NC Ch 5 : Building Blocks

This chapter is largely on sustainable architecture and "green development".

It highlights an office building by Ton Alberts in Amsterdam, built in 1987. It is the office building of what is now ING. "Upon initial occupancy, the complex used 92% less energy than an adjacent bank constructed at the same time, Absenteeism is down 15%, productivity is up, and workers hold weekend cultural and social events there."

Michael and Judy Corbett, architects of Village Homes in Davis, CA, in the 1970s, a subdivision that improves quality of life and cuts energy bills by half to two thirds.

Inn of Anasazi, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, transformed into an adobe-style structure in 1991.

One main point that the authors want to stress is that people like to be comfortable, and so the buildings need to suit people's needs better so that people will be more productive in them and also more healthy.

In order to shift to green design, we need to change the way architects design buildings and the way they get paid. Currently, "compensation paid to architects and engineers is frequently based directly or indirectly on a percentage of the cost of the building itself or of the equipment they specify for it" (p91).

The problem with skimping on design is that the owners and tenants bear the brunt of the costs later.

Some ways to encourage efficient buildings are for to have a system where appraisers credit efficient buildings for energy savings, LEED, better market-based information and accurate incentive structures for both tenants and owners, "feebates" for energy hookups.

Building technologies
Main ways to make building efficient and also comfortable for people are:
"having the physical shape, and facing in the direction, that takes the greatest advantage of solar gain and deflects unwanted heat or wind. Saves 1/3 of building's energy use at no extra cost."
Also, taking into consideration thermal mass, shading, surface finishes, landscaping, for passive-solar heat gains and passive cooling.
Installing advanced light sources (?) to eliminate flicker, hum, and glare. The authors recommend swing-arm task lights on desks combined with variable ambient lighting rather than big ceiling lights (p95).
Improvements in the building's shell such as insulation, but also "superwindows" which are insulating windows. You can install them to have different infrared properties on different sides of the building so that it optimized the flow of heat and light to have a more comfortable building with less controls.
Install photovoltaic power generation on a building envelope (windows and roofs).

Recycling buildings - Stewart Brand's How Building's Learn recommends designing in flexibility by having walls, pipes and other interior elements that can be easily moved. This is to encourage reusing buildings. "This saves the energy and landfill space embodied in construction materials, which are responsible for 40% of all materials flows and mainly end up as waste whose disposal typically costs 2-5% of construction budgets. (p100)"
Audubon and Natural Resources Defense Council Headquarters in New York is a recycled building.

Recycling sites - Building and developing on "brownfield sites," which are places that previously had a lot of industry that may need some cleanup.

The other interesting section is on Redesigning Community, where the authors talk about meeting the needs of the community with fewer resources. New Urbanism has new land-use ideas, which aren't necessarily new, but presents a new theory for how to meet people's needs.
clustering houses around minigreens - preserves privacy, fosters neighborliness, making sharing equipment easier
"granny flats" - encouraging multigenerational families
narrower streets
lighter-colored paving and building surfaces
urban trees for shading and to improve air quality
porous-surface, watershed restoration movement - better than sewage for absorbing rainwater

examples:
Prairie Crossing, 667-acre residential development near Chicago
Haymount, new town in Virginia - reduced project infrastructure costs by 40%

"Towns and cities are also starting to prevent unnecessary leaks of dollars out of the local economy through more productive use of local resources." I'm not actually exactly sure what they mean by this, perhaps that since they will pay less for energy, they will have more resources for other projects.