with a decision by Parks and Recreation to not pursue a bond measure this year. Developers who have tried to turn the school into housing in the past abandoned the efforts once they saw the price tag."

"Still, DeMuro won’t walk away from Washington High. The desire to see the building brought back into the community is too strong, he said. 'After I worked on another renovation at in the neighborhood, I felt this connection to the place where Washington High is located,' DeMuro said. 'I’ve never done a school rehab. The project doesn’t have a high probability of a successful conclusion, yet it could have so much community impact.'”

As I've said before, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art would seem to be an ideal anchor tenant for Washington High School. The organization already staged most of its internationally renowned and locally popular Time-Based Art Festival in the building last year, and will be doing so again this fall. Why not devote a portion of Washington High to PICA exhibit and performance space and designate the rest for some combination of retail, residential and/or commercial tenants? Wouldn't a lot of creative-industry businesses like to locate themselves next to a highly valued organization like PICA?

Olympic Mills Commerce Center, photo by Brian Libby 

The example of building rehabs as hives for the creative industry already has enjoyed success in Portland, with examples like the Leftbank Project on NW Broadway, Malsin's East Bank Commerce Center and Olympic Mills Commerce Center in the Central Eastside, and the Ford Building in Southeast, all of which are healthfully full of tenants during this "Great Recession" or "Great Reset".

As Architecture 2030 notes in the CRE Solution paper, providing incentives to encourage energy reductions in commercial buildings is already established in legislation. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides a well-established mechanism for immediately and effectively implementing expanded incentives and energy reduction targets in the commercial real estate market:

"Currently, the Act provides up to $1.80 per square foot for specific energy reduction targets in new and renovated commercial buildings. However, the Act can be amended to better align with the 2030 Challenge and current federal policy, as established in the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) passed by the House and the American Clean Energy Leadership Act (S. 1462) passed out of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in 2009, by expanding and increasing the existing energy-efficient commercial building tax deduction provision from $1.80 per sq.ft. to a range of $4.50-$9 per sqare foot for renovations and $3-$7.50 per sqare foot for new buildings (for three years) when meeting the energy reduction targets of H.R. 2454 and S. 1462. This would provide an effective tax benefit for building purchases, renovations, and high-performance new buildings and additions, as well as significant energy savings for businesses and commercial property owners."

National Trust partnering with Green Building Services, Cascadia Green Building Council on renovation study

Ecotrust/Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center, Portland, photo by Brian Libby 

For all the progress that's been made over the last decade (and more) advancing green buildings, most of that has focused on new construction. It's the same on the research front: Lots of studies have done analyzing  the merits of constructing new green buildings, yet there’s relatively little data available on the economic and environmental benefits of building reuse.

That will soon change thanks to a new partnership between the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Portland-based Green Building Services and the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. The three groups are partnering on a large, unprecedented study that will quantify the value of building reuse in a number of different situations, such as environmental impacts avoided when homeowners reuse and retrofit an existing house rather than tear one down and construct a new green home in its place.

“We can’t build our way out of the climate change crisis," said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust, in a press release. "We have to conserve our way out, and this study provides us with a unique and crucial opportunity to help people understand the environmental value of building reuse.”

Buildings consume around 40 percent of total energy use in the United States. "So they are a big part of the problem, and, by necessity, they have to be an integral part of the solution," added Ralph DiNola of Green Building Services."The energy and environmental impacts embodied in the building’s structure become a more significant part of the equation.  With this study, we aim to provide real clarity about these impacts.”

Gerding Theater at the Portland Armory, photo by Brian Libby 

The study, funded with a grant from the Summit Foundation, will employ a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) evaluation to look at the differences between energy, carbon, water and other environmental impacts in new construction and building reuse. The LCA study will examine several building types in four regions of the United States. The research, team members say, requires a comprehensive understanding not only of existing buildings, building materials and methods, but also of the numerous development forces at play in shaping the built environment, many of which cannot be easily quantified. 

Jason F. McLennan of the Cascadia Green Building Council said, “Throughout their lifecycle, building materials are responsible for a whole range of adverse environmental impacts ― from destructive resource depletion and energy-intensive manufacturing, to accumulation of toxins after their disposal.  This important study will provide key missing data for the green building industry as we advocate for lower environmental impacts through building and material reuse.”

Green Building Services, a sustainable development consulting firm, has expanded from its Portland office to include outposts in Sacramento, Orlando and Houston. Cascadia is one of three original chapters of the US Green Building Council and, as a chapter of the Canada Green Building Council as well, is the only international chapter in North America. 

The study is expected to be completed in early 2011.

David Cook and redefining sustainability

Unilever Haus, Hamburg Germany, courtesy Behnish Architecten 

David Cook of Behnisch Architekten, currently the Pietro Belluschi Distinguished Visiting Professor in Architecture at the University of Oregon School of Architecture, will be speaking at the U of O White Stag Building at 6PM Thursday evening, May 20th.

Behnisch Architekten is an international leader in large scale sustainable design projects. The Stuttgart, Germany-based architecture and planning firm maintains US offices in Los Angeles and Boston. Their portfolio includes the LEED Platinum-rated Genzyme Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Norddeutsche Landesbank in Hannover, Germany; the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Cultural District Riverfront Development Plan; a corporate headquarters for Unilever in Hamburg, Germany; and a Science Complex for Harvard University.

 “The name Behnisch is associated with a particular architectural language, one characterized by transparency, lightness and a decidedly modern approach," reads the firm's website. "In more than 50 years over 150 buildings have been realized, many of which are considered milestones in German post-war architecture, ranging from large-scale sports facilities to administration and bank buildings, from educational facilities, museums, libraries and airport towers to residential buildings of all sizes.”

David Cook (pictured at right) studied architecture at the Polytechnic in Manchester and obtained his Diploma at the University of East London in 1992. Together with firm leaders Stefan Behnisch and Martin Haas, he has co-led  Behnisch Architekten since 2006.

Cook will be speaking in conjunction with the exhibit  ”Design, Ecology, Synergy”  which redefines the term sustainability by examining how people inhabit their built environments. This exhibition, which toured Europe, showcases the design approach of Behnisch Architekten and Transsolar Climate  Engineering, as illustrated by several international projects and ongoing collaborations. 

"It is a cleverly designed exhibition that demonstrates the human senses to the built environment," says John Jennings of BetterBricks (a Portland Architecture sponsor). "Human scale diagrams show our intake of the environment and our reactions to light, material, temperature, air, and sound as conditions determined or often dictated by the enclosure system of the building. The exhibition appropriately features audio, visual, and tactile displays including large light boxes where information on each category (light, material, etc.) is printed on the surface; videos of interviews and projects; project models, and large colorful dome luminaries."

The lecture is free and open to the public, and will take place at 6PM at the University of Oregon's White Stag Block, at 70 NW Couch Street.

Architect Magazine lists SERA Architects as nation's #3 green architecture firm, ZGF as #7 firm overall

Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building renovation, rendering by Scott Baumberger and Baumberger Studio 

The May issue of Architect Magazine has come out with two lists: its second annual Architect 50, listing the nation's top firms, and a separate list of the top green architecture firms specifically.

Portland firms had a substantial presence on both lists. Most notably, SERA Architects was listed at #3, just behind the giant Chicago firm Perkins + Will and EYP Architecture & Engineering of Albany, New York.

Also on the top 10 green firms list was Portland firm ZGF Architects at #10. And DLR Group, which is based in Omaha but has a Portland office, was listed at #9.

Then there was the Architect 50 list, which had ZGF listed as the #7 firm in the country. "ZGF is as green as its Pacific Northwest roots would suggest," the listing text reads, "while its strength in health care, infrastructure, and government work has kept it chugging through the recession." New York-based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which previously operated a Portland office and designed local landmarks like Memorial Coliseum, the US Bancorp Tower ("Big Pink"), Autzen Stadium and the Standard Insurance Center, was listed as the nation's top firm.

The Architect 50 list is a little different from other lists of top national architecture firms in that it "recognizes ecological commitment and design quality as much as profitability when measuring the country’s very best A, AE, and AEC firms."

Meanwhile, yesterday I spoke with SERA Architects' principal Clark Brockman about the listing as America's #3 green architecture firm.

Brockman likes the fact that Architect Magazine didn't just add up the number of LEED-rated projects and LEED-accredited professionals to compile the list; also included was a "firm culture" metric, for which SERA earned a high ranking. "I’d hope we keep finding new measures," Brockman said. "What we really want is to inspire more and more firms to be going green faster and faster. But this is a move in the right direction."

Today SERA has about 85 employees, which is about the same number the firm employed two years ago, when the Great Recession was beginning to take its toll. Just breaking even in terms of employee growth during the worst economic climate since the 1930s is pretty impressive. The obvious conclusion to draw is that SERA's focus on green is what allowed the firm to prosper amidst the tough times. 

