The AIA 2008 National Convention and Design Exposition — "We the People" — starts next week Thursday, on the East Coast for the first time in almost a decade. As usual, BuildingGreen will be there. If you are, too, come see us at booth 14079.

We also have people involved in a couple sessions. Peter Yost will co-lead an all-day preconvention workshop, "USGBC's Residential Programs," along with Mack Caldwell and Ann Edminster. On Thursday at 4 p.m. until 5:30, Nadav Malin, along with Scot Horst, answer the troubling question, "It's Certified Green, But What Does That Mean?"

Me, I'll be a first-timer at AIA, and will be posting here from there. I've been going over the guide and the website... this thing's a monster.

If I could adopt a conference, it would be the USGBC Cascadia chapter's Living Future 'Unconference'. As someone who generally prefers to stay behind the scenes talking shop, it was a delight to find myself surrounded primarily by the obsessed of the green building world. Even better, as presenters we were encouraged to bring our own big challenges to the table and get attendees to help us address them — which is exactly what we and many other presenters did. (More about that later, I hope.)

First, this is the only conference I've been to where I left with less stuff than I started with! Yes, you could buy a conference T-shirt (lovely, organic, low-impact dyes, made in the USA), and I did get some green building playing cards, but there was no bag full of conference papers and booth swag. Instead, at registration we were each given a paper nametag and a single tri-fold with the conference schedule. For details, you had to wrest control of one of two computers hooked up to a screen set to scroll through sessions. I, of course, lost my tri-fold, and there didn't appear to be any spares.

Paul Hawken's keynote speech set the tone for the conference with kudos, encouragement, and warning for the audience; kudos for the work going on to transform the world for the better, encouragement that we are not alone (visually demonstrated with an endless scrolling list of nonprofits that can, by the way, all be found on WiserEarth) and a warning of radical changes to come that'll put green practitioners on the front-lines. "I just want to caution you. I think your star may rise faster than you'd want it to... I'm not saying this to flatter you. I'm saying this to warn you."

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As Research Director at BuildingGreen, I dabble in - or dive headlong into - a wide range of BuildingGreen internal and collaborative projects, and am part of the team working to make the GreenSpec product directory as robust as possible. I have every intention of making my bio personalized, but there are too many other fun things to do than talk about myself – so in the mean time:

Through her work with BuildingGreen, Toxics Use Reduction Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rocky Mountain Institute, and Demand Management Institute, Jennifer has conducted research and analysis in a variety of sustainability topics including green building, commercial and industrial energy efficiency, electronics recycling, and the economics of toxics use reduction. Her activities at BuildingGreen include providing technical and research support for GreenSpec, EBN, and other BuildingGreen activities, as well as collaborating on projects such as the ASID/USGBC ReGreen Guidelines and a policy white paper for the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. A primary focus of hers has been developing and clarifying standards to assess the environmental sustainability of products, processes, and organizations. To this end, her activities at BuildingGreen include researching and updating product criteria for GreenSpec, and providing technical support to the Construction Specification Institute (CSI) on GreenFormat. Jennifer has a dual MS from MIT in Technology Policy and Material Science & Engineering, and a BS in Environmental Science from Brown University.

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"Green buildings have captured the imagination of many in the mainstream, but for green professionals the time has come to stop designing for mere energy efficiency and start designing to regenerate and restore. And that means taking responsibility for what people do in buildings and communities after they are built." — www.greenmanifesto.org

Also from the website:

