The honors have been doled out. The party’s done. And AIA’s What Makes It Green is over for another year. To read my article in the DJC, click here.

There have been some interesting blog postings on this year’s ceremony. Dan Bertolet’s self-described rant at hugeasscity talks about the title of the awards, and whether, after all this time, we still don’t know what makes it green. Dominic Holden at The Stranger also weighed in on the point of the awards here. The AIA Seattle COTE also live-blogged the process (go here if you want a full list of winners). 

Of the ten projects that won, it surprises me that six are in Washington. Two are in Seattle. If we’re really looking at the greenest of the green, I would expect a wider range of geographic locations (considering the competition was open to designers and architects in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, Montana, Guam, Hawaii, Hong Kong and Japan). 

This year’s project winners included one project in Leavenworth, one in Woodinville, two in Seattle, one in Olympia, one on San Juan Island, one in Victoria, B.C., one in Billings, Mont., one in Portland and one in Denver.

By way of comparison, last year’s winners included one two from Seattle, one in Tacoma, one in Issaquah, one in Bremerton, one in Billings, Mont., one in Corvallis, Ore., one in Portland, one in Salem and one in Bend. 

(Incidentally, both winners in Billings went to the same architecture firm - High Plains Architects).

But here’s the thing: an awards process is only as good as the entries it receives. And from what I’ve heard, it takes a lot of time and effort to put a project entry together. So what can you do?

I don’t have the answer. But I do have winning project pictures. Here are a few of them: enjoy!

Miller Hull's Building #35, Natural Sciences Building at Puget Sound Community College in Olympia

Anna Howlen of D + A Studio's The San Juan Channel House on San Juan Island

High Plains Architects' Klos Building in Billings

Tomorrow, the Seattle Chapter of the AIA will announce its winners of the What Makes it Green Awards. The awards celebrate the greenest projects in the Pacific Northwest (and a few overseas countries. Still not sure on how the overseas aspect works but it does).

So before they make their big announcements, I wanted to ask you, dear readers…. what do you think are the greenest buildings of the past year?

Nationally, the AIA chose Weber Thompson’s headquarters and Dockside Green (for more info, click AIA tag below). Who do you think the local awards will honor?

Just for fun, I’m including some randomly chosen images of green buildings I have reported on in the past year. Let me know if you think these - or any I haven’t mentioned - will be winners:

The garage next to the future Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Headquarters.

Alley House, Sloan Ritchie's Leed platinum home project

Gerding Edlen's Bellevue Towers in Bellevue

Building Changes' LEED platinum Kenyon House in Seattle

Vancouver, B.C.'s Convention Centre West

P.S. For pictures of last year’s winners, click the tag ‘AIA’ or ‘Awards’ below!

When it rains in Seattle (as it often does) water flows along city streets and sidewalks, picking up toxins, before it is sent to a storm drain and eventually ends up in Puget Sound. This is the largest polluter of the Sound, sending 52 million pounds of pollutants into it every year.  That’s a conservative estimate but it’s nothing new. 

What is new is a map, produced by a team of GIS students from the University of Washington that shows where the storm drains - that send the water into Puget Sound - are. Turns out there are 4,500 public manmade storm drains, according to the team. The map was produced for People for Puget Sound, a nonprofit that advocates for healthy policies for the sound. The map also includes 2,123 natural drainages that receive inputs from the watershed system of additional drains, and 297 storm drains from the Washington State Department of Transportaion and 70 bridges. Industrial and private drains were not included in the project.

What poisons end up in the sound? Yummy things like copper, zinc, mercury, flame retardants, PAHs, and petroleum hydrocarbons. Some of these pollutants, like phthalates, which are found in plastic bottles and packaging, get dissolved in stormwater, making them hard to remove, if not impossible.  Pleasant.

Why should we care? Because, on a very base level, the Puget Sound is a huge economic driver that helps support our local economy. Not to mention the environmental aspects. 

So what does the image look like? Here it is…

Courtesy People for Puget Sound

Bruce Wishart, policy director for People for Puget Sound, said the map shows the enormity of the stormwater problem which impacts the sound.

Heather Trim, urban bays and toxics program manager for the organization, said the students went well beyond their class project to create a terrific map that advances knowledge of stormwater inputs. “We have been told by agencies that it would be years before we could get this map and yet the students have produced this tremendous resource.”

How about it readers, is this image a tad surprising? Or is it what you would have expected?

On Thursday evening, I attended the first lecture in AIA’s new ‘Regeneration’ series. The lecture featured Lucia Athens of CollinsWoerman, Pliny Fisk III of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems and Jason Twill of Vulcan.