But Brockman says it's not that simple. He points to SERA's diverse portfolio of both public and private clients. The firm is also an employee-owned company, which he says helps them retain talent and keep people motivated. "I sure wouldn’t want the message to be that SERA thinks we are where we ware because of green," he says. "I think of being sustainable in a broad sense. We want to be financially sustainable, protecting and saving staff, and working on green design."

Another key for SERA, Brockman argues, has been the development over the past two years of the firm's  in-house Sustainability Resources Group (SURG), comprised of employees with specific areas of sustainable expertise. "We’ve got a mechanical engineer, skin experts, daylighting and lighting experts," he adds. "Two years ago we had two people in that group amongst 85 people on staff and now it’s seven. We’re busy as heck and providing a lot of service to all the projects in the firm.  But it’s constantly changing."

Right now SERA is engaged in three major projects: the Oregon Sustainability Center (in partnership with GBD Architects) and a renovation of the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building (in partnership with Cutler Anderson Architects), both in Portland, as well as an extensive sustainable master-planning process for the city of Liwa in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

The Oregon Sustainability Center, as its website describes, is "a first-of-a-kind synthesis of unparalleled environmental performance with an integrated sustainability agenda, serving both as a technological model and as a hub for sustainable practices, policy, education, research and entrepreneurship." Located on the edge of the Portland State University campus in downtown Portland, the OSC will bring together academic, government, nonprofit and business sectors. It is being designed to achieve triple net-zero performance in energy and water use and carbon emissions, and to meet the world’s most stringent green building criteria, the Cascadia Region Green Building Council’s Living Building Challenge.

Oregon Sustainability Center, rendering courtesy oregonsustainabilitycenter.org

The OSC would be upon completion perhaps America's greenest office tower, and that is a hugely impressive achievement for SERA, GBD and developer Gerding Edlen. The only criticism I would personally make is that, to my eyes at least, from a visual, aesthetic standpoint it seems ugly, like a banal office building with a mismatched top. But this is also not a final design, so there is still time to change that. And if I'm critical of the look of the building based on the renderings released so far, let me be absolutely clear in saying that doing any Living Building office is hugely impressive. It's just that architecture is, at its ideal, a marriage of the practical and scientific with art and beauty.

I also wonder if an even greener move would be to build the Oregon Sustainability Center in an existing building, such as the empty US Customs House, which the GSA is currently seeking a tenant for via online auction, or the nearly empty Gus Solomon United States Courthouse downtown on Broadway, just a few blocks from the OSC site. But this is neither SERA's decision nor GBD's to make. That said, SERA has extensive renovation experience with landmark projects like City Hall in Portland. What better way to combine the firm's talents?

For the Abu Dhabi project, SERA and the other firms involved have engaged in what's called "energy-mapping", which Brockman says has "allowed us to map climate effects at a city scale. We’ve been siting and massing the buildings in a way that creates a comfortable place in a harsh environment. To be creating district scale tools that function in real time and allow us to design in real time based on climate and comfort, that’s a whole new world. Which I also think is a theme. It feels more and more like the projects we’re working on are all research, and they’re feeding other projects. The city-scale tool we're using in Abu Dhabi is going to be invaluable with all the eco-district work that will be happening in Portland."

The $133 million Wyatt building project (pictured at the top of this post) has been high profile, earning a feature in the Washington Post. The ultra-green retrofit will include rooftop solar panels supplying up to 15% of the building’s power needs, a new overhanging roof to provide shade, and a water collection and reuse system combined with low-flow fixtures that will reduce potable water consumption by as much as 68%. The big buzz surrounding this project, though, is a 250-foot vertical green wall that will cover the entire western facade of the office tower. Plants will grow on facade ‘fins’ that act like garden trellises during the spring and summer, shading the building to reduce energy bills. In the colder months, the plants will naturally drop their foliage and sunlight can once again penetrate the building to provide warmth.

Hopefully the green wall will actually happen, though. A May 4 report Daily Journal of Commerce report by Nathalie Weinstein suggests the GSA may wind up scrapping the wall due to budget concerns.

Brockman says lessons learned on the Oregon Sustainability Center and the Wyatt building are influencing each other. "We’re designing a new building a few blocks from an existing building retrofit a few blocks from each other, so we can share lessons back and forth," he says. "We learned something on OSC and took it to the Wyatt a week later. And the façade research on Wyatt will very much inform the way we move on the OSC's envelope design. It’s a huge privilege but exciting too."

Twelve West named to AIA/COTE Top 10 Green Projects List, first for Portland firm or building

Photo by Brian Libby 

For all of Portland's leadership in the field of sustainable design, the city and its architecture firms have been continually on the outside looking in when it comes to the biggest national architecture prize for green buildings, The American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment's Top 10 Green Projects list.

Each year the program celebrates, in the AIA's words, "projects that are the result of a thoroughly integrated approach to architecture, natural systems and technology," that "make a positive contribution to their communities, improve comfort for building occupants and reduce environmental impacts through strategies such as reuse of existing structures, connection to transit systems, low-impact and regenerative site development, energy and water conservation, use of sustainable or renewable construction materials, and design that improves indoor air quality."

But despite Portland often being called America's greenest city, and at several junctures having the most LEED-rated buildings of any US city, there has never before been a building project in Portland by a Portland firm to crack the Top Ten. Until now, with the listing of Twelve West, designed (and partially occupied) by ZGF Architects.

Portland has come close to making the Top Ten before. The Gerding Theater at the Portland Armory, designed by GBD Architects, won Honorable Mention for the 2007 list. But it still wasn't in the Top 10. The Wayne Morse Courthouse in Eugene was included in 2007's listing, but Eugene isn't Portland and the lead architect, Morphosis and Pritzker Prize winner Tom Mayne, is based in Southern California. The Lloyd Crossing sustainable design plan was included in 2005, but it was designed by a Seattle firm, Mithun, and is only an urban and greenspace plan, not a building. There was also the Bank of Astoria by Manzanita architect Tom Bender that made the list in 2002, but again, that's something different from Portland.

Photo by Brian Libby 

If our city was chasing windmills with the COTE Top Ten in years past, perhaps it took a building with windmills to make the list. That would be Twelve West, the mixed use building designed by ZGF Architects and developed by Gerding Edlen. Besides its other green credentials, including two LEED Platinum certifications, LEED-NC (new construction) overall and LEED-CI for the office interiors at ZGF's headquarters in the building, exceeding current 2030 Challenge benchmarks for energy use, and achieving an overall savings of 46% over a baseline standard, Twelve West also happens to be the first building with wind turbines in an urban setting in the United States.

One thing I've always wondered about the AIA/COTE list is whether they may be any kind of regional or other geographical bias. Was Portland merely being ignored? That seems unlikely, because even Seattle, in the same region, has earned numerous Top 10 listings. Even so, the lack of inclusion for Portland projects always seemed incongruent with what the rest of the green building world was saying about the city.

Yet when I look at the jury for this year's Top Ten, I can't help but wonder if some extra familiarity with Portland and its architects and developers was helpful. After all, this year's jury included Peter Busby, the Vancouver architect with Busby, Perkins & Will. Busby designed the Meriwether Condominiums in South Waterfront in Portland for Gerding Edlen. Did he recuse himself from choosing Twelve West? It doesn't seem so. Then there was Alison G. Kwok from the University of Oregon. She has no connection to Gerding or ZGF that I know of, but her familiarity with local architecture must have helped.

Photo by Brian Libby 

There's no doubting, though, that Twelve West deserves to be on the COTE list. The 23-story, 552,000 square foot building was constructed with low-impact materials, including salvaged, reclaimed and FSC-certified wood. Much of the concrete structure is exposed on the interior, minimizing the use of finish material and providing ample thermal mass. A 47% reduction in potable water use is predicted through use of efficient fixtures, low-water roof plantings, and rainwater reuse. And placing the building atop a surface parking lot in Portland's dense urban core (on the site of a former surface parking lot) facilitates a pedestrian oriented, car-free lifestyle for the occupants, which minimizes required parking while increasing density and reducing stormwater runoff.

In the years ahead, it will be interesting to see how Gerding Edlen and ZGF move forward. Gerding has changed its focus from new construction and mixed-use towers to renovating existing buildings, but if the economy were to start booming again, that would likely change. The developer began its rise to prominence with the Brewery Blocks development with GBD Architects, employing the firm for all five buildings plus the Armory and then an additional project, The Casey, just down the street. Those were all LEED-rated project, not to mention the Armory as the nation's first project on the National Register of Historic Places to earn a LEED rating, and The Casey was the first condo. But ZGF has now designed the first Portland building on the COTE Top 10 list, putting the firm on arguably equal fitting with GBD for top-shelf local green architecture credentials. When you couple that with the work ZGF is doing in Eugene for the University of Oregon's athletic department, such as the Jaqua Center and another to-be-announced project, it gives this venerable Portland firm a firm grip on the future.

