“Platinum Will Be a Yawner”, And Other Notes from Friday’s Green Building Forum

Last Friday at the Gerding Theater I attended the panel discussion about green building in Portland moderated by Metropolis editor Susan Szanasy as part of PNCA’s “Idea Studios”. My notes aren’t comprehensive, but hint at the 90-minute long conversation.

The panel was first asked to put Portland in the national context when it comes to green building. “Portland is definitely out near the front if not in the front,” Scott Lewis of Brightworks said. “I think there’s a danger of resting on our laurels. But I get kids applying for jobs because they want to move to Portland, because they think it’s the greenest city in the country.”

Greg Bob Baldwin of Zimmer Gunsul Frasca added, “We’re in a place where it’s relatively easy to do well. If there’s something that troubles me…we don’t necessarily put the pieces together. It’s building by building.”

Mark Edlen, head of Gerding Edlen Development, said, “Green building is in our DNA more than other cities….But pretty soon, getting to LEED Platinum will be a yawner. We need to get to net-zero and regenerative buildings.”

Susan Anderson, head of the city’s Office of Sustainable Development, noted that greenhouse gas emissions are down 14% in Portland since 1990 while the national average is up 16%. “The challenge is we need to reduce emissions by 80%,” she said. Anderson also added that we should retrofit and weatherize every building in the city within 10 years, pointing to a program in Berkeley, California where banks and the city sell bonds to provide loans for retrofitting.

Randy Gragg, editor of local home magazine Portland Spaces, pointed out there’s a difference between strategic and tactical. We have a long history of public-private partnerships, and a comprehensive planning tradition, but the last few years we’ve been more tactical than strategic with ill-advised affairs like the Burnside couplet. Gragg also cited Lawrence Halprin’s Keller Fountain as the beginning of the downtown rebirth, acting as a metaphor for the return of the watershed.

Lest we pat ourselves on the collective back here in Portland, though, Scott Lewis had this reminder: “If we get every building to LEED platinum we’re still going off the cliff.” He cited a city in Abu Dhabi intended as an entirely net-zero metropolis, and asked, “How fast can our region run on 100% renewable power?”

Mark Edlen also connected worldwide food shortage and poverty to green building. “Until people in Africa can stop worrying about feeding their kids, they’re not going to worry about solar energy.” But he also called sustainability, “the biggest grassroots movement ever.”

Oh, and most importantly of all given the morning hour at which Friday’s panel was held: The event included lots of tasty, highly fattening donuts and some very respectable Illy coffee. I hope some of the rest of you were able to access the couple of pastries I didn’t scarf down.

Comments

[brett]

I scarfed a couple of donuts, too, but I'm sorry I didn't spot you there. It was an interesting discussion, though sometimes a bit abstract and I got the feeling that everyone had a lot more to say than there was time for. I especially wanted to hear more from the always compelling Randy Gragg.

I was glad to see everyone admitting that the city is coasting a bit and needs to think bigger. I was impressed by Edlen's recognition that these decisions may begin in architecture and design but are ultimately political in nature.

The discussion of transportation came late and was so interesting that I wish there'd been more. Someone beat me to the punch by asking about the Columbia River Crossing, and everyone on the panel who answered said that putting more cars and more highway lanes over the river was a terrible idea. Let's hope they can influence the decision. Edlen said, approximately, that gridlock may be what it takes to change the car culture and make this a truly pedestrian oriented city where nothing essential is more than 20 minutes away -- without a car.

There seemed to be a feeling that I 405 will eventually be capped but that the whole highway network needs rethinking. It'd be great to see a discussion just on those issues. I guess with the CRC decision looming, we'll be seeing a lot more. Nice to see PNCA sponsoring such a discussion with such a well qualified panel.

[goose]

with transportation being such a big issue to pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers and environmentalists, and with portland updating its comprehensive plan with an eye toward 2050, are we going to start seriously considering adding an underground transit system? or a commuter train between vancouver and salem and beyond? i realize that this costs an ungodly amount of money, but it seems to me that with everybody wanting to move to portland (my long journey home takes flight saturday), continuing to add (sometimes unconnected) surface lines which are subject to stoplights every 200 feet just ceases to make sense if you take a long-range view.

on a more holistic note, this is obviously a more global issue, but changes do start with local pressure and action. if only conversations like this were happening everywhere. it's like pulling teeth to get people to even recycle here in philadelphia. perhaps we can get sam adams to host a mayor's conference and bring city leaders from all over the us and the rest of the world to whom we can preach our propaganda and with whom we can brainstorm for real change. (no comments about the amount of jet fuel required for such an event please.)

[Charles]

I found the conversation and setting sweet (and I missed the donuts), and yet I was struck by one of the panelists saying Portland needs to begin to have a higher level of conversation around the future. And I was assuming another city visioning process wasn't what was being called for. Isn't it time we brought the same sort of sustainable/regenerative principles and design to our conversations about the future?
Here we had 100 plus engaged people in attendance and couldn't we have tapped into the wisdom of the whole and taken this sort of conversation both deeper and higher. This feels like the very sort of conversation we as city in our times need to be having and it seems we need to get a lot more creative about how we have these conversations together. How do we begin to create regenerative conversational processes to create the sort of collective shared understanding and insights that we are going to need to get to regenerative communities?

[ModernMaven]

GREG Baldwin, not Bob.

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