The first full day of Living Future is done and Paul Hawken’s vision of the future (see last post for that) has definitely permeated the conference. It seems everybody, in sessions or personal encounters, is repeating the main message: things are changing quick, we need to help facilitate that and we need to be prepared for a new world. I’m also meeting a lot more people from outside the Cascadia bioregion than I do at these events… people from California, Wisconsin. Interesting.

The conference itself seems very local. It’s exponentially less frenetic than Greenbuild and less straight-laced than Globe: people are having a good time batting around ideas here. (Though the scenary certainly helps. The Westin Bayshore is on a beautiful, open, sunshine-laden, waterside site).

Depending on the session, people also aren’t sugar coating their messages. Earlier today for example, Tracy Bowen of the Alice Ferguson Foundation in Maryland (doing the project discussed below) said she was surprised by how even the greenest people and teams in the construction industry aren’t integrated enough in their building work. “I think it’s really limited,” she said. “It’s boxy, it’s very linear. It’s just shocking to me.” (More on this topic later.)

Bowen spoke during a session on living buildings and the precautionary principal, featuring Sandy Wiggins of Consillance LLC in Philadelphia and immediate past chair of the USGBC. Wiggins spoke about the project, a future living building the foundation’s Maryland farm. He spoke like a virtual poet using phrases like “colorful cacophany of spring” and “children weaned on asphalt and blight.” Do phrases like this help draw you in or turn you off?

Then I attended a session on the realities of building a living building from the developer’s perspective and through the lenses of financing and codes. Clark Brockman of Sera Architects in Portland moderated this one, and R. Peter Wilcox, developer of the Kenton Living Building and David Eisenberg of Development Center for Appropriate Technology in Tucson spoke (to read a past article I wrote on Kenton, that is most likely out of date, click here). Wow, does it sound like there’s a lot of work to be done.

Basically, they said we need to rework financing and codes to make it easier for developers to build and regulators to permit.

Other sessions I missed: BIM and sustainable design, design for construction and zero waste, be a product detective, netzero buildings and holistic engineering applied to a living building water system. If you are at Living Future, tell me about your sessions. Were you invigorated or disappointed? What did you think and what session did you most look forward to?

Another side note: in trying to walk its talk, this conference is missing the standard conference bits of plastic surroundings for your nametag and thick paper-filled schedules. Instead, nametags come on single slips of paper and conference schedules feature (gasp) just the session title without any descriptions (you have to look on the boards for those). Full schedules are available online. It is a little inconvenient, but honestly, isn’t that in part what green building is about - changing your conception and building patterns from what you’re used to for the benefit of the environment, future, or your bottom line? What do you think? Stay tuned, I’ll keep you updated as the conference progresses.

Tags: , Living Building, Living Future, Paul Hawken, Projects

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Green events, Living Building, Living Future, Paul Hawken, Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.