Rebecca Henn, AIA, was a jury member for the 2008 AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten Green Projects awards. She is pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, studying how sustainability influences the building team, and although you won't find it in her official bio, she worked here at BuildingGreen during the summer of 2006. I called on the connection to ask for her perspective on the Top Ten experience. –TKA

In the middle of dinner conversation about mosque design, car racing, and sole proprietorship, I realized that I was surrounded by architecture's luminaries... one Pritzker Prize winner and a handful of AIA Fellows. I could have spent the rest of the weekend nervous and self-conscious, but as the "student" member of the 2008 AIA COTE Top Ten Awards jury, I realized that expectations for my participation were probably pretty low, so I just went with the flow and drank in the experience.

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It's not a new idea, but this book is less than a year old. From the blurb for Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto, by David Tracey:

"In the case of guerrilla gardening, the soldiers are planters, the weapons are shovels, and the mission is to transform an abandoned lot into a thing of beauty. Once an environmentalist's nonviolent direct action for inner-city renewal, this approach to urban beautification is spreading to all types of people in cities around the world.

These modern-day Johnny Appleseeds perform random acts of gardening, often without the property owner's prior knowledge or permission. Typical targets are vacant lots, railway land, underused public squares, and back alleys. The concept is simple, whimsical and has the cheeky appeal of being a not-quite-legal call to action."

Just sowing some seeds. Spring is right around the corner.

Innovation point for the Hearst Tower in New York: reduced steel in the structure.

One way that teams are getting more sophisticated is in knowing which innovation points are the best bet. It's now well established, for example, that certain specific activities — like entering a case study in DOE's Database — earn you a relatively easy innovation point for "occupant education." To find that information, however, you had to talk to someone in the know, or dig through the online database of credit interpretation requests (CIRs). The scorecard that USGBC publishes listing the points each project has achieved identifies the innovation points by name, but it doesn't provide any details on what was done to achieve those points.

For years, designers have been pleading for a more accessible list of previously approved innovations. Why force everyone to reinvent the wheel? If the point of LEED is to help the industry as a whole innovate its way to greener buildings, shouldn't USGBC be doing all it can to share that information?

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"There's one thing worse than being young and full of stormy tantrums, and that's being old and backward-looking and crotchety."

So said Bruce Sterling (author, thinker, critic, doer) in this year's annual rollicking and roving discussion of the state of the world at The Well — the still-kicking "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link" founded by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985 (more than 20 years ago!) for the writers and readers of the seminal, sadly defunct Whole Earth Review. Among much else, Bruce is the instigator of the Viridian design movement, described as a confluence of "environmental design, techno-progressivism, and global citizenship," from which grew the popular Worldchanging website, and more recently, book of the same name.

The turn-of-the-year conversation is still unfolding. A freewheeling email discussion presented chronologically, it can be slightly trying to follow — but the thoughtful, informed, witty participants make it so worth the effort.

After the jump, I've excised some quotes from Bruce Sterling that range from insightful to wry to what some might find abrasive, depressing, and contrary. It was not only difficult to choose which to include here, but also took strength limiting myself to just the "headliner." There's a lot of thought-provoking material throughout from others.

Thanks to the lovely and brainy-hilarious Jeanine Sih Christensen of greenbuilder.com for reminding me of this once-a-year treat.

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The LEED Accredited Professional (LEED AP) exam consists of 80 questions, and is scored on a scale of 125 to 200, with a score of 170 being good enough to pass. I thought that writing for Environmental Building News and earning a master's certificate in sustainable design online through the Boston Architectural College, I was in good shape for taking the LEED-AP test and joining the ranks, so I scheduled my accreditation exam for later this winter.

I remember the drill from taking the SATs in high school -- practicing actual questions is the best way to study. So I started looking for sample tests and other test prep junk, which led me to the popular ARE Forum, where I got my first reality check.

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[Clicking an image in this post will load a larger version of the image. A slideshow of the images in this post, and more, is also available. Previous posts in the "Notes from Sweden" series include #1: How They Get Around.]

It's enough to make architects go weak at the knees. I'm not an architect, but wandering around Malmo's Western Harbor (Vaestra Hamnen), I can imagine my architect friends going bananas about these buildings — many of which were designed and built through an architectural competition that attracted many top architects.

Overlooking the area is the remarkable 190-meter (630-foot) Turning Torso building designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. I'm usually not so taken by architectural statement buildings, but one could literally spend hours gazing up at this twisting spire with its exposed exoskeleton on one side. Its appearance changes dramatically as one wanders around the building and views it from different angles.

