In today’s edition of The Seattle Times, Eric Pryne examines how the recession is affecting Seattle’s premier Green Lake neighborhood. For the most part, the article focuses on apartment and condo complexes. But it also mentions that Pryde Johnson’s LEED platinum Ashworth Cottages is in the process of foreclosure.

According to the article, only two of the 20 homes have sold though it also mentions that another four of the houses are in various stages of possible sale.

Of course, the obvious reason for the project’s current state is the economy. But

Curt Pryde and Fawn Johnson at the grand opening of Ashworth Cottages in August, 2007

Ashworth Cottages came on the market in the summer of 2007 - before the economy really tanked. So my question is why is it where it is today?

First, some background: Ashworth Cottages opened to a lot of media attention. They were the first LEED platinum residential project in the state (seventh in the country), and thus received a press conference attended by Mayor Greg Nickels. The 20 cottages are on a lot originally zoned for six houses. To get it rezoned for 20, Pryde Johnson waited an extra 6 months, and had to get it approved by Seattle City Council.  I wrote an article about the project’s grand opening. It’s available here.

At the time, Curt Pryde and Fawn Johnson said they were confident Seattle buyers would appreciate the quality and health benefits of the platinum projects and pay between $739,000 and $950,000 for the ultimate green two-to- four-bedroom home. Apparently, that has not been the case.

But why?

The interior of an Ashworth Cottage, August 2007

I live on the other side of Green Lake - and what many people would say is the more expensive and disireable side. Even in this recession, houses around me are for the most part being snapped up. Sure, they might be on the market longer than usual but it seems like they’re still selling. Heck, even a gross ex-college party house I toured with rooms that smelled of urine sold for a pretty good price. If Ashworth Cottages were on the other side of the lake, would they have sold? Is it location, location, location?

By the way, you dear readers, have voted Ballard/Fremont the greenest neighborhood in my poll at right, followed by Capitol Hill, followed by Green Lake/ Wallingford. Maybe this project would have done better in a different neighborhood?

Maybe it’s a question of what people want for their $750,000. The Ashworth Cottages are very quaint but they don’t really have yards (the argument here is that Green Lake is basically a person’s yard). At the July 2007 grand opening, they were touted as a model example of what the city should be striving for in density. But could it be that people want more space for their money and don’t really want to spend $750k for “the model” of dense living?

Or is it the elephant in the room …. that people just do not put that high a price on green features yet and aren’t willing to pay a premium for them?

Was it the recession after all?  What do you think the problem was? If you had $750k, is this the house you would spend it on? Comment below and tell me what you’re thinking…..

By the way, the project’s Web site now says homes begin in the mid-$500s.

Some keynote speakers leave you satisfied, some leave you disappointed and some leave you angry that you just wasted two hours of your time. Then, there are keynote speakers like Janine Benyus that leave you wanting more.

Benyus spoke last night at the Living Future Conference in Portland. Her talk was warm, personal, funny

and informative. Having never heard Benyus speak before, I now understand why she’s considered such a big deal. The talk was pretty amazing.

Janine Benyus

The talk began with Sam Adams, Portland’s mayor (who is funny!!!), welcoming people to Portland. He was pretty straightforward about the general fear that you can’t make any money being green. Not true, he said: “If you take nothing else away from your trip to Portland, take this away: you can make money being very, very green.” Portland, he said, keeps millions in its economy because of its public transportation and green business.

Jason McLennan, Cascadia’s CEO then glowingly introduced Benyus, saying “I think you’re one of the most important figures in the planet today, period… I think you represent our species really well.” Not every day you hear that!

Then Benyus took the stage. She said the uncertainty in today’s financial markets can be used to the benefit of biomimicry, building design and creating a better world. When cultural certainties disappear, she said, so does arrogance. She said the recession is creating a similar attitude that happened after the World Trade Center attacks – where “the world is open to listening to the next question … As long as they’re listening, let’s make the vision as big as we can.”

What can we learn fro, this luna moth?

In this same vein, she said building models for a place can be created by looking at how natural organisms in a location treat things like fire, wind etc. “Our buildings could have general organisms as their models.”

Benyus said she hopes we will be able to fly over cities in the future, and have them be functionally indistinguishable from the natural environment. That, she said, would be sustainability.

Benyus also plugged a tool she has been working on for the past year called asknature.org. The tool, she said, allows designers to ask how nature would fix a problem and learn from it. She also discussed how future areas of technology can be inspired by animal organisms. She and Paul Hawken, for example, are working on a new solar cell that is inspired by photosynthesis.

But in the end, she said, new technology or new laws aren’t going to save us from ourselves. She said the only thing that can save us is “a change of heart and a change of stance towards the rest of the world.”