Sustainability and using what you have

Photo by Brian Libby 

Mike Francis, a member of The Oregonian's editorial board, had an editorial published Saturday that explores the intersection of sustainability and historic preservation.

Francis tells of meeting recently with David J. Brown and Anthea Hartig, the executive vice president and the western director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, when the pair were in Portland last week. (Individuals and groups continually seek out the paper's editorial board to make their case for something.) 

Brown's primary message was, as Francis recalls, "that saving and reusing buildings is more environmentally friendly and economically sound than tearing them down, even if they are replaced by the greenest, LEEDiest structures imaginable."

Brown cited a National Trust-commissioned report by Rutgers University that examines the economic effects of the Federal Historic Tax Credit. 

The report concludes that the Federal Historic Tax Credit is a highly efficient job creator, and has accounted for the creation of 1.8 million new jobs over the life of the program. The report also finds that the Federal Historic Tax Credit has generated jobs more efficiently than other stimulus options, and that the economic activity leveraged by credit returns more tax revenue to the U.S. Treasury than the cost of implementing the program.

"The case for preservation improving sustainability is more intuitive," Francis writes. He goes on to say: 

"Of course it's less wasteful to reuse a building than to tear it apart, cart away the rubble, and import and erect new piles of steel, glass and concrete. That was what so maddening (to me, at least) with the arguments of those who wanted to tear down Memorial Coliseum to erect a "green" baseball stadium. As much as I appreciate the presence of baseball, beer and warm summer evenings, it seemed crazy to demolish a perfectly usable building a couple of miles away from the Beavers' current home to relocate the team. The only argument in favor seemed to be that nobody had yet figured out how to put the coliseum to use since the Trail Blazers moved next door, so better to tear the place down than re-use it.

That kind of thinking is what threatens a lot of the places where we work, live and play. Sometimes, we manage to make the best of it, as when civic leaders created Pioneer Courthouse Square on the block that housed a grand Portland hotel until it was demolished for parking. Sometimes, we do a halfway decent thing, such as pouring money into the Pioneer Courthouse next door, although it was an enormously bad idea to, essentially, privatize the place by evicting the post office and carving out an exclusive underground parking lot for the visiting judges there. 

Most often, sadly, we tear down something of cultural, emotional or historical value in order to make way for something else, usually of lesser value. When that happens, we're all the poorer for it."

Of course one of the key landmarks under threat of demolition or radical alteration Francis talks about, Memorial Coliseum, still has its fate hanging in the balance.

Photo by Brian Libby 

It is arguable that all three of the remaining finalists selected by the mayor and PDC's Stakeholder Advisory Committee are at least partially preservation oriented in that they preserve the exterior. But only the Blazers' Jumptown proposal actually retains the inside of the building as an arena without compromising the integrity of its signature bowl-in-a-glass-box design. Oh, and in this Great Recession, retaining the Coliseum as an arena is the cheapest option and the most sustainable. And have you been in this building with the curtain open, like it was meant to be? I've met few Portlanders, even the natives, who actually have.

As it happens, National Public Radio ran a story on Morning Edition a few days ago ("Building Law Seen As Threat To California History") about the intersection of sustainability and preservation. The story profiled Paul Song, who, after demolishing his home, is now building a $1 million LEED-Platinum house which will be the first “100% energy-independent” home in Santa Monica. The piece went on to quote Linda Dishman, Director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, saying that the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED standards don’t do a particularly good job of recognizing the value of building reuse.

However, the NPR story also, in the opinion of Portland's Ralph DiNola of Green Building Services (as written on his blog), "painted a picture that new green buildings can outperform historic buildings and that rehabilitation of existing buildings takes more time or costs more than demolition and new construction, while also leaving the impression that LEED does not adequately credit historic rehabilitation projects compared to new construction projects."

DiNola goes on to look at LEED and historic buildings in his post:

"Perhaps rather than focusing on our desire to have LEED award more points to historic building rehabilitation projects (hopefully they will based upon more advanced LCA methods in the near future), let’s look at the other LEED points that a project can already earn through rehabilitation.  Under LEED for New Construction and Major Renovation (LEED NC), a rehabilitation project can actually earn four points for building reuse. In LEED for Core & Shell (LEED CS), there are five points available plus an additional one point if 95% of the building is reused for a total of six points.  Elsewhere in the rating system there are other nods to existing building rehabilitation projects, such as Energy and Atmosphere Credit 1.  Here, existing buildings get more points for the same level of energy performance compared to new buildings.  For instance in LEED NC, if a rehabilitation projects reduces design energy cost by 24% it will earn nine points, while a new construction project will only earn seven points.  That’s two more points for historic buildings.  There are also two points available for materials reuse, and we have found that existing buildings more often incorporate salvaged materials than new construction projects.  There are also additional opportunities for credit in LEED in the Innovation and Regional Priority credit categories.  In Portland, Oregon for instance, the Building Reuse credit is identified as a Regional Priority credit, thus offering one bonus point to projects that earn this credit. This intentional allocation of points suggests that LEED strategically favors, rather than challenges, reuse, as is sometimes implied."

"Portland has served as a virtual laboratory for sustainable preservation, yet we still struggle with these issues," he concludes. "These are indeed exciting times for historic preservation advocates and green building professionals as American values shift from valuing our history to valuing the new."

Ecoroofs: for the birds?

Photo by Brian Libby 

Two weeks ago I attended an open house at the Audubon Society of Portland, a chance to meet and see up close the organization's educational birds, those injured or otherwise unable to survive in the wild now used to teach about habitat and conservation - such as Jack the Sparrowhawk, Julio the Great Horned Owl, Aristophanes the Raven, and Ruby the Turkey Vulture.

Some of these are not birds ever likely to be common to urban landscapes, even those with a massive forest inside city limits like Portland. Even so, it was such an inspiring site to see these magnificent birds up close that it got me wondering about efforts to re-introduce nature and wildlife into the city through ecoroofs, bioswales and greenspaces.

Portland has become a national leader for ecoroofs, particularly ones that are designed to capture stormwater. But what if the city's collection of green roofs could, once expanded, go a step further and actually become a functional habitat for birds and wildlife - part of a green infrastructure in the city? Ecoroofs do a lot for buildings themselves, insulating them better and reducing energy bills, besides capturing stormwater to prevent runoff. But it wouldn't take much for them to be bird magnets as well.

As it happens, March is being promoted as "Ecoroof Month" by the City of Portland, the Audubon Society of Portland, and the Urban Greenspaces Institute. Events will include "Ecoroof Portland," a free two-day event this Friday and Saturday (March 12-13), as well as an ecoroof tour of South Waterfront on March 27, lectures on March 30 and 31 by London ecoroof expert Dusty Gedge, and an ecoroof tour of downtown Portland on March 31.

As Bob Sallinger, conservation director for the Audubon Society of Portland notes in the organization's wonderfully titled newsletter, the  The Warbler, there are already 200 ecoroofs in Portland, and the city has set a goal of increasing vegetated rooftops to cover at least 39 acres by 2013. An incentive program initiated by the city in 2009 provides property owners with up to $5 per square foot to install ecoroofs. According to the City's ecoroof website Buildings can also receive bonus FAR (floor area ratio) based on three ranges of ecoroof coverage in relation to the building’s footprint: 10-30%, 30-60% and 60% or greater earns one, two and three square feet of additional floor area per square foot of ecoroof respectively.

Multnomah County Central Library ecoroof, photo courtesy Jaysonphoto via Flickr 

Chicago is the only American city with more ecoroof area then Portland, with 534,000 square feet of ecoroof space compared to the Rose City's 423,000 as of 2009. But how are we doing compared to Europe, where ecoroof building leads the world and dates to the 1970s? We've got a lot of catching up to do.

For example, the metro area in Stuttgart, Germany, home of the exquisite Mercedes-Benz brand, has 10.7 million square feet of estimated ecoroof area. Dusseldorf, Germany's overall metro area has 7.86 million square feet. Basel, Switzerland - just the city, not its metro area - had 7.53 million square feet of ecoroof area as of 2007. London has 5.38 million, not including its suburbs and exurbs.

"Portland is particularly well positioned to learn from the European experience with ecoroofs and the emerging trend of biodiverse ecoroofs," writes Jim Labbe of the Audubon Society, also in The Warbler. "Efforts in the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland clearly indicate an ecoroof building boom is possible with the right public policies in place. These include adequate incentives and regulation to strongly encourage or require ecoroofs on new development where technically feasible. However we also need local research to help improve designs of biodiverse ecoroofs adapted to our unique climate, flora and fauna."

Photo by Brian Libby 

"By investing in and expanding biodiverse ecoroofs in Portland, we can dramatically expand urban habitat diversity, enrich our local and neotropical bird populations, and help keep nature nearby in our densest neighborhoods."

