BuildingGreen Report
Blog Post
November 8, 2007
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... Read more
Blog Post
November 8, 2007
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... Read more
Blog Post
November 8, 2007
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.
Blog Post
November 8, 2007
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... Read more
Blog Post
November 7, 2007
We may already have a winner for the best, smartest booth swag at Greenbuild '07: the "rethink the dress code—CLO.08" t-shirt from Big Ass Fans. Technically, these shirts may not be booth swag, since they 'cost' the very special Greenbuild price of a one-dollar donation—which funds are met in kind by the Big Assers and used to support ASHRAE... Read more
Blog Post
November 7, 2007
Well, I'm in—standing at the back of an auditorium that seats 6,000... at an event that does seem to me now like it will exceed 20,000 attendees. The registration lines this morning were astonishing, a mythical beast with multiple tails snaking up and down the expansive corridors of this sprawling structure. I tried to take pictures, but it was... Read more
Blog Post
November 7, 2007
BuildingGreen is a content collaborator with McGraw-Hill for GreenSource magazine, the member publication of the USGBC. Our own Nadav Malin is its Executive Editor; I'm the Products Editor. Tristan Korthals Altes and Jessica Boehland are also on the masthead.
GreenSource recently won an Ozzie award recognizing its excellence in editorial content... Read more
Blog Post
November 7, 2007
This may not count as booth swag either; it's just a paper handout from the EcoLogo people called The Six Sins of Greenwashing. I can't find it online (not this version, anyway), so I'm going to type it in arduously by hand... I think it's worth the effort.
Sin of the Hidden Trade-OffFocusing consumer attention on a single environmental... Read more
Blog Post
November 7, 2007
Bill Clinton's keynote is this morning, and it's likely to be a madhouse.
There are 13,000 pre-registrants for Greenbuild this year. In past years, up to 40% of attendees registered on-site. Yesterday morning at Member Day, USGBC honcho Rick Fedrizzi said that he expects 25,000 people. "My staff cringes every time I say that number," he joked,... Read more
Blog Post
November 7, 2007
Nadav, along with John Boeker of 7Group and Victor Canseco of Sandpebble Builders, is a panelist for a session at Greenbuild '07 convened by Larry Strain of Siegel & Strain Architects that's going on right now—"Green Guideline Specifications: Taking it Public, Making it Real." Here's how it looks.
In the next room, the fabulous Ann... Read more
Blog Post
November 7, 2007
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... Read more
Blog Post
November 7, 2007
I attended the USGBC Educator Summit this morning with a great group of green design educators. The opening speaker was Rachel Gutter, manager of the LEED for Schools program I believe. Rachel told us that children, especially the children at green schools, are "Sustainability Natives" while we are all "Sustainability Immigrants." She says that... Read more
Blog Post
November 6, 2007
Because not everybody gets the idea of integrated design and delivery yet, I'm glad AIA National and the AIA California Council collaborated on Integrated Project Delivery: A Guide... and even more glad that they're making it available as a free-to-download pdf.
The 57-page document provides plenty of context and content, though the tightly... Read more
Blog Post
November 6, 2007
Electric resistance heaters, outside, at the hotel. I guess the towel- and sheet-reuse program makes room for this kind of thing. (Nice place, though.)
"Saying that electric heating is 100 percent efficient is like saying that a Cadillac is 100 percent efficient because it burns up all the gasoline pumped into it." —Lawrence Solomon, quoted... Read more
Blog Post
November 6, 2007
Big news from Member Day at Greenbuild '07—the LEED ratings programs are... going away.
I'll be updating this post in the next hour or so after listening to the session again, but it boils down to this: there will be a "bookshelf" of credits, and when a project application is made, a custom rating system will be generated.
There's a lot more... Read more
Blog Post
November 5, 2007
As a LEED Faculty member, I've been hearing for a while about the conflict-of-interest concerns with USGBC's LEED-Accredited Professional program. USGBC has been putting a lot of effort into improving and standardizing the exams, in an effort to get the accreditation program accredited (geez—how many layers of accreditation can you have?). But to... Read more
Blog Post
November 3, 2007
GreenerBuildings put together a nicely thorough intro to Greenbuild '07. Their article "What Greenbuild is Bringing to Chicago" includes us:
In what has become a much-anticipated annual feature of the Greenbuild conference, BuildingGreen, the publishers of the GreenSpec Manual and Environmental Building News will announce its top 10 green... Read more
Blog Post
November 3, 2007
In the BuildingGreen Suite we have a Discussions feature on just about every page that allows members to respond to content with their comments and questions. There was a brief exchange the other day in response to a November 2007 Environmental Building News piece titled "Recycled Decking Manufacturers Launch Virgin PVC Options."
Excerpts from... Read more
Blog Post
November 2, 2007
Every year before Greenbuild I go through the exhibitor listings to see which ones have products in GreenSpec. At the show, I first visit the booths that don't (we're already familiar with a majority of those, but in this growing industry there are always new contenders), and then make a second sweep to catch up with anything new from the ones... Read more
Blog Post
November 1, 2007
A post came through one of the too-many email lists I monitor: the nonprofit Empreinte ("print"—as in "footprint"), in conjunction with the French straw building network, Les Compaillons, started an online database of French strawbale buildings, and have so far registered 239 of them. France is smaller than Texas by about the size of Illinois,... Read more
