It never fails. August ends, September begins and the green building community GOES CRAZY WITH EVENTS! It’s like the green people fall asleep sometime in mid-July and wake up after Labor Day energetic and raring to go.

Anyway. As I will be out of the office for the next week, I figured I would make a short list of what’s going

Stop sleeping green people! It\'s September!

on. Here are some (not all) of the many green things to fill your September with:

On Sept. 8 the Master Builders Association hosts an introduction to Built Green at the MBA Housing Center from 8 to 10 a.m. It costs $30. More info here.

On Sept. 9, the Univeristy of Washington Professional and Continuing Education hosts a webinar on its new certificate in low impact development. The free Webinar runs from 5 to 6 p.m. For more information, click here.

On Sept. 10, the Cascadia Region Green Building Council is hosting a workshop on zero net water buildings and super low impact development. It will be at the Wyckoff Auditorium at Seattle University from 4 to 6:3- p.m. and costs $10. More info here. (P.S. last time I went to a talk in this series it was awesome. I’m sad I can’t go to this one….)

On Sept. 15, Carol Sanford will speak about attracting, incubating and holding business and sustainability at REI. Tickets are $18. More info here.

On Sept. 17, Sustainable Industries hosts its annual Economic Forum. Paul Hawken will speak. A panel of local business leaders will also discuss the economy. The morning event runs from 7:30 to 10:30 a.m. It costs $75. More info here.

On Sept. 17, the AIA hosts its latest Regeneration lecture at the Seattle Art Museum on “the architectural challenge of 2030.” Amanda Sturgeon of Perkins + Will is speaking. Tickets run from $10 to $25. More info here.

On Sept. 23, the Urban Land Institute is hosting a morning presentation on the future of the Puget Sound region and challenges in urban development. Former governor Dan Evans will speak. Tickets are $15 at the door. More info here.

On Sept. 23, SMPS is hosting a lunch panel as part of Kirkland’s Sustainable September Initiative on sustainabiity and the state of the economy. The talk is called “After the recession - where is the work, what will it look like and are you ready?” It will run from 11:30 to 1:30 at the Bellevue Athletic Club. Tickets range from $40 to $55. For more information, go here.

On Sept. 25 the Northwest Ecobuilding Guild is hosting its annual 10×10x10 green building slam at the downtown Seattle Public Library. It costs $20. More info here.

If I missed your event, feel free to post it below in the comment section. Enjoy!

The AIA Seattle’s Forum magazine is seeking submission proposals for an upcoming issue on design for healthy living. Proposals for features run up to 2,500 words and columns run between 600 and 700 words. Proposals must address some aspect of design for healthy living in the Seattle metro area, Puget Sound or Washington state.

For more info on Forum or the submission process, visit http://www.aiaseattle.org/forum . Proposals are due by August 21.

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!

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?

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.

What’s the point of green awards? I asked that question in a post last week and during an AIA panel discussion the following day,  a number of Seattle architects tried to answer the question (see the post for a list of architects on the panel).

But answers ranged across the board. So I asked, ”If you could boil what you want out of the green awards down to one thing, what would it be?” (One of this year’s award winners is at left - the planned Center for Urban Waters in Tacoma by Perkins + Will).

The response was that you really couldn’t boil it down to one thing. Green awards are supposed to: inspire, train people, get people interested in green buildings, share project information, elevate Seattle’s green building reputation, honor people equally that are pushing the envelope and just beginning to do green work, and change the way design is done.

Whew. Those are a lot of goals for one award program. But OK, assuming one program can achieve it all… how do you do it?

Here are some of the panel’s ideas for making AIA Seattle’s What Makes it Green Awards better, and for extending it’s breadth so that next year, you, Seattle-area-architect-who-is-only-kind-of-interested-in-green-building, will want to go to the event, and begin designing green: (more…)

Green awards, green awards. There’s lots of them out there but what’s the point? And what’s the responsibility of people doling them out?

That is the topic, to some extent, of an AIA Seattle forum I’m presenting at tomorrow. I am a guest panelist - the token architectural outsider - along with Lucia Athens of Seattle’s Green Building Team and a host of locally known architects including Marc Jenefsky, Anne Schopf, Peter Steinbrueck, Dan Williams and Rick Zieve. Jerome Diepenbrock, chair of the AIA ethics and practice committee will moderate. (more…)

Yesterday, the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment announced its high profile list of the top ten greenest projects in the country. One of them is from Seattle.

For any of you that don’t know this competition, this is a very….. big….. deal. For those of you that do know it, do you think it should be as big a deal as it is? And are these really the greenest projects in the country? What do you think?

The winning Seattle entry was the South Lake Union Discovery Center by Miller/Hull (at left). I’d tell you more about it, but there’s been lots written on this unique modular building that is designed to break about in four pieces, move to another location and be reconfigured. If you want to learn more about it, read a story I wrote on it last summer here.

It’s also worth noting that this project did not win the regional version of this award…. judges at the AIA Seattle COTE mentioned it and praised its ability to move, but said its lack of “living environment” led the panel to pick another project as a regional winner.  To see the projects they chose, click here. Which judging team do you think made the right decision?

Like I said, this award is a big deal. The only other project to win the award this year on the West Coast was the Nueva School, Hillside Learning complex outside San Francisco (at left). Other winners this year were in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.

The Queens Botanical Visitor & Administration Building in Flushing, New York is pictured above right. Below left is the Cesar Chavez Library in Laveen, Ariz. Below right is the Pocono Environmental Education Center in Dingman’s Ferry, Penn.

I could talk about these projects for hours, but really, I just want to show you the pictures. The AIA’s Web site is a comprehensive source of information. For an overview, go here. To learn more about a specific project, go to the link at left and click on any underlined project’s name. For an overview, see my story here . For more pictures, check out the slideshow that goes with my story, currently on the Web site at www.djc.com.

By the way, it’s clear from these pictures that the accessory of the year was the slanted roof, eh? What do you think the accessory of next year is going to be? And check below for my first posting on green buildings galore!

The AIA Seattle Committee on the Environment announced its top 10 greenest projects in this region but my question to you is did they make the right choices?

Winners of the competition are included in the photos at left and right. At right is Home on the Range in Billilngs, Mont. by High Plains Architects. Below left is Lake Sammamish State Park Beach Boathouse in Issaquah by Patano and Hafermann Architects and below right is the Bertschi Center Project at the Bertschi School in Seattle by Miller/Hull.

The thing is, a competition is only as good as its entrants. Judges said these were great examples of green projects, but said there might be greener projects out there with teams that didn’t know about the competition, or didn’t have time to put together an entry. Entries were open to built and unbuilt projects.

So dear reader, if you were judging this competition and could choose any green project in the Pacifc Northwest and Pacific region, either built or unbuilt, what would your 10 picks be and why?

The competition was open to any project in Alaska, Guam/Micronesia, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Idaho, Japan, Montana, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. There were 56 entries, of which 10 awards and three honorable mentions were doled out at the ReGeneration conference this week. For more on the process, check out today’s story on the awards here.

Do you think AIA Seattle COTE made good choices or not? If you were at the event, what project do you think deserved recognition that maybe didn’t get it, or what project did the judges choose that truly deserved the award?

If you can’t think of 10, I’d still like to hear what you think the greenest top two or three projects in the region are. Let me know!