In 2006 I wrote an article for Metropolis magazine about Tanner Springs Park and its design by German landscape architect Herbert Dreiseitl, which was indicative of an an emerging philosophy regarding wild-life protection in a high-density urban setting. "Instead of just setting aside one or two larger parcels on the outskirts of the city, Portland planners favor also introducing small pockets of nature throughout," I wrote back then. “We’ve done a lousy job of protecting nature in the city until very recently,” added Mike Houck, urban naturalist for the Audubon Society of Portland and director of the nonprofit Urban Greenspaces Institute. “This is a new phenomenon.”

In seeking to become a sustainable capitol, can Portland also become an innovator for nature in the city? Sure, if the Europeans haven't beaten us there first. But Portland also boasts something these older European cities perhaps don't, or at least not in as much supply: enough space, and enough of a connection with the surrounding natural landscape, to enjoy a more substantial connection between city and nature. In that way, the urban growth boundary is as important as ecoroofs. But as with urban planning, it takes both macro and micro level design and implementation to make the unified whole work successfully - a unified plan for growth, and means to make it happen block by block, or in this case, roof by roof and park by park.

Cusack, Steward, Gulick lead BetterBricks Award winners

Photo courtesy BetterBricks 

The 2010 BetterBricks Awards breakfast, held on February 11, honored 12 green building professionals who have, in different ways, championed high-performance buildings in the Pacific Northwest. The awards, presented by BetterBricks, an initiative of the nonprofit Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (and a sponsor of this site), recognize architects, engineers, developers, building owners, building operators, facility managers and other building professionals for their support of high performance, commercial buildings with a special emphasis on energy efficiency in the Northwest. 

Winner in the Architecture category was Dennis Cusack of SRG Partnership. Finalists were Lisa Petterson of SERA Architects and John Breshears of ZGF Architects.

As an SRG principal for almost 30 years and now the firm’s managing partner, Cusack and his partners have achieved 84 percent LEED accreditation of all staff, and 46 LEED equivalent projects.  The firm has committed to the national AIA’s 2030 Challenge. In 2008, Cusack also led SRG’s creation of a graduate research fellowship with the University of Oregon's Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory. This two year program has further deepened SRG’s collaboration with ESBL to focus on research and firm-wide training/education.

Puget Sound Science Center, photo courtesy SRG Partnership 

Among the recent SRG projects to earn significant green credentials are the Da Vinci Arts Middle School for Portland Public Schools (targeted at LEED Platinum); Mt. Angel Abbey’s Annunciation Academic Center, where 95 percent day-lit classrooms and passively cooled ventilation system have become prototypes for many other projects nationally; and the LEED Silver Puget Sound Science Center in Tacoma.

In the Design Engineer category, the winner was Bob Gulick of Mazzetti Nash Lipsey Burch. A finalist was Nick Collins of PAE Consulting Engineers.

The Facility Manager/Building Operations category saw the award go to a team from Fred Meyer stores. The other finalist was the Melvin Mark Companies Operations Team.

In the Advocate category, the winner was Susan Steward, executive director of BOMA (Building Owners and Managers Association International) Portland. You can find BOMA Portland’s list of advocacy projects here. The organization, for example, is a strong proponent of energy efficiency, and that’s probably a large part of why Steward won. (Wow, that’s eerily appropriate: an advocate named Steward.) An additional finalist in the Advocate was Clark Brockman of SERA Architects.

In the Owner/Decision Maker, the winners were Garrin Royer and Danny McGinley, of Redside Development. The photo below is of the 221 Mollala project Redside previously developed.

Photo courtesy Redside Development 

"We got our start in 2002 by focusing on sustainable commercial redevelopment in Oregon and Washington," Redside's website reads. "Today we’re a thriving, fully-integrated commercial real estate company known for successful projects, steady growth and an innovative emphasis on sustainability.

"A lot of people talk the talk when it comes to sustainability. But we actually walk the walk. By integrating construction, property management and facility services into our company, we’re able to apply a green standard to every aspect of a project — from demo and construction all the way to finishes, paint, landscaping and housekeeping."

This year, the BetterBricks Awards introduced a new category honoring a multi-disciplinary team, which is a group of professionals who joined together for a specific high-performance building project. The winning team worked on the Slocum Center for Orthopedics and Sports Medicine: John Bauman; Dr. Thomas Wuest of the Slocum Center; Whitney Churchill of The Neenan Company; Galen Ohmart of Solarc Architecture + Engineering; Brian McCarthy of CMGS Landscape Architects; and Doug McKay and Steve Korth of McKay Investment Company. Finalists were the team behind 12 West, including Gerding Edlen Development; Greg Goodman, the Downtown Development Group, ZGF Architects, Hoffman Construction, Glumac, and KPFF Consulting Engineers.

Winners were selected by a panel of judges comprised of industry professionals and past BetterBricks Awards winners.

To achieve high performance buildings, award winners have used and promoted best practices such as maximizing local climate in the design, employing early design decision-making and energy modeling, supporting building commissioning and implementing better building operations. Their projects have achieved substantial energy savings, reduced building operation and maintenance costs and enhanced productivity of building occupants.

Keeping the Delta House dream alive - as a Living Building

Image courtesy Nye Architecture 

If you're like me, when you hear the phrase "Delta House," you think John Belushi, toga parties and food fights. But the June Key Delta House project is something very different.

As reported in an excellent February 4 Oregonian story by Larry Bingham (which, curiously, the paper also separately lists as an Associated Press story by Thomas Boyd), the  June Key Delta House project in North Portland is a remodeling of an old gas station began in North Portland. The client is a small group of African American women in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, who first began planning this home and community center two decades ago.

After a  dozen of the sorority sisters donated $100 each to start a fund, the project inched closer to reality when member June Key purchased an old ARCO gas station at the corner of Albina Avenue and Ainsworth Street in 1992, with the understanding the sorority would pay her back. 

"The site across from Peninsula Park had been declared a brownfield -- a property possibly polluted by the gas station's underground tanks -- though an Environmental Protection Agency review found no contamination," Bingham writes. "Because of its status, the property was going cheap."

Budget is a concern not only because of the grassroots effort behind Delta House, but also because the project follows the strictures of the Living Building Challenge, which was created by our own Cascadia chapter of the US Green Building Council and is arguably the most stringent green building standard in the world.

"Like many of the 50 or so current active members, these women endured the same kind of discrimination that led to the founding of their national sorority at Howard University in 1913. They wanted a home to locate their community outreach projects, such as health and education programs, to fulfill the sorority's mission. They wanted to stop schlepping their meetings to whatever union hall or church basement would have them. They had outgrown each other's homes."

The now-defunct Sienna Architecture Company was the original architect for the Delta House project, with Mark Nye as project architect and Greg Acker as principal in charge. When Sienna folded last year, Nye took over the project under his own banner as a sole practitioner (Acker has since left Portland to work in Abu Dhabi). Many younger former Sienna employees assisted Nye in the design. "There was a little bit of tension, of saying, 'Is this a good idea or not?'" Nye told me in a recent phone conversation. "But I find you end up with a much better product that way."

Photo by Thomas Boyd for The Oregonian 

A key partner for Nye was general contractor Colas Construction, who worked with the architect throughout the design process to keep the budget as low as possible. What's more, Nye says, "Colas is an African American owned firm with long and deep roots in the neighborhood. "They were developing properties in the neighborhood in the early '90s with their own money and are really dedicated to their community."

[Incidentally, the family that owns Colas Construction has ties to Haiti and has started a relief fund in partnership with the Oregon Community Foundation. Go here to assist or find out more about this laudable effort.]

Over the years, many local companies have also made helping the sorority sisters move closer to their dream a part of their pro-bono or charitable efforts. For example, Neil Kelly, the construction company with a showroom just a few blocks away from the Delta House site, donated survey work and created a blueprint in 1992. Benson Industries LLC donated $57,000 worth of glass in 2007. Demolition was provided free earlier this year courtesy of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers as a Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday service project. The Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability's Green Investment Fund also provided a grant of more than $119,000 for using boxcar-sized salvaged cargo containers. 

Image courtesy Nye Architecture  

Nye, the architect, was raised just across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington. After several years on the east coast earning a bachelor's degree at Bennington College, a master's of architecture degree from Columbia University and working in New York for the firm Rogers Marvel, he returned to Portland in 2005.

"I was really impacted by the sort of Kenneth Frampton tectonic ideas," Ny adds, citing the British architect known for advocating regional modernism. "It’s really about using a deep technical understanding to manage design, to sort of design with that understanding. The idea is to try to achieve a higher performance building. The tectonic of sustainability is it’s a much higher game we need to be playing, and the technical aspects need to be bought into line to make the aesthetic work."

Meeting the Living Building Challenge specs means that The June Key Delta House will have to  generate its own renewable energy (via solar panels) and treat its own water. The community center will use rainwater for toilets and divert storm water to bioswales.

