This post is by Jared Silliker, a new contributor to the Building Green Blog.

Want some inspiration in our current housing crunch? I’ve had the good fortune to tour a couple Central District projects designed and built by the architect/developer duo of Brad Khouri and Graham Black. And the back stories are just as impressive as

Urban Canyon

the finished products.

To start, both Khouri, who runs b9 architects, and Black, owner of gProjects, bicycle to all their projects and strive for designs that integrate with the neighborhood’s character and scale. They are big fans of the design review process, which they say encourages better and more profitable projects.

While Khouri designs efficient and smart use of space for these human-scale homes, Black concentrates on salvaging building materials for reuse. A couple projects, for instance, use reclaimed wood from old Fort Lewis barracks that dates to the 1930s. And Black employs all his own builders in order to maintain quality and pay competitive rates. The final result are modern homes that fit and work–efficient on resources and high on function and style.

And with the market bearing down, the best inspiration may be that the homes are selling. There’s plenty of evidence to build green, but clear market success will most quickly drive more quality sustainable projects.

AIA Seattle is hosting a case study and tour tomorrow at the Urban Canyon (pictured above), Khouri’s and Black’s latest project at 19th and Pine, which is the first 5-Star Built Green multi-family development in Seattle. The Alley House, a Madison Valley urban infill residence seeking LEED Platinum, by Urbanmix and Cascade Built, will also be highlighted. Check out www.aiaseattle.org as space is limited.

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!

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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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!

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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So you know what the greenest projects in the Puget Sound are…. but what about the country? If you want to find out, the AIA will host a reception in Seattle FOR FREE on April 6 that features submissions and project judging for the year’s AIA COTE Top Ten Green Projects. 

But to attend, you have to register first, and being a high profile event, this might fill up quickly. To do that, press here.

To whet your appetite for what you’ll see, I’ve included pictures of last year’s winners. The picture above is the Hawaii Gateway Energy Center in Kailua-Kona, Hi., by Ferraro Choi and Associates. The middle picture is Heifer International Headquarters in Little Rock, Ak., by Polk Stanley Rowland Curzon Porter Architects. The last picture is the Whitney Water Purification Facility in New Haven, Ct., by Steven Holl Architects.

Award judges include Glenn Murcutt, winner of the 2002 Pritzker Prize. The award winners will be not be announced until Earth Day.

The reception and viewing of award submissions will be at Kane Hall at the University of Washington from 6 to 8 p.m. This is the first year since the AIA COTE’s inception that the judging for the awards is taking place outside of Washington, D.C.

For more information on the awards, go here, or to check out a list of past winners and more photos, press here .