Santiago Calatrava's 190-meter Turning Torso building in Malmo, Sweden

Turning Torso building — looking up

The Turning Torso seen behind some modern homes in the Western Harbor area

Another view of the Turning Torso

But even more exciting to me is the sustainability overlay for the entire Western Harbor region.

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The answer to this question is... MIT might, but only if it wants to.

I went to a "lecture" at MIT a few days ago — part of the "Critical Issues" series put on by, of all groups, the MIT Women's League. (Kira Gould, author of Women In Green would have a field day with this!) The idea for the evening was to present ways in which MIT might think about greening the campus, in the context of making a much wider impact on the world. Lofty goals indeed.

The interesting points from the afternoon were that first, a little elementary school in the woods of New Jersey has had a disproportionate impact on its community by following its regenerative design ideals; and second, that MIT could easily perform a similar duty in a much larger community and have pretty far-reaching effect.

The folks presenting ideas were:

• Rebecca Henderson, the George Eastman Kodak Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management. (I'm sure we could toss a few more words in there... but why?) Rebecca is the classic big thinking, big consulting client strategy professor at MIT who is scared to death about climate change and other environmental issues.
• Mark Beidron, co-founder of the Willow School, a kindergarten through 8th grade private school in New Jersey focused on environmental literacy for its students. An interesting choice for a conversation about MIT... but hang with me here.
• Bill Reed, one of the leading voices in green design issues. But that just scratches the surface of Bill's vision of regenerative design and community building. Bill is exactly the right person for this discussion.
• Steven Lanou, the Deputy Director for the Environmental programs Office at MIT. Steve's job is to manage the Energy Initiative at MIT and help green the campus.

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[Clicking an image in this post will load a larger version of the image. A slideshow of the images in this post is also available.]

Despite the light drizzle and the fading light of Sweden's mid-afternoon dusk when I arrived in Lund, it was immediately clear that the prevalent form of transportation here is bicycling. Bicycles are everywhere. Hundreds are parked at the train station, where I arrived from Copenhagen. For every person I saw in a private automobile, there were probably 20 on bicycles.

It's such a pleasant contrast to the U.S. and our car-dependent cities and towns. Of course, I suppose it helps that this part of southern Sweden is quite flat. The region has some of the best farmland in the country.

Many of the cobblestone-paved streets have designated bicycle lanes and sidewalks, demarked by different paving patterns. There are also separate bicycle/walking pathways, usually with marked bike lanes for travel in both directions, with walkways on one side — or both. These pathways, at least in the Lund University campus, have their own roadway underpasses, signage, intersections, and even traffic lights in some places. One can bike all the way to Malmo, maybe 25 kilometers away, on paved bicycle pathways — and I get the sense that there are good pathways connecting most towns and cities here.

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"Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost." —James Thurber

We talk a lot about energy efficiency here at Environmental Building News. If we follow Thurber's lead and add environmental humor to our concerns, what do we get? The green building light bulb joke, of course. Enjoy these originals, and add yours below.

• How many daylighting consultants does it take to change a light bulb?

  None—the sun will be back up in exactly 10 hours.
  
  

• How many LEED Accredited Professionals does it take to change a light bulb?

  Four—one to tell you how to earn LEED points by changing it, one to change it, one to document the change, and one to deliver the check to the U.S. Green Building Council for certifying the change.
  
  

• How many product manufacturers does it take to change a light bulb?

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So, this is it. The shoe has dropped. The Fourth (and final) Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is out, and people seem to be paying attention. It got prominant coverage in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and a zillion other places—would have had even more impact if it were not on a Saturday, but what can you do? Apparently emboldened by their shared Nobel Prize, the scientists on the Panel reportedly stood their ground against attacks from the big polluters (that's us, and China) and from Saudi Arabia. They released a final Synthesis Report and a Summary for Policy Makers that doesn't mince words in laying out the likely consequences of various levels of warming.

It's scary stuff. The warming has already started. Some more is inevitable. How much is hard to say. At low levels the impacts are severe, especially on those populations (both human and other) who can least afford to adapt. At higher levels predictions get fuzzy, because unforeseen secondary and tertiary effects of the phenomena that can be predicted could prove overwhelming. If the ice shelves in Greenland and Western Antarctica melt, all bets are off—the Panel won't even hazard a guess as to how much sea levels might rise.

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