GreenClips.250 10.13.04 SALES SLUGGISH AT SUBDIVISION WITH STRICT ECOLOGICAL REQUIREMENTS The Coffee Creek Center subdivision in Chesterton, Indiana, has been hailed by national media as a model of ecological design. Yet sales remain sluggish. Lake Eric Land Company (LEL) acquired the 700 acres in 1996 and began master planning the land, calling on a veritable eco-brain-trust of consultants, including William McDonough + Partners and landscape architects and site planners Conservation Design Forum. The plan calls for 3,000 housing units and 4 million square feet of commercial and office development, all centered around a 167-acre preserve. But currently only 17 single-family homes are spoken for in a first-phase neighborhood of 250 dwellings, which was ready for development five years ago. LEL is not building any houses. Rather it is selling land to other developers for subsequent construction. But the strong New Urbanist grid and rigorous ecological requirements have thus far failed to attract significant development. Any construction within Coffee Creek is governed by a rigorous set of site planning, materials, landscaping, and stormwater guidelines, codified in a codebook that runs to 150 pages. The stringency of the code may have scared some developers away. Hoping to prime the construction pump, LEL is working closely with a builder on new housing starts, just beginning construction this fall, that they hope will spur further investment in the community. Landscape Architecture, Oct 2004, p 100, by Adam Regn Arvidson. [More: http://www.coffeecreekcenter.com/] AUSTRALIAN GREEN BUILDING COUNCIL CERTIFIES FIRST OFFICE BUILDING The Green Building Council of Australia has announced that the design of an office building in the national capital of Canberra is the first to earn certification under Green Star for Office Design, a comprehensive tool for rating the environmental responsibility of building designs. The building, developed by Canberra International Airport, is now under construction and expected to be completed by the end of 2004. Green Star for Office Design was modeled after existing building rating tools, including the U.K.'s BREEAM and the U.S.'s LEED. It rates designs according to their performance in nine categories, including energy, materials, land use and emissions. Each category is weighted to reflect its relative importance, with the weighting adjusted to reflect priorities in each state. According to the Green Star literature, this weighting system "means that a credit in one category is not of equal value to a credit in another category," and it "permits credits to be added or deleted within individual categories without affecting the overall environmental importance of an issue." More: http://www.gbcaus.org Environmental Building News, Oct 2004, p 2, by Jessica Boehland. OHIO SUPERMARKET POISED TO BECOME FIRST LEED-CERTIFIED GROCERY STORE Giant Eagle, a large regional supermarket chain based in Pittsburgh, intends be the first company to achieve LEED certification for a grocery store with its new 80,000-square-foot supermarket in Brunswick, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. The store's energy-efficient lighting systems include the use of fiber-optics in the wine-room cooler to provide nearly heat-free light, which will help reduce cooling needs. The HVAC system includes a refrigerant heat recovery system that collects cold air that escapes from refrigerated cases and shunts it to a desiccant wheel on the roof, where it is dehumidified. "The warmer, drier air is then sent to diffusers above the refrigeration cases, which both enhances customer comfort in the aisles and reduces load on the refrigeration cases," said Bradley R. Morris, the refrigeration and HVAC engineer for the store. Other innovative features include an industrial pulper for produce waste, which can potentially save 100,000 gallons of water per year because it uses juice from the produce it shreds to lubricate the process and keep waste flowing to the grinder. Giant Eagle spent more than $10 million on the new store, approximately $250,000 of which went toward achieving LEED certification. HPAC Engineering, Sept 2004, p 27, by Tim Baker. PRECUT FRAMING TECHNOLOGY PRODUCES TIGHTER ENVELOPE AND LESS WASTE MF Technologies, a Minneapolis-based company, is using a CAD-driven system called MasterFit, developed in Japan, to churn out custom-cut, engineered wood frames for single- and multifamily houses. Sustainability may be the system's strongest selling point. "We're using about 2 to 5 percent less lumber than typical stick-frame houses, and making the frames from trees that grow back quickly," says MF Technologies president Santos Martin. "And you can get a better R-value with the same insulation," he added, because the frames are tighter than stick frames. Houses built using MasterFit also lend themselves more easily to deconstruction and disassembly for reuse, according to James Brew, an architect in Minneapolis and a consultant to MF Technologies. The system also reduces production and assembly time, and simplifies labor requirements. The factory can turn around an order in about two weeks, and once components are on-site, the shell of a 1,500-square-foot house can be erected and enclosed within three days. Architectural Record, Oct 2004, p 181, by Ted Smalley Brown. [More: http://www.mftcorp.com] DESIGNING TODAY TO EXPEDITE FUTURE DECONSTRUCTION The building industry is doing a better job of diverting construction waste from landfills, but has hardly begun to address the issue of Design for Deconstruction or Disassembly (used interchangeably), which integrates waste prevention into the design process. Randy Croxton, principal of the Croxton Collaborative, advocates an approach that he calls "materials minimization." His firm's design philosophy includes looking for ways not to build; avoiding glued and composite systems and using assemblies of resources that can be retrieved and reused at the highest value; and facilitating disassembly by avoiding situations that require destructive demolition. Bradley Guy from the Penn State University Hamer Center for Community Design in Philadelphia and Scott Shell of EHDD Architecture in San Francisco are using a grant from the EPA to explore strategies and details for Design for Disassembly at the Chartwell School in Seaside, California (Monterey County). Strategies include segregating utilities from wood framing to allow for easier disassembly and to reduce holes in the framing, thereby increasing future salvage value. Windows are designed so that they can be replaced by simply removing the wood trim, without disturbing the adjacent finishes. Similarly, the wood siding is fastened with clips that are screwed into the backing for ease of disassembly. Architectural Record, Oct 2004, p 181, by Barbara Knecht. [Full text available with free registration: http://archrecord.construction.com/resources/conteduc/credit.asp] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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