Meanwhile, though, even with grants and savings, the Delta House still has $455,000 to raise towards the estimated $755,000 needed for the project going forward. So if you or your company are looking to make a positive community impact, remember that (if I may bastardize The Eurhythmics) these sisters aren't doin' it for themselves - or by themselves.

Beverly comes to Hollywood

photos by Brian Libby 

Portland’s Hollywood district is home to a new mixed-use project, The Beverly Condominiums, at NE 44th Avenue and Sandy Boulevard.

Slated for LEED Silver certification, the five-story building was developed by Gerding Edlen Development, now the largest sustainable building developer in the United States. This, along with another recently completed Gerding Edlen mixed-use project, The 20 on SE Hawthorne Boulevard, represents the developer moving to Portland’s east side. In the past, Gerding principally made its name with larger west side projects such as the Brewery Blocks in the Pearl District as well as Atwater Place, The John Ross, The Meriwether and (more recently) The Ardea in South Waterfront. 

Named after a former famous resident of the Hollywood district—children’s author Beverly Cleary—The Beverly was designed by GBD Architects, Gerding’s most frequent architectural collaborator. If you put together all five Brewery Blocks, The Casey, The Gerding Theater, the OHSU Center for Health and Healing and now The Beverly, The 20 and The Ardea, that’s an incredible number of major projects between this developer and architect in the last decade-plus, all of them fairly large in scale. (And that doesn’t include the work Gerding and GBD have done together in other cities like Los Angeles and Bellevue.) I can’t think of another developer-architect partnership in this city in the current era that has been more impactful. 

The brick and wood-clad Beverly is anchored by a Whole Foods Market and Chase Bank on the first floor, with two floors of parking above. The top two floors are devoted to 53 condominiums (all one or two bedrooms), which enjoy views of Mount Hood to the east and downtown Portland looking west.

 

 

The residential units share a handsome rooftop interior courtyard that feels quite different (more intimate) compared to the massiveness of the overall building. It’s a series of small forms stacked on top of the big, broad base and middle of the structure.

Inside the condos, living areas feature hardwood floors in natural red or saddle oak and wool carpet. Kitchens are built with maple or ash cabinetry with stainless steel hardware.

For optimal indoor air quality The Beverly was built with materials emitting low or no volatile organic compounds (VOCs) or formaldehydes. The building team, led by general contractor R&H Construction, also recycled all construction waste. And The Beverly provides 100 percent storm water filtration.

When I first heard about this project, I was disheartened because constructing The Beverly meant the mid-century modern bank on this site, an elegant glass and concrete structure, had to be torn down. At the same time, there is reason to cheer this new building because of the density it adds to the Hollywood district given its relatively close-in location and its proximity to a MAX stop. The Beverly is part of Gerding Edlen's broader focus on what's commonly referred to in sustainability talk as "20-minute living," or the notion that most of the things we need (jobs, shops, services) can be found within a twenty-minute walk.

 

Viewing the block-sized building from Sandy Boulevard, I enjoyed the façade’s interplay of textures, particularly the natural wood cladding of the upper portions and how it contrasts with the brick below.

Standing on the street outside the building can look monolithic and imposing, particularly towards the back. However, because of the triangular building footprint created by Sandy Boulevard, The Beverly is at its most slender and visually appealing at the point from which it will most people will see it. What’s more, it is very difficult to make a parking garage look humane and vibrant. They’re a necessary aesthetic evil of having automobiles.

  

Naturally, were the parking garage underground and The Beverly instead a three story building with Whole Foods and Chase on the ground floor and the condos directly above, it could have made for a more attractive piece of architecture and a more pleasant experience for the casual passer by. The subterranean parking would also have added significant costs to the project, and the land cost east of the river must not have allowed it in the building’s budget. As a result, the residential units on top of the garage feel less connected to the street and the neighborhood. That makes the building feel less attractive ultimately than comparable projects like Museum Place downtown, which GBD also designed, or the Brewery Blocks that Gerding Edlen and GBD previously collaborated on (one of which has another Whole Foods).

 

To be honest, I'm not sure exactly how to judge a project like The Beverly. It earns very positive marks by a number of measuring sticks, from its sustainability to the attractiveness of its materials to the way it contributes to Hollywood’s future as a higher-density, transit oriented neighborhood. But it’s a bulky building with a parking garage enlarging what would otherwise have been a more intimately scaled mixed use building. And yet I'm also not sure if it's fair to critique a building's design based in part on what might have been in terms of program (with underground parking). In that way, perhaps this project is a reminder of both the opportunities and challenges, economically and in terms of design, along Portland’s continued path towards higher density. 

US Green Building Council president visits Mercy Corps for LEED Platinum ceremony, tour

 Photo by Jeff Amram

Last week, US Green Building Council president Rick Fedrizzi was at the new Mercy Corps headquarters to personally award the building its Platinum certification, the highest possible in the Council's LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) rating system for green buildings.

"Fabulous. Fabulous. Terrific," Fedrizzi said of the building, which was designed by THA Architecture and received an assist from consultants Green Building Services, engineering from Glumac and construction by Walsh. "This is always exciting for me. We talked sixteen years ago when we started the LEED system about how people would someday celebrate their buildings like this. This is a really beautiful space. And a building like this is teaching lessons you can take around the world."

"It is not easy to do LEED Platinum," added Fedrizzi (pictured at left in the shot below). "And I've actually seen LEED Platinum achieved but done wrong. But this building is what LEED Platinum should be all about. It will be a beacon."

 Photo by Caitlin Carlson

"We needed a home that reflected our values and our mission," said Mercy Corps president Neil Kenny Guyer (pictured at right in the above shot) as he accepted the Platinum plaque (which is actually glass) from Fedrizzi, "a place where we could make an impact. We know that climate change discriminates. It affects the poorest first."

"But we knew we got it right the first day [after moving in]," Guyer added, "seeing people meeting on the stairwell with smiles on their faces."

Photo by Jeff Amram 

The Mercy Corps headquarters is comprised half of a historic existing building, the circa 1892 Skidmore Fountain Building (also known as the Packer-Scott Building), and half from a new building, making one unified space. A lot of structural work had to be done to get the Skidmore Fountain Buidling structurally sound and up to current seismic codes, especially when one of its walls was removed to connect the new and old buildings. "“If you had a really strong breeze, this thing would have fallen over,” Ashton Walsh of Walsh Construction told the Daily Journal of Commerce.

The building includes offices for Mercy Corps as well as an Action Center, which the organization describes as "a social studies lab for school groups and a newsroom for everyone. It's an interactive exhibit space dedicated to providing up-to-date, compelling stories from around the world. It's a place where programs -- casual, short-term university seminars, impromptu panel discussions and guest lecturers -- encourage conversation about the issues of the day."

 Photo by Jeff Amram

In order to get the design approved by the city's Historic Landmarks Commission, the exterior of the new half of the building needed to fit in aesthetically with the old Skidmore Fountain building's red brick façade.

THA Architects managed to walk a fine line in this regard, because the new half of the Mercy Corps headquarters feels thoroughly modern even as it is connected to the historic half. The newer portion feels like the repeating of a rhythm, neither a trite neo-historic caricature of old architecture nor a jarring incongruent departure.

The new half of the building's two most visible sides, the east-facing riverfront side and the south-facing one that looks out at Ankeny Plaza, are also distinctive in their use of glass. The riverfront facade takes its cue from Mercy Corps' mission. In researching the client and the project, the architects learned that a connecting thread between the many world cultures the agency serves is just that - thread and weaving. So the glassy riverfront facade faintly resembles a weaving, but again without resorting to postmodern silliness.

Photo courtesy THA Architecture 

The south-facing facade (pictured above) is one of the most important for any green building, because that's where you manage changing solar light, so as to bring in the illumination and warmth when it's needed in the winter and keep it out when it's unwanted in summer. Instead of the usual light shelves one sees on many a green  building facade (horizontal exterior shades extending out at every floor), the THA design utilizes a patchwork of small rectangular shades that are tilted at an angle. Standing inside the building, it made for a dazzling experience watching the winter sun come into the space. And the array of shades also creates a compelling look for the facade of this otherwise boxy building. I love it when beautiful form is born from very useful function.

Inside, the heart of the building, as Neil Kenny Guyer mentioned, is an open stairway that looks and feels like a kind of geometric DNA double-helix. Wood stair treads salvaged from the original building were combined with a light steel stair structure, giving the area both texture and transparency. This is the very middle, interior-most portion of the building, and it's still teeming with natural light.

