GreenClips

Issue No. 269 | July 20, 2005

TIME FOR A BREAK!
Look for GreenClips.270 after 08.17.05.

THE PICK OF THE SUSTAINABLE CROP

Among the 2005 Top Green Projects selected by AIA's Committee on the Environment (COTE) are several that express what it means to build in a particular region. The Pittsburgh Glass Center is an adaptive-reuse project by Davis Gardner Gannon Pope Architecture and Bruce Lindsey. The glass foundry keeps its cool even with two 1,000-pound glass furnaces, eight glory holes, and several electric annealers along its West wall. The architects created a mechanical system that relies largely on convection, in which heat from the glass furnaces activates a natural ventilation system throughout most of the building. Austin Resource Center for the Homeless, by LZT Architects, reduces the load on Austin's storm-water-management system with a 13,000-gallon rainwater-collection system for landscape irrigation and flushing of toilets and urinals. Seeing both an architectural and educational opportunity, LZT installed eight 21-foot-tall, 24-inch-diameter galvanized-steel tubes within one of the structural frames near the front door. The water cisterns double as solar-shading devices in front of a south-facing window, creating a diffused, pearly light within the lobby. The University of Florida's Rinker Hall (Gainsville), a joint venture between Croxton Collaborative Architects in New York and Gould Evans Associates in Kansas City, Missouri, basks in daylighting. To preserve open space, the building had to be oriented along a north-south axis—which flies in the face of passive-solar design for this latitude. Randolph Croxton researched previous projects and used computer modeling to determine that a correctly designed building oriented along the north-south axis could actually benefit, in terms of both energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality, from its more abundant and varied daylighting.
Architectural Record, Jul 05, p. 153, by Nancy B. Solomon.

www.aiatopten.org/hpb/index.cfm

EXHIBITION CAPTURES INTOLERABLE BEAUTY OF CONSUMERISM

Photographer Charles Jordon wants to give a concrete sense of our consumption, with the real quantities. To that end, he is currently preparing for an exhibition of photographs of industrial refuse—his first solo show in New York—in September, at the Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea. Most of his subjects—huge piles of crushed cars, mounds of discarded cell phones, bales of recycled cans and mountains of sawdust—were photographed as he found them at industrial sites. Jordon, who lives in Seattle, abandoned a 10-year career as a corporate lawyer in 2002 at age 38. Originally a detached observer about consumerism, he now is an openly passionate advocate, or maybe a protester. While he is aiming for visually resolved images as an artist, the point is to heighten awareness about our collective environmental disregard.

The New York Times, 24 Jul 05, p. AR 1, by Philip Gefter. www.yossimilogallery.com/exhibitions/2005_09-chri_jord/

SPECIFYING LEED UNDER PUBLIC BID RULES

When constructing a public building, how can a design team account for the bidding conditions and help the potential contractor comply with LEED requirements? Tips include: 1) Avoid the use of "goal" words. When the owner wants something, require the contractor perform/install it with specific contract language. 2) LEED-related information specific to work of each section should be provided in every trade section. 3) Make compliance easy with easy-to-follow directions. 4) Do not permit the contractor to choose any LEED products. Specify the desired materials and reject everything else. Contractors may propose substitutions during bidding, but these do not imperil LEED compliance as long as the minimum number of products listed satisfies the public bid rules. 5) Add LEED compliance requirements to the Supplementary Conditions. 6) Use Deduct Alternates where unsure what the cost of compliance might be.
The Construction Specifier, Jul 05, p 63, by Len Harding.

SCULPTING FROM SCRAP

In the foothills of India's Shivalik mountain range is a 40-acre man-made garden filled with thousands of unusual natural rock forms and sculptures fashioned from waste. The Rock Garden is the awe-inspiring work of Nek Chand, a transport official who decades ago illegally began to clear a patch of jungle for a small garden. From 1958 to 1965, Chand collected waste he noticed being cleared from villages to build the city of Chandigarh. He carried objects home little by little on his bicycle to his secret garden. In 1973, a government survey team discovered the garden and was astounded by its size and beauty. The exceptionally visionary art environment was opened to the public in 1976 and has been expanded in three phases while Chand was put on salary. Chand's genius lies in the soulful way he transforms waste into art on a monumental scale. For him, objects that are thrown away because they have no economic or utilitarian value are not redundant. They retain an aesthetic worth and possess the magical capacity to transform environments—they have a force and energy of their own. This belief has enabled Chand to bestow a rare beauty on all manner of industrial and household junk. Whatever the raw material—old drums, discarded electrical fixtures or bottle caps, redundant fluorescent light tubes or cycle parts, broken pots and crockery, foundry slag and even human hair collected from barber shop floors—Chand's vision enables him to engage in a creative dialogue with the materials and create a new form of beauty. Over the years, he has established one of the largest recycling programs in Asia in the Rock Garden.
Landscape Architecture, Jul 05, p 42, by Minhazz Majumdar.

www.nekchand.com

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