These are just a few of the items she discussed. For more, stay tuned to a future story in the DJC. If you attended the talk, please comment below and tell me what you thought of it – or what you’ve thought about Benyus’ previous talks. If you didn’t attend the talk, I’d love to hear your comments. Is mimicking nature the future of building? How important is it compared to meeting netzero energy or netting zero water?

Bright and early this morning (7:30 a.m.) I boarded a Seattle train bound for Portland so I could attend Wednesday’s Living Future site tour (the first official part of the Living Future Conference) and share the results with you. Though I may be hitting the sack a little early tonight, the results did not disappoint.

There were three tours being held. I attended the one at Portland State University’s Shattuck Hall, a building that was originally built in 1915 and recently underwent a ginormous renovation, both functionally and sustainably.

The building itself houses the school’s architecture program, so one of the goals of the renovation was to make the building itself a teaching tool. Hence it features things like exposed piping and systems and exposed radiant ceiling panels. The visibility of systems changes from floor to floor, with the top being the most obvious and open.

Having written about the Vance Building earlier this week for the DJC, I noticed a lot of similarities. Both were built early in the century, and both recently underwent massive improvements on tight budgets. The differences in what the two decided to concentrate on though, especially having toured both buildings, were really interesting.

I took some amazing photos, which my (old) computer is unfortunately not letting me load. I promise to post them as soon as I feasibly can. I’ll also try to add more information about Shattuck Hall at a later date.

Stay tuned: tonight’s keynote speaker is Janine Benyus!

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.

Last week, the 1.2 million-square-foot Vancouver Convention Centre West opened in Vancouver, B.C. The project is massive.

Built next to the existing east convention center, the new west building allows the convention center to triple its capacity. it will also be the broadcast media center during the 2010 Olympics where it will host 7,000 members of the media. It cost $883 million in Canadian dollars and was designed by Seattle’s LMN Architects, who partnered with local firms Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership and DA Architects & Planners, who were prime architect.

On the green front, the center is shooting for LEED Canada gold and has two real stand-out features. One is the six-acre living roof, which press materials say is the largest green roof in canada and the largest non-industrial green roof in North America (does anyone know what the largest green roof is in North America, industrial or non-industrial?) You can’t walk around on the roof but there is apparently a viewing space where visitors can see it.

The other is the building’s consideration for local habitats. For example, the team worked with scientists to reduce the building’s impact on marine animals (about half of the structure is built over water). The building has an underwater habitat ’skirt,’ or an artificial reef that emulates a shoreline and provides habitat for barnacles, fish and other sea creatures, in addition to other restorative features.

My question is - does the inside of it feel green? McCormick Place in Chicago, for example, felt just like any other convention center. And having been to a conference in the Vancouver East Centre (which again, felt just like a regular convention hall) I am curious to see if any of the green elements that influenced the west building are visible to the general user. 

For more information, check out the DJC article here.

View of the green roof

Outer view of the center

Interior view

Outside view

This week, I covered the giant new Thornton Place develoment next to Northgate in the DJC here.

The nine-building project is 109 condos, 278 apartments, 50,000-square-feet of retail and restaurant space and a 14-screen movie theatre with two IMAX theatres. There’s a 143-unit senior living center on the site called Aljoya, developed by Era Living, and a large portion of Thornton Creek that has been daylighted by Seattle Public Utilities.

It’s targeting LEED silver certification under LEED for Neighborhood Development. Its buildings are also shooting for separate LEED NC silver certification. Green features include easy access to transit, project walkability, water efficient and energy efficicient features, and extensive daylighting. For more info, see its Web site here.

The story got a lot of press - in the DJC, the Stranger, and the Seattle Condo Blog, for example - so if you want more info on it, you can read about it there. I’ll get straight to the photos.

A view of the piazza. Developers say they need to do something with this roof, though they aren\'t sure what!

An inside view of a condo unit.

The area where Thornton Creek will flow.

View of the park-and-ride from inside an apartment unit.

Era Living\'s Aljoya project

An inner pathway.

Yesterday, I was visiting members of architecture firm Weber Thompson in their headquarters when I decided to pull out my camera and snap some pics for those of you who have never been.

The nearly year-old building is LEED gold core and shell and is eagerly awaiting a LEED platinum certification for its interior. We’ve written about this building numerous times in the past year so I’m going to skip the description and go straight to the photos. For more on the building, read Shawna Gamache’s story on it here, read the building’s blog here, or click tag Weber Thompson below.

Here they are:

View of the inner staircase

View of the staircase through an opposing inner glass wall

Interior view of office space

View of the courtyard inside the building

Outside view of the building

vertical view of building sunshades