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?

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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Women and men are constantly compared to each other with touchy results (look no further than the race for the Democratic nomination for proof) and sustainability is no different. So what does this mean in Seattle? A panel at the AIA’s ReGeneration conference Monday will try to find out.

What do you think? Is one gender more prone to green living, building and working? Or are both perfectly equal?

The “Women in Green panel” from 1:30 to 3 p.m. on Monday will bravely delve into the subject of gender and sustainability. Here in Seattle, there’s no question that many of the brightest (and most powerful) green minds are women. Four of them - Anne Schopf of Mahlum, Lucia Athens of the city of Seattle’s Green Building Program, Amanda Sturgeon of Perkins + Will, and Judith Heerwagen, an environmental psychologist, will flesh out the issue.

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