OFFICE RETROFITS TO SAVE ENERGY
The British firm ECD is studying a Victorian office in Southwark, London as part of an EC-funded research program called Office. The Office program involves 11 partners across Europe who aim to develop strategies, methods, and design guidelines for retrofitting offices to achieve low-energy performance with good indoor comfort. After monitoring 10 case-study buildings over a year, developing retrofitting proposals for each, and evaluating their performance, the Office group plans to produce a handbook of design guidelines and an atlas that maps successful retrofitting methods into climate zones. For its case-study building, an historical brick structure, ECD is looking at a mix of new and established technologies that won't require radical intervention in the building's form or fabric — To reduce glare and solar gain from south-facing windows, venetian blinds. To rectify leaky, single-glazed window sashes, internal secondary glazing. To improve poor winter indoor air quality, exhaust fans on the chimneys to raise the ventilation rate. To save energy on artificial lighting, simple controls; on space heating, a new condensing boiler with up-to-date controls; on water heating, new point-of-use heaters. And to relieve overheating from computer equipment, using groundwater to cool ventilation air or to feed chilled ceiling panels. — The Architects' Journal, 20 November 1997, p. 77, by Barrie Evans.

BAMBOO FLOORING IN GOOD SUPPLY
Environmentally, it's hard to argue with a wood substitute that matures in three years, regenerates without replanting, and needs little fertilizer or pesticide. At least eight North American companies now import tongue-and-groove strip flooring made from bamboo, a hard, strong, and dimensionally stable building material. The manufacturers quote hardness specs ranging from slightly softer than red oak to significantly harder — 1130 to 1640 psi measured by the standard Janka Ball Hardness Test. Besides standard strip flooring, several bamboo flooring distributors are introducing longstrip or floating floor products. And San Francisco's Smith & Fong Company now offers flooring accessories like stair nosing, reducer strips, thresholds, and beautiful grills. Prices for bamboo flooring products range from $4 to $8 per square foot, a bit more expensive than flooring from domestic hardwoods. For more information, call Dan Smith at Smith & Fong Company, 415.285.4889. — Environmental Building News, November 1997, p. 5.

COMMERZBANK TOWER MISSES OPPORTUNITY
Successfully building the "world's first ecological skyscraper" would require attention down to the last detail of Norman Foster & Partners' design for Commerzbank Tower in Frankfort. But in the implementation stage, the bank entrusted its general contractor Hochtief AG with delivering its building under cost and deadline pressures ignored earlier. And Hochtief revised details Foster had worked out, compromising the building's innovative ecological design. Foster's 1991 competition-winning design envisioned Europe's tallest building as an organism optimized to energy efficiency in its climate. A working green lung, its prominent hanging gardens would provide the building with sufficient cool and humid air even without air-conditioning. But as built, the hanging gardens are hardly perceptible from outside, while inside they are little more than conventional terraces dominated not by vegetation but by cafeterias with stone-clad surfaces. All that remains of the design's climatization features is natural ventilation of the offices. An external sheet of glass keeps wind and rain away from the operable windows and a system of chilled ceilings stabilizes the temperature. Yet despite the missed opportunity, the Commerzbank Tower is still a good piece of architecture. — Domus, November 1997, p. 20.

BOARD MAKERS RECOVERING WOOD
The number of particleboard and medium-density fiberboard (MDF) producers using recovered wood is relatively small, though companies like Ponderosa Products often play a large role in the local wood waste market. The company pays up to $20 per ton for the 250 tons of recovered wood it uses to make particleboard each day at its Albuquerque, New Mexico plant. Ponderosa cleans incoming wood of paper and trash, washes and pulverizes it. Then the company mixes the particles with a resin and compresses the mixture under heat and pressure into four-by-eight-foot boards. Sanding the boards produces 20 tons of wood flour a day that fuel the plant's boilers. Ponderosa sells $20 million worth of scrap-based particleboard annually, mostly to kitchen cabinet and furniture makers. And The CanFibre Group of Toronto is building a $120 million plant in Riverside, California to make 100-percent recycled MDF using up to 155,000 tons of recovered wood annually. — Resource Recycling, November 1997, p. 33, by Jerry Powell.

CHANGE BEHAVIOR... OR TECHNO-FIX ITS CONSEQUENCES?
Mel Prueitt, a guest physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has designed a convection tower to reduce air pollution by washing smoggy air. Prueitt says that about 100 of his patented structures, each the size of a 60-story skyscraper and costing about $10 million, could clean half the air in a place like Los Angeles, where it rarely rains between spring and fall. Made of Teflon-coated fiberglass stretched around frames of steel masts, the towers would take in air at the top, wash it with pumped-in seawater, then blow clean, cool air from their fluted skirts. The wind in the tower turns turbines at ground level that generate energy to pump the water, with several megawatts of electricity left over. The water is treated to restore it to normal salinity, then returned to its source. Dumping polluted water into the sea is sure to raise a few eyebrows — some critics see the towers as a scheme to sweep pollution under a different rug and instead emphasize preventing it. Even Prueitt doesn't think his idea is a panacea for pollution. But Charles Lave, professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, points out that while campaigns to get people to drive less have failed, emission control and fuel efficiency technologies have succeeded. "I tend to like engineering solutions because it's a lot easier to reduce the consequences of people's behavior than to change the behavior itself." Also receptive is Steven Moore, professor of architecture at Texas A&M. He says the visually intrusive towers would "make the conditions of our lives powerfully present in the landscape. The message that we need to take such action to clean the air and generate power is something that you could no longer avoid." — Metropolis, December 1997-January 1998, p. 43, by Douglas Page.