 

Photos by Jeff Amram 

Overall I am a big fan of the Mercy Corps building, but came away with two relatively small criticisms:

While standing in the new half of the building filled with Mercy Corps workers' cubicles, I was surprised to see that the executive offices were placed along the north and south facades and walled off on the inside with drywall. This means that only a select few will have access to natural light from the building's exterior. It's of course largely moot in terms of light distribution because this same area benefits from an all-glass east facade looking out at the river. But this configuration is still surprisingly indicative of an older, less egalitarian way of laying out administrative offices for executives and rank-and-file employees. I'd have expected either the executive offices along the building perimeter to be walled with glass on the inside, so the light and views are distributed into the space, or to have open desk configurations along the perimeter and executive offices in the middle of the space. During the tour, THA principal William Dann explained that interior-wall glass for these perimeter offices was too expensive, and that Mercy Corps didn't want to be extravagant with budget given the extreme needs of the people around the world the agency serves. But if that's the case, why not put the executives in the middle and the larger amount of regular employees along the glassy perimeter?

Photo by Jeff Amram 

My other disappointment was with the Mercy Corps Action Center, located on the ground floor of the older Skidmore Fountain Building portion of the headquarters. This is a space for the public to come and learn more about Mercy Corps and the needs of people the agency serves. It was designed not by THA, but by noted exhibit designer Edwin Schlossberg (husband of Caroline Kennedy, JFK's daughter).

To its credit, the Action Center has on display some of the tools and equipment Mercy Corps provides around the world, such as an easy-to-build tent dwelling and a rollable donut-shaped water carrier. Most of the space consists of TVs where one watches video about Mercy Corps' efforts and is encouraged to take actions such as contacting a member of Congress.

The video terminals have educational value, of course. Yet I'd like to have seen more of an experiential design approach taken, as was done with the "Real.Life" exhibit at the Medical Teams International facility in Tigard. There you can stand under a simulated 25-foot tsunami wave (like the one that ravaged southeast Asia), or amidst a recreation of Mexico City's garbage-dump, a Ugandan refugee camp, and a Romanian orphanage. The Medical Teams International exhibit is emotionally evocative as it is educational; the Mercy Corps video terminals can be helpful to get one to take action, but any of this could also be done on the organization's website. In this day and age, providing someone with a screen full of information seems a little bit of an outdated concept when they can do so with even a cell phone.

Even so, the Mercy Corps building seems architecturally like a major success. Locating in still-gritty Old Town and renovating a historic structure wasn't the easiest course for the agency, but as Ralph DiNola of Green Building Services wrote in a blog post about the project, "Mercy Corps’ decision to consolidate several offices and locate in this part of the city catalyzes redevelopment momentum and revitalizes this re-emerging neighborhood. Directly adjacent to downtown, the urban locale leverages existing infrastructure, offers employees an array of alternative transportation options and concentrates development to protect agricultural and natural habitats in the outlying areas while infusing the adjacent district with long-term investment and ownership."

Indeed, I love the idea that when one comes west across the Burnside Bridge into downtown, the crossing is bookended by the University of Oregon's White Stag Block on the north side and the Mercy Corps headquarters to the south. Admittedly, it's also a neighborhood teeming with homeless people, but that's all the more reason why it's great to see these entities embracing Portland's urbanity, both in terms of amenities and challenges. 

Photo by Jeff Amram 

As with the rest of the THA Architecture (formerly Thomas Hacker Architects) portfolio, including projects like the Woodstock and Hillsdale libraries in Portland, or their theater for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, this is not contemporary design meant to grab you by the lapels and call attention to itself. The Mercy Corps headquarters is a quintessentially Portland building in that it's a good neighbor, a piece of the urban fabric that fits well within its context. Yet a lot of buildings that fit well into their context are a design bore, forgettable as soon as one passes them. The Mercy Corps headquarters is, like Fedrizzi says, a beacon. It walks a deft balance between sober and dazzling, which seems entirely fitting as a physical embodiment of the client and the city.

We'll leave the light off for ya': Melvin Mark, Russell lead BOMA Office Energy Showdown winners

The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) has announced the winners of Portland’s 2009 Office Energy Showdown. Now in its third year, the Showdown recognizes Portland-area office buildings that have made significant achievements in energy efficiency.

Participation saw a nearly 30 percent increase in the number of participants from the previous year and added nearly four million square-feet of office space to the friendly competition.

Winners were chosen from among 32 properties, representing over 11 million square-feet of office real estate. Challenged to assess their buildings’ energy performance, all participants demonstrated market leadership in quantifying their energy use and establishing baseline data that can be used to track future gains in operating efficiency.

The Grand Prize winner, which receives the “Power Broker” trophy for a property, team, or company achieving an outstanding accomplishment in all-around energy performance was the Melvin Mark Companies, a commercial real estate broker. Melvin Mark's portfolio includes the Sunset Center at Tanasbourne as well as the Columbia Square (pictured above) and Crown Plaza buildings downtown.

Three projects were also singled out for demonstrating the highest energy performance ratings. 1st Place went to the 200 Market Building, managed by the Russell Development Company. 2nd Place was the Gus Solomon Courthouse, managed by the General Services Administration (which probably uses little energy by virtue of being largely empty), and 3rd Place went to the Kruse Woods V project, managed by Shorenstein.

Then there were awards for 'Greatest Improvement', for the properties demonstrating the most significant gains in energy performance rating over the year. 1st place went to the ODS Tower in downtown Portland managed by Ashforth Pacific (now if they could only do something about the hideous sculpture in the front of the building) and designed by ZGF. 2nd Place was Montgomery Park, the Northwest Portland landmark managed by Bill Naito Company. 3rd Place was a tie between the Liberty Centre (Ashforth Pacific) and 1915 Amberglen, managed by KG Investments Management.

If they'd needed to break the tie, I'd have disqualified Liberty Centre for spelling "Centre" like Canadians. That said, Liberty Centre is also noteworthy in that it was originally to be a design by internationally renowned architect Cesar Pelli, before ultimately being designed by Portland's GBD Architects.

Design afficionados (or "designistas", as developer Dennis Wilde has called them) may snicker that many of these buildings are visually unattractive or, in some cases, located in some far-off suburban office park surrounded by surface parking lots. I mean, you never hear someone say, "Have you seen that Kruse Woods V office building in Lake Oswego? What a gorgeous work of architecture! What is that, Koolhaas? Piano, Meier?" But energy efficiency is one of the biggest movements of our time, and part of a regional effort to reduce the need for coal-fired power plants by cutting our power addiction. What some of these projects lack in looks or location, they admirably atone for by being as efficient as they can be.

Oregon schools slow to embrace LEED

Wendy Miller has a sobering report in today's Oregonian: Of the 27 new schools approved by Oregon voters in 2006, only about one in four have achieved LEED certification at any level. That doesn't mean the non-LEED-rated schools do not have sustainable features but rather that they didn't pursue registration.

Still, as Miller writes, going green but not pursuing LEED amounts to a kind of honor system. Should Oregon be requiring its public K-12 schools to earn certification?

"School boards cite cost as the main reason they haven't pushed for such schools," Miller writes. "But there appears to be a move by some districts to build green without the expense and perceived hassle of meeting national standards. Green is a nebulous term, they say, and they don't need a certificate to prove their new schools were built to be sustainable."

The story also says that five schools across Oregon have received LEED certifications, and another 16 new public schools are expected to be approved for certification within the next year. But Miller does not report, by comparison, how many schools there are which are not receiving or seeking LEED documentation.

Miller does, however, delve into the issue of whether LEED certification sometimes steers design and contruction toward decisions that have less to do with the efficiency of the school. "For example, LEED requires contractors to recycle their construction debris and use wood from certified forests," she writes. "It's a holistic approach. School districts that don't pursue LEED may skip those requirements and put the money into the building to enhance its energy efficiency or improve its comfort."

Again, though, a school could conceivably use these arguments that embracing LEED isn't necessary because you can be just as green or greener within school walls than without it, but then abandon a lot of the efficiency measures with "value enginering" (an industry euphamism for cost cutting) when no one is looking.

Then there is the issue of whether LEED certification adds to a project's total cost. According to a study Miller cites by the US Green Building Council, administrator of LEED, these measures can add one to three percent to a project's total cost.

But I have long been hearing from local architects that a LEED-rated school can be done for no extra cost. Way back in 2003, for example, I wrote an article for Metropolis magazine about three Oregon schools designed by BOORA Architects: Clacamas High School (pictured in the diagram above), The Dalles Middle School, and Ash Creek Intermediate in Independence (pictured at the top of this post). In each case, architect Heinz Rudolf and his team at BOORA were able to eliminate enough mechanical and other costs by embracing sustainable methods to make the total construction cost for these projects no larger than that of conventionally built schools.

"I believe in functionalism," Rudolf said in the Metropolis story. "You design a building according to analysis, and everything is in the right place. Then you don't need a big electrical system or a big mechanical system. You take advantage of all the things you can. If you ignore all these good things that nature provides automatically, then you have to overcome them." Each of these three buildings underwent significant commissioning to ensure optimum knowledge and performance of ventilation and mechanical systems, verifying that everything was built the way it was intended to be.