For those of you that missed it, the information was certainly presented in a unique way. Speakers discussed a number of topics under ‘headings,’ like mentors and current work. The

Regeneration is a new AIA Seattle lecture series

format allowed speakers to touch on a variety of topics and gave the audience a little more background, than is often given, into what influenced the speakers in their work. It struck me as being a more personal discussion than lectures often are. It was also a little less structured, and allowed speakers to discuss what they thought was interesting about regenerative design, architecture, etc.

For example, Athens spoke about her relationship with Fisk. It turns out Fisk is a mentor to Athens, and Athens even designed the landscape at his Austin, Texas Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems. (By the way, Athens’ book, Building an Emerald City, is due out in November. For more info on that, click here.)

The talk looked at regenerative design, what that means and how far the industry is in achieving it. Twill said as an industry, we’re nowhere near where we need to be, in part because it is very difficult to convince the higher-ups that things need to, and can, change. Green design today, he said, isn’t green enough. “I still see us designing a box and throwing in an efficient toilet and calling it sustainable.” Twill said we need to move from green to sustainable and eventually restorative design, before culminating in regenerative design.

Twill asked the audience a number of questions like ‘Have you been a part of an integrated design process,’ and ‘Have you participated in a post occupancy evaluation?’ Out of a packed room, barely anyone in the audience (other than Twill) raised their hand and responded ‘yes’ to these questions.

Because the discussion breached so many topics, I am, more than anything, left with a checklist of Web pages to check out and items to research. Here is my checklist, of Web sites, books and people, that the speakers thought were interesting and influential. Feel free to share your experience below, if you attended the event!

www.rose-network.com,  www.livingneighborhoods.org , www. conservationeconomy.net, terra preta, Bill Reed, and  Panarchy.

The Regeneration series is a seasonal event. The next one will be June 16 with Robert Pena. For more information, visit AIA Seattle’s Web site.

P.S. AIA Seattle’s What Makes it Green awards ceremony is next Tuesday, April 28, at FareStart. I’ll be there. Will you?

The University of Washington has developed a new certification centered on low impact

Do you know what this is? Ever worked one? Maybe you should become a teacher!

development. There’s only one problem: it doesn’t have teachers yet.

The program, which will begin this fall, will consist of three 30-hour courses. Students will take ‘Foundations of Low Impact Development’ in the fall, ‘Practical Applications of LID,’ in the winter of 2010 and ‘Implementing LID projects,’ in the spring.

The UW is seeking applications from professionals in the LID field to teach these courses. It wants instructors who have been working in the field for over five years. Is this you? Apply to mamrhein@extn.washington.edu by April 24. If you’re looking for more information, click here.

Today, the AIA’s Committee on the Environment selected its top ten green projects. Tomorrow’s DJC will feature a short story and slideshow of the images but there were so many great pictures, we couldn’t include them all. Here, I give you some of the pictures we aren’t about to run in the DJC.

Local winners of the awards are Weber Thompson for the Terry Thomas Building and Busby Perkins + Will for Synergy at Dockside Green.

…But before I give you the pictures, I wanted to remind readers of the jurying for last year’s AIA COTE awards, which were held here in Seattle. That event last April was one of my most favorite green events ever because the judges were - at times - brutally honest about the state of green building and how nominees need to go further in the quest for green goodness.  (I wrote a story about it called ‘U.S. green buildings don’t go far enough, AIA award judges say‘.)

Among their comments (remember, this is last year’s judging for 2008, not 2009) judges said: “We saw very much less of what I would really liked to have seen” (Glenn Murcutt); “Projects that call themselves green are not green enough and in most of the work that we see we’re not taking the big enough leaps that we need to make” (Jason McLennan); and “The last thing you want to do is have the environmental movement associated with things that are overbudget and with things that are ugly” (Rebecca Henn). Like I said, sometimes brual. But honest.

I blogged on last year’s winners here.

Unfortunately, I did not get to attend this year’s jurying as it was not in Seattle. I wonder if it was quite as critical or if the entries had improved from last year. If anyone attended, I would love to hear a short review below!

However, Rebecca Henn’s comments about the separation between beauty and performance seem to be officially part of the judging process now. An AIA press release says “In architecture, performance and aesthetics are inextricably linked. The COTE Top Ten is one of the very few awards that evaluates performance and design,” said jury members. “Other awards and organizations look strictly at performance without care for how a building looks.”

The award winners might achieve this balance but it still seems to be a pretty big issue, and one that local award programs have struggled with as well. It will be interesting to see the AIA Seattle’s COTE awards at the end of this month…. (on April 28 if you dont’ already have it on your calendar).

As for performance, it looks like most of the award winners are LEED platinum.

