Over the last few days two articles in New York Times affiliated newspapers caught my eye:

Spanish Region Limits Golf Development  by Kevin Brass in the International Herald Tribune is about how the government in Andalusia in “golf-happy Spain” has passed a new law restricting the development of golf courses. One of the golf courses there is pictured at right. The regulations limit how many houses a developer can build around a course and require new courses to use recycled water for irrigation.  It’s an interesting story about the relationship between a crashing housing market, “thirsty” golf courses in an area prone to droughts, and houses.

Plus, it’s always amazing to me how controversial golf courses can be. Doubt me? Read Alex Shoumatoff’s The Thistle and the Bee from Vanity Fair’s green issue.

The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological by Felicity Barringer in the New York Times is basically a total overview of LEED for homes.

The Hollywood house profiled in the article is LEED platinum and $2.8 million. Kelly Meyer, one of the people behind the house, points out green houses can be stylish, while the article compares LEED platinum to Prada… but not all LEED homes, platinum or not, cost $2.8 million. Sheesh. Some are just Besty Johnson or Eddie Bauer. Though they do tend to be a tad more expensive…  locally Pride + Johnson’s Ashworth Cottages (also platinum and pictured below) cost between $739,000 and $950,000. Read my story on that here.

Barringer highlights LEED for its certification process, but doesn’t mention other programs, like Energy Star homes , are third party certified too. And while describing what third party certification is and how much it costs, there is no mention of why it is needed (to prove that everything works like it says it does) or where some people say it falls short (verifiers don’t actually see buildings, just read and verify the documents).

It barely touches on LEED as a marketing and selling tool… Like it or not, marketing is why lots and lots of people are doing LEED projects. For more on this, read the Building Seattle Green blog’s overview of a study that tackles that topic here.

I’m also interested in why the USGBC isn’t asked to comment. Then again looking at a topic like this in two pages seems momentous to me to begin with. And the reporter did cover a lot of ground. Judge for yourself.

Happy reading everyone!

Being a reporter, I’m always struck by how magazines or newspapers choose to put words like “green” in quotations. The designation implies a term is not yet known to the general public and says a lot about a publication’s readership.

Here at the DJC we put quotations around phrases like ”netzero” (a goal of producing all the energy a building uses) or “regeneration” (making a site better than what was originally there), but not LEED or green. Then again, we have a focused readership.

So, while reading Vanity Fair’s third annual green issue last weekend, I was struck by the magazine’s presentation of green buildings, and by its use of quotations around words like LEED “gold,” “living roof,” and “cradle to cradle.”

The coverage raised a question in my mind: when one of the foremost investigative magazines in the country covers green buildings but still assumes its readership doesn’t know much about them,  just how mainstream can green building be?

What do you think, is green building mainstream? 

Three pieces between the magazine’s covers, all written by VF Special Correspondent Matt Tyrnauer, take on the subject. To read an interview with Tyrnauer about the projects, click here. 

The first is a photo and long caption of New York-based Neil M. Denari Architects’ Manhattan condo project called HL23, pictured above left. Denari is designing a 14-floor cantilevered building on a 40-foot-wide lot that gets wider as it gets taller. Vanity Fair uses quotation marks to say it is reaching LEED “gold.”

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