What do the rest of you think: Should Oregon pass a law requiring all public schoos to achieve at least LEED Silver? Or are contemporary energy codes and other measures already assuring more efficient schools without such interference?

As so often happens with Oregonian stories, I found Miller's reporting itself to be well reasoned and written, but the headline -- which an editor usually writes -- made me cringe a little: "Oregon schools: It's not easy, or cheap, being green." The headline takes a more pessimistic attitude than the story itself, casting skepticism on going green at all when Miller's story was about whether to certify. (The paper did the same with a recent story about Memorial Coliseum, expressing skepticism in its headline and sub-healine about a recent tour that didn't exist in the Casey Parks-written story or the tour itself.) Nobody should be arguing at all about the merits of sustainable design and construction itself, especially when it comes to public schools. Students learn better and are healthier, and Portland's own architecture community has already long since proven it can be done at conventional budgets. So as it happens, it can indeed be easy, and inexpensive, to do the right thing.

More than skin deep: Perepelitza on façades

This month at the American Institute of Architects’ Center For Architecture, Mark Perepelitza of ZGF Partnership is exhibiting the results of a fellowship he spent in Europe studying building facades courtesy of the Architecture Foundation of Oregon.

“I think it’s incredibly fascinating,” Perepelitza told me in a recent phone conversation. “That’s what we’re looking at when we look at buildings. And there’s this incredible potential in what they can do.” The architect’s extensive research findings are also being presented on the BetterBricks website.

Perepelitza graduated from the University of Oregon and has been practicing since 1992, with some of that time at Richard Brown Architects as well as ZGF for the past five years.

“Even though there are things we know and we’re doing quite well, there’s a ton we don’t know,” he said of building facades. “And it seems like things are changing and a lot of new potential with the envelope. The fellowship gave me an excuse to focus on it and to follow up with what’s happening in northern Europe.”

If Perepelitza’s itinerary indeed represents cities and countries leading innovation with building envelopes, I need to make studying this stuff more of a priority. He visited six cities in Germany as well as London, Bath, Amsterdam and Copenhagen. “I had a lot of interviews,” he said, “but I tried to keep enough time to just bike around and look at what’s out there.”

 

In this architect’s eyes, building façades are interesting for their duality. They they must marry both performance and aesthetics for example, as a big part of energy efficiency goals and also a major part of how the building looks. What’s more, solutions can be modern and utilize new technologies, or they can be low-tech and come with hundreds of years of proven results. Perepelitza also sees building façades increasingly able to change.

“Rather than a static envelope, there’s this potential for it to be dynamic and to change or at least to respond to dynamic conditions: provide air, light,” he said “All of this stuff is happening outside the building where a sophisticated envelope can manage those things. As the light moves across them it’s changing, which is visually interesting but provides solar control. Or they may be literally changing for shade and ventilation. But there are basic ways of going about it too, like operable shutters on windows, exterior shading or Venetian blinds on the outside of buildings. Before we had electricity and AC, that’s how we kept comfortable. In places like Germany the starting point is assuming not having air conditioning. We’re used to thinking this way a little more in this climate because we don’t have air conditioning as much. In some ways, it’s going back to the ways we used to do things to move forward.”

The image below is a shot of the Wessex Water Operations Centre in Bath, with a double skin to help mitigate climate fluctuations while bringing in plenty of natural light. Among the other buildings he studied were London City Hall, the Deutsche Post Tower in Berlin (pictured above), and the Het Kasteel housing project in Amsterdam (pictured at the top of this post).

Looking forward to the possibility of innovation in our region, “There are a lot of huge hurdles, so it’s not going to be immediate, but I think we’ll start getting a lot more clever about applying these things and getting the most out of them,” the architect added. “There will probably be cases of high profile projects with big budgets doing more, but I’d hope it would not be limited to it.”

The Center For Architecture exhibit of photography and research findings continues through the end of July at 403 NW 11th Avenue.

Highlights from the Oregon Sustainability Center feasibility study [updated]

Yesterday the consortium of public and private entities working on the proposed Oregon Sustainability Center released a draft executive summary and feasibility study.

What does that mean? Best I can tell, it's an extensive research and design process for the building, but does not guarantee that the building will be built. That's to be determined in Phase 2. This feasibility study is Phase 1.

The building was designed by GBD Architects and SERA Architects, with development from Gerding Edlen. Additional team members have included Interface Engineering, Glumac, PAE Consulting Engineers, and Hoffman Construction, with advisors from all three major universities (UO, OSU, PSU), Earth Advantage, the Energy Trust of Oregon, and Guy Battle of London-Based Mattle McCarthy Engineers.

Pictured above is a rendering of the Sustainability Center as it might look once constructed. It would be unfair to judge a building so innovative and so green on its exterior aesthetics. At the same time, it is written in the summary, "The Living Building Challenge is unique, among programs that encourage and evaluate accomplishments in sustainable design, in that it mandates beauty as well as aggressive goals for energy, water and waste systems." It certainly seems like the team has met the aggressive goals. Have they met the beauty mandate? That's a harder goal because it's of course in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I am not crazy about the look of the roof. But of course the design could continue to evolve.

Here is a portion of the text from the 14-page Sustainability Center draft executive summary that explains the process:

The project’s mission is to create a world-class center of excellence in sustainability that celebrates and nurtures the values and strengths of Oregon’s leadership in climate change, land use planning, smart growth, green building, environmental stewardship, civic engagement and social justice.

Predominantly an office building, the Center’s top floors will house a variety of non-profit, government, academic and business tenants who are working to promote sustainability. The public spaces on the first and second floor will serve as exhibit space, including interactive displays and signage that tell the story of the region’s innovations in sustainable technologies, policies and practices. A resource dashboard will let onlookers review the building’s energy and water use in real time. The lecture halls, classrooms and conference rooms on the second floor will support higher education, as well as networking for public, private and academic purposes. This area will also include a visualization lab, which will bring together researchers and community groups to solve regional issues in an experiential way. An active retail environment will anchor the first floor of the building.

The current headcount for the building includes approximately 725 weekday office users and an estimated 1,400 students and faculty, who will utilize the classrooms and conference center each day. Visitors attending events and touring the facility could range from the dozens to the hundreds, depending on the building’s daily schedule.

At the core of the project is a 220,000+ square foot urban, mixed-use high-rise located on the eastern edge of the Portland State University campus, between SW 4th and 5th Avenues and between Harrison and Montgomery Streets. The Center is also the proposed anchor for Portland’s first Eco-District, a neighborhood development strategy that combines high performance buildings with city infrastructure, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy use and water use.

The building’s size is strongly influenced by the site’s capacity to generate renewable energy. The 13-story structure is predominately concrete and glass and includes one level below grade. The second floor classroom and conference center is accessible from inside the tower, as well as from a monumental exterior stair, which connects this floor to the ground floor plaza. The tower is crowned with a large structure that supports its primary solar array. Artfully shaped and strategically oriented, this distinctive structure will establish a strong presence on Portland’s skyline.

The 33,500 square foot site (currently a surface parking lot) is located on the south end of downtown Portland, on the eastern edge of the PSU campus. It is a nexus for public transit with bus, streetcar and light rail systems all immediately accessible either on-site or on surrounding streets. The design anticipates a permanent streetcar alignment that will diagonally bisect the site.

The front door to the Center will be SW Montgomery Street. Efforts are underway to transform eight blocks of Montgomery into a green street, which will celebrate creative stormwater reuse. Coupled with its display of sustainable site features, the Center’s urban design and integration with the district’s green street will create a unique and extraordinary place for individual reflection, social interaction and public events.

The current site is zoned RX (a classification for residential uses) that allows only limited commercial uses. The site also has a height restriction that limits new buildings to a maximum of 125 feet. As a result, a legislative zone change will be required, as part of the entitlement process, in order to allow the development to proceed as currently conceived. A strategy for enacting the zone change has been developed with guidance from the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability.

The Living Building Challenge is unique, among programs that encourage and evaluate accomplishments in sustainable design, in that it mandates beauty as well as aggressive goals for energy, water and waste systems. The Center has been designed in this spirit, integrating and often expressing the technical features that enable the building to perform to the highest green building standards.

UPDATE, 6/27: I'd like to respond to those who have said it was a "copout" of me to not criticize the building's look.

What I meant was that I wanted to judge the building fairly and holistically. It's very very innovative when it comes to performance and sustainability. That is worth our praise.

At the same time, I do agree with the more negative commenters that the rendering makes this look like an ugly work of corporate architecture. I'd also heard these same whisperings of concern from the city in recent weeks, that the project was turning into an Edsel.

We should also keep in mind, however, that the rendering above is just that. It's one rendering. This is not the final design, nor is it a complete look at the building.

