Though Greenbuild '07 wraps up soon (and checkout time at my hotel is at noon), I've still got a number of things to report. There will be additional Greenbuild-related posts in the coming days about products, happenings, and a probably a slight meander about social and professional hierarchies. It will be nice to have a little more time to think—a little less immediacy, a little more research, a little more sleep, a little less frenzy—but I've had a blast this week.

I'm surprised that people started finding BuildingGreen.com Live as quickly as they did—we gave it about the softest launch imaginable. A few people apparently stopped at our booth and said they'd stumbled across it via the BuildingGreen home page (which is the only link in) and started following it. And Timothy Latz over at the Best Green Blogs aggregator rolled us into his service on Monday or Tuesday.

During the more sane times coming, I imagine there will be less frequent, and more content-rich, posts. Along with a certain amount of irreverence and goofiness.

To follow up on another reader comment, apparent fetishist Matthew suggested that "a fun report might be documenting the types of shoes people are wearing"—so I spent a little time shoe-gazing last night at the Leadership Awards celebration in the Merchandise Mart.

Shiny black shoes were The Thing for both sexes. Some of the women had pointy-toed affairs, a couple of them almost elfin in structure; mostly spike heels, not wide heels or flats. For guys, mostly tapered with a flattened nose; laced, not loafers. Leather, pleather, vinyl, imported, domestic... what do I know about shoes? I figured I'd come off as more than a little creepy if I started asking, and since I do have some measure of decorum (believe it or not), I didn't.

I hope this has helped somehow. It actually was kind of fun. I'm open to additional suggestions.

In the comments on another post, Neil Finlayson of Greenspace Research over in the UK asked if I'd greet James Morrison "(all the way from Scotland)" at the Green Building Studio booth. I don't know either of these guys, and being just another dopey 'Murrican suspicious of all foreign hooligans, knew that something nefarious was afoot and that I would be taking a great risk with my health and safety to agree to this foolhardiness... but I tracked down that randy Scotsman anyway.

He had infiltrated the booth of California-based (my fellow Americans) Green Building Studio, which offers time-saving web-based, 3D-CAD/BIM-integrated whole building energy analysis for any type of structure, as well as more conventional engineering consultation and service.

But, darn it all, what most intrigued me was a SketchUp plugin by those scary foreigners, Greenspace Research, that Green Building Studio offers as part of their services. Called "Demeter," it can import gbXML models from Revit and Archicad, then spit out an editable SketchUp model with energy lifecycle cost and carbon footprint information. (I don't have any knowledge about the level of complexity and detail entailed in their process; something to inquire about.) Check out the demo.

This also seems like it could also be a good way to generate user-friendly visual models incorporating energy and environmental information that those certain clients—you know the ones—can look at and maybe monkey around with some on their own computer. (Though that might be opening a can of worms you'll curse me for...)

I hadn't had the opportunity to look in on it since Monday, but I see now that the good folks from GreenSource started posting to their Greenbuild blog a couple days ago. Content-rich!, and a decidedly more journalistic voice than the mumbles and barks I've been spouting here.

(Most of what I've posted on BuildingGreen.com Live is a totally different voice than our other resources, too; I almost can't believe they're letting me get away with it. What a great company. It must be pretty obvious when somebody else on our staff makes a post here—clarity, substance, readability, and a fancier kind of humor...)

Here's how self-absorbed I can get: I keep going back to the Greenbuild bookstore to see how many copies of Green Building Products are displayed. (I'm a co-editor with Alex Wilson.) It's not like I get royalties or anything; any of that funnels back into the company. It's just pure vanity, I guess.

The stack goes up and down—three books, then five, then two, then four. A few minutes ago, there were eleven. It didn't take much effort to convince myself that they're tired of restocking, so put out a mess of them. Ah, fame. Or maybe people just find it a useful resource.

From the sales pitch:

Here's a comprehensive directory of green building products for home building and remodeling featuring nearly 1,600 descriptive listings for products from agrifiber panels to zero-VOC paints. All phases of residential construction are covered, from sitework to flooring to renewable energy. Products are grouped by function, and each chapter begins with a discussion of key environmental considerations and what to look for in a green product.

"This book makes it easy to find the information and product advice you need, and it's a must for anyone—builder, designer, architect or homeowner—who wants to know the unbiased, and unembellished truth about what's really 'green'," says Sarah Susanka, author of The Not So Big House.

The prospect of getting into today's plenary by Paul Hawken isn't looking good for me. The lines are about as long as they were for Clinton yesterday, probably because all the people who were standing in the registration line then are available now to stand in this one.

It gets darker. There's a local-chapter guy walking up and down the line announcing that it's a ticketed event—"if you don't have a ticket, you're not getting in." A ticket wasn't included in the press registration, of course.

There's also no press entrance this time, and no press pen, according to the woman standing watch at the staff entrance.

I'm actually OK with not getting in, except for one thing: my friend is getting a Leadership Award, and I'd like to be able to see him get it. It's my understanding that the awards will be given out at this plenary, and then celebrated tonight at the Merchandise Mart party.

Maybe out of spite, here's another scoop (like the Top-10 post) that you get to find out here, before the people in there find out:

Read more...

UTC Power, (the fuel cell folks), brought a hydrogen bus to Greenbuild and are giving people rides around the block.

There's only a few of these prototypes on the road. While I'm sure the company would like to make more, the viability of a hydrogen economy is dubious, according to many.

What's a bus have to do with green building? Lots.

Alex Wilson is about to begin the session presenting the Top-10 products added to GreenSpec and/or reviewed in Environmental Building News over the past year... and because I can, vested by the power of the internet, these are them, just for you, even before the standing-room-only crowd of a couple hundred here in the room gets to see them. (Only a few minutes before, but there's bragging rights involved.)

Read all the details in the press release!

Update—a view of the session, now underway:

(click for bigger)

Last night we and the GreenSource folks had an intimate, half-crazed private party for 350 invited green builders at the Funky Buddha—a curious and amazing place of several connected rooms filled with murals, sculpture, candles, conversation niches, and atmosphere. Drinks and laughter were the order of the evening. It turns out that I'm not as young as I used to be.

Here's a short slideshow of dark, grainy images

One unexpected thing about this place is that one of the rooms has extensive sculpted cob seating and ornament. "Cob" is an old European term for what basically amounts to monolithic adobe. There are oodles of historic, occupied, centuries-old cob houses in Devon, England, and it's enjoying popularity in the U.S. thanks to the Cob Cottage Company in Oregon. My wife is a cobber.

Tuesday afternoon the Materials & Resources Technical Advisory Group (MR-TAG) for LEED hosted a public session for stakeholder input into the ongoing process of reevaluating LEED's certified wood and biobased products credits (see EBN Vol 15, No. 6). The MR-TAG, which I chair, had commissioned a team from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Sylvatica to provide background research and tools to support the decision-making process. The Yale team posted its reports for expert review in mid-September, and stakeholders were invited to this forum to sound off about those documents before the MR-TAG uses them to form its recommendations.

Read more...