So, did these winners achieve both performance AND beauty? You be the judge:

Dockside Green in Victoria, B.C., courtesy Enrico Dagostini

World Headquarters for the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Yarmouthport, Mass., courtesy Peter Vanderwarker

Gish Family Apartments in San Jose, courtesy Bernard Andre Photography

Portola Valley Town Center in Portola Valley, Calif. Cesar Rubio, courtesy Siegel & Siegel Architeects

To read more about the award winners and to explore the jurying process, check out AIA’s COTE page here.

Last week, the 1.2 million-square-foot Vancouver Convention Centre West opened in Vancouver, B.C. The project is massive.

Built next to the existing east convention center, the new west building allows the convention center to triple its capacity. it will also be the broadcast media center during the 2010 Olympics where it will host 7,000 members of the media. It cost $883 million in Canadian dollars and was designed by Seattle’s LMN Architects, who partnered with local firms Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership and DA Architects & Planners, who were prime architect.

On the green front, the center is shooting for LEED Canada gold and has two real stand-out features. One is the six-acre living roof, which press materials say is the largest green roof in canada and the largest non-industrial green roof in North America (does anyone know what the largest green roof is in North America, industrial or non-industrial?) You can’t walk around on the roof but there is apparently a viewing space where visitors can see it.

The other is the building’s consideration for local habitats. For example, the team worked with scientists to reduce the building’s impact on marine animals (about half of the structure is built over water). The building has an underwater habitat ’skirt,’ or an artificial reef that emulates a shoreline and provides habitat for barnacles, fish and other sea creatures, in addition to other restorative features.

My question is - does the inside of it feel green? McCormick Place in Chicago, for example, felt just like any other convention center. And having been to a conference in the Vancouver East Centre (which again, felt just like a regular convention hall) I am curious to see if any of the green elements that influenced the west building are visible to the general user. 

For more information, check out the DJC article here.

View of the green roof

Outer view of the center

Interior view

Outside view

What’s the greenest neighborhood in Seattle? Is it Ballard or Capitol Hill or Downtown? Is there any neighborhood that out-greens others? Or conversely, are there neighborhoods that are just plain not green at all?

Answer my poll at right or comment below!

(I realize I am being vague by including no definition of green. This is, of course, in order to let your minds run free and consider ‘green’ as you think best.)

When I was a kid, I remember buying stacks of colorful paper for projects. Despite my best intentions, I’d use a few sheets and the rest would - I’m guessing - end up in the recycling bin.

A Portland nonprofit knows this phenomenon and is targeting those stacks of paper

Courtesy of SCRAP

- or your extra office supplies - and turning it into a community benefit.

SCRAP, or the School & Community Reuse Action Project, was founded in 1998 by teachers who didn’t want to throw extra classroom material away. The organization takes donations of office supplies (for which you receive a tax write-off) and then sells the material to crafty people or to schools. It diverts 65,000 pounds of material each year from landfills, and also provides art and environmental activity outreach.

With the recent recession, more and more people have been looking for cheaper forms of entertainment and SCRAP has seen more business. But an e-mail I received last week says it has been so busy that it is running out of supplies.

If you have been looking for a way to get rid of old calculators or letterhead from 1980, this might be a good tip for you.

A number of items are flying off SCRAP’s shelves. They include out-of-date letterhead, unique paper stock and interesting fabric and yarn. Recent popular items have been X-ray images from head scans and old fencing masks.

Other items on the organization’s wish list include: mannequin parts, calculators, staplers, hole punches, paper cutters, spools of wire, PVC pieces, certain promotional items, small discontinued accent items, coasters, jewelry and bead bits and “shiny, sparkly stuff.”

For more information, visit SCRAP’s Web site at http://scrapaction.org/.

The Stranger reports that The Schuster Group is laying off staff and trying to sell its double-LEED-certified headquarters building in lower Queen Anne for $4 million.

An interior view of The Schuster Group\'s headquarters building

Dominic Holden’s post quotes Scott Bevan, senior development manager of Schuster, saying, “The building is actually owned by one of our investment groups and part of our responsibility is to return money to our investors … In order to return in that investment, we have got to sell the property.”

In addition to Mosler Lofts, this building has been a very significant feather in the green developer’s cap. It represented the company’s commitment to green building, and was often cited as an example of what could be done in green development. 

Last June, I reported on the double LEED certification for existing buildings and interiors here. The building’s improvements included daylighting 90 percent of the office space, installing daylight sensors control lighting, using rainwater barrels and a reflective roof.

In that story, Mark Schuster, founder and CEO of The Schuster Group, said, “We didn’t just want to create an environmentally savvy building, we wanted to create an environmentally friendly atmosphere in which every tenant and employee has an active role in using green practices every day.”

Schuster also spoke at a forum in February on how green development would be affected by the economy.  At that event, he said people in the green movement are going to have to be committed to jumpstarting green building once the economy comes back in a couple of years. To read the story, see the DJC here.