1. Communities are people, not buildings.
2. Communities will change when the people living in them change.
3. At least half of human impact on the planet comes from our lifestyles — the choices we make every day. Where, and how, we travel. What we eat. What we wear. The stuff we buy, and how we get rid of that stuff when we're done with it.
4. These lifestyle choices are not made in a vacuum. They are made in communities, and are indelibly influenced by community design and buildings.
5. The way we've designed our cities and buildings in the past has created a template for living that most people follow without much thought, and that template makes it very inconvenient to live sustainably.
6. Those of us who create and run the places we live in have tremendous influence to change this template, and and to make it easier for people to change their lifestyles.
7. Some of us have been pre-occupied with making buildings, streets, and infrastructure that use building materials, water, and energy in smarter ways. We call ourselves "green professionals." We call our movement the "green building movement." But we now recognize that the biggest problems are fundamentally social ones.
8. Since buildings and technology represent only half of the problem and half of the solution, clearly the present green building movement doesn't go far enough.
9. All across our cities, entrepreneurs and environmental groups are emerging with solutions to specific challenges of our unsustainable lifestyles — car-sharing companies, local food advocates, re-use innovators. But most of these green lifestyle initiatives are not joined up with the green building movement, or each other.
10. We urgently need an umbrella movement that will bring us all together to design, build, and operate truly sustainable communities with intent. The time has come to apply the vast ingenuity of the green building movement to making green lifestyles just as convenient as "grey lifestyles." The time has come to broaden our design teams, to bring green lifestyle experts to the table.
11. We cannot wait for someone else to bring us all together. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Read more. Take the pledge. Participate.

Amy Levin and friends photo: Heidi Glenn, NPR

The best way to learn more overall about this amazing project is to hear the story that recently aired on NPR's All Things Considered.

But BuildingGreen LIVE decided to talk a bit more with Amy Levin to learn just how and why a realtor took such a deep plunge into the world of green building.

Coming from a family of realtors, Amy has been involved in housing, property improvement, and property investment most of her life. But about two years ago, she became convinced that building green presented a real opportunity — that building green can pay builders back, even though there may be some additional up-front cost, because the public is willing to pay for the small premium. She set off looking for an existing property to prove it.

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With the addition of three new case studies from the 2008 AIA COTE Top Ten awards (Aldo Leopold Legacy Center - Platinum; Yale University Sculpture Building and Gallery - Platinum; Macallen Building Condominiums - Gold), BuildingGreen.com now features over 100 LEED certified building case studies from the High Performance Building Database (HPB).

HPB is a great tool for researching the strategies used by other designers to achieve design goals and create successful (and sometimes unsuccessful green designs). The ratings page of LEED case studies shows the points awarded to the project. Pages such as site & water and materials describe design characteristics of the projects and strategies used, and in addition the energy page includes simulation and/or actual energy use where available.

Photo: Yale Sculpture Building; credit: Peter Aaron, Esto

Last year, our own Alex Wilson served as a judge for the Lifecycle Building Challenge, a competition organized by West Coast Green, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Building Materials Reuse Association, The American Institute of Architects, Collaborative for High-Performance Schools, and Southface Energy Institute.

There are two main categories: buildings and ideas. In either category, the idea is to design a project that takes a material's entire lifecycle into account. In other words, you want to design a building that can be disassembled for reuse or recycling. Ditto for a wall assembly or some other piece of a building.

This year, the contest requires entrants to provide estimated square footage for buildings and estimated construction debris savings for their projects or ideas. There are also three new awards for outstanding achievement: best greenhouse gas reduction, best school design, and best residential design.

We wrote up last year's winners here. I'd like to have some really cool winners to write about here or in EBN in the fall, so get to it!

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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Peter Yost is the Residential Program Manager for BuildingGreen, LLC in Brattleboro, Vermont. He has been building, researching, teaching, writing, and consulting on high performance homes for more than twenty years. His expertise stretches from construction waste management and advanced framing to energy efficiency and building durability. Peter has made significant contributions to the work of many leading homebuilding organizations and initiatives — NAHB Researcher Center, Building Science Corporation, 3-D Building Solutions, EEBA, Masco's Environments for Living program, USGBC's LEED for Homes program, and the US Department of Energy's Building America program. Peter is currently an instructor for the Boston Architectural College's Sustainable Design Certificate program and for the University of Massachusetts Department of Building Materials and Wood Technology program in Amherst. He is a past co-chair and current Materials and Resources Technical Advisory Steering Committee member of the USGBC's LEED for Homes program.