GreenClips.209 02.12.03 L.A. NONPROFIT ANNOUNCES COMPETITION FOR AFFORDABLE GREEN HOUSING Frustrated by the slow rate of acceptance of green building, Lawrence Scarpa of Santa Monica-based Pugh + Scarpa Architects and a few like-minded souls founded Living Places, a nonprofit committed to building green affordable housing on challenging urban sites. Livable Place's first public project was Colorado Court, one of the country's first affordable housing projects to generate its own energy. The 44 single-room-occupancy units feature an innovative gas-powered turbine heat-recovery system and a solar-electric system. A more ambitious undertaking -- and one of three flagship developments underway -- is a [50]-unit low-income housing project slated for 12 undeveloped acres in the Los Angeles community of Carson. The project's first phase will be designed by the winner of a national competition sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. Registration to enter the competition, which is open to licensed architects and architectural firms in the U.S., is due by March 28, 2003. For information: http://www.livableplaces.org Metropolis, March 2003, p 54, by Ken Coupland, and Livable Places press release. DARING GLASS & STEEL TOWER INCORPORATES GEOTHERMAL HEAT EXCHANGE In Hannover, Germany, a new 840,000-square-foot bank complex designed by Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner rises like a sculpture of glass-and-steel boxes, piled one atop the other, some cantilevered daringly, and culminating in a tower. Spectacular aspects aside, Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner won the international competition for the Norddeutsche Landesbank in part because of the firm's skill in reducing energy use, bringing in daylight, and ensuring worker comfort. The offices have no air-conditioning. The tower's load-bearing structure -- consisting of two 3-foot-thick columns with concrete cores wrapped in heating spirals -- is cooled by a low-energy system using cold ground water, pumped from 66 feet below the ground, about 6 feet below the water table. The tower relies on concrete ceilings for its storage mass. Water, running through pipes in the tower's ceilings, gets cooled in soil heat-exchanger tubes in 120 foundation piles, where the heat is removed in the summer and can be stored for winter use. The seasonal storage and pumped circulation of ground water constitute the building's main heating system, but conventional zone heating backs it up. Though the system is not new, it is atypical for such a large building. Windows are individually operable, allowing each employee to make local adjustments to workplace temperature and ventilation. For details, see "Project Portfolio" at http://www.architecturalrecord.com Architectural Record, Feb 2003, p 125, b Tracy Metz. ARTS GROUP DECONSTRUCTS MALL TO RENOVATE 19TH-CENTURY SOAP FACTORY A Minneapolis arts organization, No Name Exhibitions @ The Soap Factory, has transformed a 19th-century former soap factory into a multiuse center for the arts. Ironically, they did it in part by salvaging and reusing building materials from a nearly new but defunct luxury shopping center. Because the shopping center had been built to last, deconstruction was extremely energy-intensive. Almost everything that was salvaged had to be ripped, punched or cut from its location by a licensed salvage crew. Planning for the deconstruction effort included: determining how to remove specific items; securing a staging area on the loading dock; finding companies to loan trucks with drivers; and scheduling volunteers for loading and unloading salvaged items. Throughout the research and planning stage, No Name peppered local building-code officials with questions, learning, for example, that to maintain established ratings for fire doors they had to punch them from walls with their frames and assemblies intact. Highly customized materials, such as ceramic tile arranged in a geometric pattern on a web backing, were the most difficult to reuse. No Name estimates that the total retail value of items salvaged from the mall and installed at the Soap Factory to be about $25,000. A substantial inventory of salvaged items remains in storage for future use, sale or donation. Architecture Minnesota, Jan-Feb 2003, p 42, by Heather Beal. [For more information email: haven003@mn.rr.com .] MORE BRIDGES DESIGNED TO ADDRESS AESTHETICS AND CONSERVATION Each year in the United States somewhere between $6 billion and $8 billion is spent for highway bridge design, construction, replacement and rehabilitation. Thanks to greater concern and awareness by both the public and decision makers, there's now more emphasis on aesthetics and impacts on natural resources. At the Tsable River Bridge in British Columbia, for example, fish habitats were protected by using longer spans for the bridge, and by setting back the piers a minimum of 30 feet from the riverbank. The bridge surface was built at the top of the piers, almost 200 feet above the valley floor. Because the valley bottom was used only for the delivery of construction materials, most of the ancient Douglas firs were protected. And during construction, work within the riverbank perimeter was restricted to the period between June 15 and September 15 so as not to damage fish stocks. And in Index, Washington, when the Wes Smith Bridge was to be rebuilt, residents wanted a bridge that was aesthetically pleasing and would have minimal environmental impact since it would span habitat for the endangered Chinook salmon and bull trout. The 262-foot structure was created with steel arches because it allowed a long span with minimal structure depth, so piers did not have to be constructed in the river. Landscape Architecture, Feb 2003, p 46, by James Sipes. GREEN BUILDING CHALLENGE SHOWS RESPONSIBLE BUILDINGS BECOMING THE NORM Green Building Challenge (GBC) is a consortium of over 20 countries that is developing and testing a new method of assessing the environmental performance of buildings across national boundaries. The assessment framework takes the form of software called GBTool that allows a full description of the building performance, and allows users to carry out assessments relative to regional benchmarks. For the GBC'S third bi-annual conference, which was held in Oslo, Norway, last fall, the Canadian GBC team selected three projects to represent current Canadian practice: Mayo Replacement School in Mayo, Yukon; Red River College, Winnipeg; and Jackson-Triggs Estate Winery, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Canadian team leader Alex Zimmerman of the BC Buildings Corporation described the project selection criteria as putting "less emphasis on pure green performance, relying primarily on technology to improve a building's operating energy consumption. More emphasis was given to sustainability improvement, relative to benchmark comparisons, and the utilization of a comprehensive integrated green design approach." All the projects selected for the GBC assessment process incorporate an impressive range of components and strategies that qualify them as comprehensively green buildings. Interestingly, however, they don't represent a major breakthrough in building sustainability. The fact that we can no longer cite these buildings as exceptionally innovative but rather celebrate them as examples of what is becoming normal practice, is a very positive step forward. Canadian Architect, Jan 2003, p 14, by John McMinn. [More: http://www.iisbe.org ] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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