Most everybody agrees that the key to great green buildings is integrated design - where different professional disciplines work together in an integrated way to create a building, rather than cutting a project up into sections and having different companies separately work on those sections.

But when I hear it discussed, people are often doing one of two things: patting themselves on the back for doing such a great, fantastic job on a particular project, or explaining the necessity of the process to newcomers.

Rarely do you hear it criticized or analyzed. But the proof is in the pudding and if you’re really wondering how well the process is working, why not ask your client?

That’s just what Tracy Bowen (right) of The Alice Ferguson Foundation in Maryland is. She’s developing a living building project in Accokeek, (across from Mt. Vernon), and the lady tells it like it is. She chose to go after a living building, rather than LEED because “I felt like LEED was a really good baseline but it was going to create a ceiling… (that) wasn’t high enough.”

Using her experience with integrative design as a baseline, Bowen says the process is in its infancy. In fact, the process was shocking to her. “It’s boxy. It’s very linear.”  - What do you think?

Boiling it down- Bowen said the charette is great because it gets so many minds thinking about the same problems that solutions can actually be achieved - but once it’s done, she said the whole process of design becomes ”less organic” and is dealt with by professional subsection again.
Read more to hear her advice! (more…)

What’s the greenest kind of new building, you might ask? For many people here in the Pacific Northwest, that answer would be ‘a living building’.’

What’s that you say? A building doesn’t live; it exists! People live!

That’s the way buildings are thought of now, but the whole premise behind a living building is to change that idea to make a building function - (skeptics don’t roll your eyes yet) - like a flower that gives and takes from its environment. (more here).  Living buildings are self sustaining. They produce their own energy, treat their waste and reuse water, among other bits.

Developed by Jason McLennan of the Cascadia Green Building Council, I wrote one of the first stories about the green guideline in April 2007 here.

Only problem is, there aren’t many of them out there yet.

There are a handful of them however, and one is being developed by the Alice Ferguson Foundation in Accokeek, Md.  (more…)