The team putting this building together is absolutely first rate when it comes to green credentials and track record. That should not be underestimated. These people are world leaders in their field. That's why they were selected.

At the same time, I'm not sure beautiful buildings are the strong suit of GBD, SERA and Gerding Edlen. They all design handsome enough architecture, I suppose. But it's not the focus. The Oregon Sustainability Center figures to have that same set of strengths and weaknesses.

Green building is unquestionably the dominant movement in contemporary architecture today. But unlike modernism or postmodernism, it's not an aesthetic movement. It's not to say there can't be beautiful green buildings, but the guts are more the focus than they used to be. That's not a bad thing at all. Architecture absolutely has to transform in order to meet the future's energy needs. Being great green architects and being the conjurers of aesthetic beauty do not always go hand in hand.

But, having said that, it would not have been impossible to create a net-zero energy building with more than net-zero looks.

A man struggling: Guy Battle comes to Portland

Britain's Guy Battle, director of the multi-disciplinary Battle McCarthy Consulting Engineers, has become one of the leading environmental building engineers in the world. And this Wednesday, he'll be in Portland to deliver the latest talk in the Cascadia Green Building Council's Transformational Lecture Series.

Guy Battle is not really "a man struggling," as I called him in the title of this post; more like a man succeeding with flying colors. But I had to have some fun with his name, which sounds like a description of some gladiatorial bout.

Guy Battle? Nice to meet you. I'm Fella Conflict. Have you met Dude War? The image at left was one of the first that came up when I did a Google image search on Mr. Battle's name.

Battle’s lecture is titled, “Low Energy Buildings and Sustainable Communities: Designing for the Zero Carbon Economy,” and will take place at the White Stag Block (at SW Naito and Couch) at 5:30pm with a short reception to follow.

As the press release says, "Battle has been responsible for developing a unique approach to sustainable development while still keeping an optimum balance between the environmental impact, social benefit and financial return both for his clients and the community. Battle has worked on a wide range of international projects and with many world-renowned architects including Foster and Partners, Will Aslop and Sir Richard Rogers. During the past 15 years, Battle is credited with developing an innovative approach to sustainable environmental master planning including Greenwich Peninsula and ParcBIT Sustainable Masterplan, Mallorca."

I saw a presentation at the Greenbuild conference in Chicago two years ago for the Mallorca masterplan, and it was incredible: practically an entire island running on net-zero energy usage.

Also, a few years ago Battle spoke in Portland during the 2005 Greenbuild conference and I did a Q&A with him afterward. Here is a portion of that discussion:

How did you become interested in green building?

I went to the University of Bath in England, and I was educated in architecture as much as engineering. As a result, I learned to speak architecture, to understand its language, which is very important. During that period, I also had a number of tutors who professed interest in the environment. I picked up on that, and my thesis was on intelligent buildings skins which reacted to their environment. From there, I got interested in architecture that responds to climactic conditions.

Would you advocate that there be more integration in the educational process between architecture and engineering?

There’s not nearly enough. In this country [USA] it’s amazing to me that so few architects are able to speak to engineers and vise-versa. Half the problem is the architects don’t invite engineers to the table early enough. And if they do, the engineers feel somehow restricted, unable to take up the conversation. I think that’s due again to the education of engineers. They’re not taught to be creative.

How does this compare to Europe?

There’s a big difference. There’s a wealth of European engineers who are amazingly creative, and at the moment taking over the States. You’ve got Buro Happold, you’ve got Whitby Bird, you’ve got Arup, you’ve got Tim MacFarlane, you’ve got ourselves. These are environmental structural engineers who know how to be creative with their designs.

And of course green building requires greater collaboration between architects, engineers, and the rest of the building team.

Sustainable design means a greater level of integration. As an architect you have to conduct more people into the process: the engineer, the acoustician, the landscape architect. That’s why at our practice we have structural engineers, M/E/P engineers, and landscape architects, because we believe we have to produce an integrated package that will support the architects.

And then there have also been studies linking green buildings, or specifically daylit buildings, to improved human performance.

How far along do you think we are to taking green building mainstream?

If you look at the bulk of building in the States, 75% or 80% is people who are ignoring the issues. But I think there is a trickle-down effect. Obviously, though, the most basic means of change is the code. The bottom line is that if you don’t obey the code, the building is illegal, so it’s always the barest minimum. That has to be the starting point. And then you have things like incentives, which organizations like BetterBricks are a part of. It helps architects and engineers to do analysis work. And then you’ve got the straightforward incentives to do with photovoltaics or wind turbines or whatever it might be. So I think carrots alone will not make changes. You need sticks and carrots. 

You believe that within five or ten years the US will be more advanced than Europe in green building.

Yes, I passionately believe that actually. Coming here to Portland, you’ve got some architects doing amazing stuff, and engineers supporting them. I really believe that once you guys create a bit of momentum, there will be no holding back, because ultimately green building is driven by money. Once the US realizes that, it will be developing the best products and processes. And that’s why our firm is working here in this country. I’ve seen a massive sea change in attitude just in the last twelve months. It really is very exciting.

In your lecture here, you talked about a Battle McCarthy project, the Peckham Library in England, and how its architects, Alsop and Stormer, believe green building need not operate according to any particular stylistic principles. Do you agree?

There is a big debate about whether green buildings should look green, or whether they should just look like a piece of great architecture. And I think both are valid, but one thing that’s definitely true is that a green building does not have to wear its credentials on its sleeve. Alsop’s work is all about following a green agenda but very much interpreting it in a very artistic fashion. I think that’s actually very important.

Relatedly, it seems unfortunate that even though we live in an age of celebrity architects, few of them seem to have incorporated green principles into their design. There is a bit of a disconnect. I might go so far as to say there’s a new movement in architecture that’s environmentally driven, but it’s found outside the celebrity environment, although [Norman] Foster is doing some interesting stuff. If you go back to architects like Louis Kahn, Walter Gropius and even Le Corbusier, however, before air conditioning was invented much of their work took an environmental form. They were really interested in climate.

What aspect of your career gets you the most excited about getting up and going to work every day?

I enjoy the challenge of forging design with good architects. You cannot do better than to sit down with an architect and sketch for three or four hours together. You just can’t beat that feeling, because it’s the whole essence of giving birth to a design. Working with SOM, KPF, Gensler, Grimshaw, Farrel, or Foster, these are all architects who, given a set of criteria, will all do something different, and that is very interesting and challenging for an engineer, to allow that creativity to occur and enhance it. But looking at the bigger picture, sustainability is also what drives me and my practice. The ideas are rote sometimes, but they’re not easy to come by. To be able to deliver them is another sort of layer that is also very important to us.

Do engineers deserve more credit?

Yes, I think so. Engineering is the hidden hand. They have an enormous amount to contribute to architecture, but too often their contribution is gently put to one side. I think it’s something that should be celebrated. You look at someone like Peter Rice or Neil Thomas, Chris Wise, Guy Nordenson, and a host of other fantastic engineers, and they don’t really get the recognition they deserve.

NY Times looks at DaVinci daylighting scheme and its "halo" / "donut"

The online version of today's New York Times includes on its 'Green Inc.' blog a post by Libby Tucker about a prototype classroom at DaVinci Arts Middle School that may indicate a future design path as Portland and the nation renovate and retrofit schools sustainably over the coming decades.

The prototype green classroom addition, which is under construction at Da Vinci, utilizes natural daylighting, passive heating and cooling systems, solar roof tiles and other features that achieve energy efficiency 70 percent over Oregon building code requirements. The 1,500-square foot music classroom, designed by SRG Partnership with the University of Oregon’s Energy Studies in Buildings Lab, is set to earn a LEED-platinum rating and net-zero energy use.

The space can be amply lit with daylight year-round and even in the grayest overcast conditions thanks to what's called “the halo,” a kind of high-tech chandelier conceived by G.Z. "Charlie" Brown that distributes natural light even throughout the space from a large central skylight. It's so effective that there’s no need to flip on a switch at all during the school day.

I previously blogged about the halo - or as Brown originally called it, "the donut" - in January of 2006 when it was part of a mock classroom prototype at Mt. Angel Abbey. (SRG's Kent Duffy spearheaded its use in a project there.) And I've long written about Brown's efforts, including a 2003 New York Times feature called "Beyond the Bulbs: In Praise of Natural Light".

I was very glad to see Libby Tucker's post, because if more people had a chance to experience the halo/donut, I'm sure this thing would become standard in practically every single-story architectural space where people spend any amount of time. Windows on the walls are great, especially in providing a view. But in lots of spaces, the light they distribute is uneven, bringing bright light near the window and making interior spaces away from the window seem all the more dark. Skylights are great, but they are essentially still just directing light straight down. Brown's halo/donut does for natural light what a ceiling fan does for air.

Meanwhile, all this talk of donuts has me hungry for a Hostess old fashioned glazed. No wonder they changed the name to halo.