Letter from the Chair

Letter from the Chair
By James L. Binkley, FAIA
Find out what COTE's five programs—Top Ten and Defining True Sustainability, Allied Relationships, Greening Initiatives, Ecological Literacy in Architectural Education, and Communications—have accomplished lately.

Features

Students in John Quale’s ecoMod studio, University of Virginia, 2005

Are We Training Designers for a 21st-Century World? Not Yet
COTE has released its Study on Ecological Literacy in Architecture Education, which covers recent efforts to bring issues of sustainability into architecture education. Read on for its definitions of sustainability, ecological literacy, and sustainable design.

AIA COTE Definition of Sustainable Design
At the AIA Convention in Los Angeles, COTE offered a session about defining sustainable design. We continue to invite input via the Architecture of Sustainability blog. For a definition of the COTE Measures of Sustainable Design, a 10-point framework for understanding the inter-related aspects of this field, click here.

A Natural Connection—Sustainable Design and Historic Preservation
Many preservation advocates believe that the sustainability and preservation communities share common goals and objectives. Should they reconcile their respective interests and objectives and become more integrally linked? The intent of the AIA Historic Resources Committee’s Fall Conference in Minneapolis November 17–19, 2006, is to explore the relationship between historic preservation and sustainable design raised by these and other compelling questions.

A House for an Ecologist: Design Competition Winners

A House for an Ecologist: Design Ideas Competition—Results and Jury Comments
Review the winners and  jury comments for this design competition offered in conjunction with The Architecture of Sustainability conference this past May on on the grounds of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center, in Shepherdstown, W.Va. For a quick link to the winners, click here. Visit Metropolis magazine to read Susan Szenasy's article about her experience as a juror for the competition.


Walking The Talk
What Sustainability means to architects spans a broad arc, from day-to-day practice issues to their own offices and how they live their lives. For architects to be credible in the eyes of their clients and the public as the authoritative voice on sustainability, we have to be running our practices with sustainability issues in mind. But what does that mean?

This issue of COTEnotes offers three resources on this topic, articles from—

AIA Handbook—Greening Your Practice
BuildingGreen—Greening Your Firm: Building Sustainable Design Capabilities
Green Roundtable—Greening Your Design Firm in 10 Easy Steps

In future issues, COTEnotes will provide lessons learned from firms who have been greening their practices and facilities. If you have lessons to share from your firm, please contact us: kira.gould@gouldevans.com.


Biophilia in Practice: Buildings that Connect People with Nature
This article, reprinted with permission from Environmental Building News July 2006 at BuildingGreen.com, takes a look at biophilia—literally a love for nature—and how this concept can inform building design. Applicable to all buildings where people live, work, or learn, biophilia is referred to by symposium organizer Stephen Kellert, PhD, of Yale University, as “the missing link in sustainable design.” While many of the leading examples of green design incorporate aspects of biophilic design, many, unfortunately, do not—something that we should remedy as we move forward in the green building movement. This article addresses both the underpinnings of this design philosophy and specific strategies for “bringing buildings to life.”

Guest Column
We invited Hal Levin, an expert in sustainable building research, to write a guest column for this issue of COTEnotes. Levin was a member of COTE’s founding steering committee and active participant in COTE from 1990–1995, serving as a key reviewer of the Environmental Resource Guide.

Defining Environmentally Sustainable Building Budgets
By Hal Levin
Determining whether a building is sustainable requires a benchmark based on scientific knowledge of the earth’s carrying capacity. Environmental budgets or targets can be used to evaluate or compare building designs or performance. We propose a method for deriving targets based on global population projections through the year 2100 to allocate resource consumption and pollution emission budgets equally to all the earth’s inhabitants.

Navigating the Green Blogosphere
By Jared Silliker
Ideas about sustainability, green architecture, and healthy buildings are all around us. Here to explain, interpret, and connect these ever-evolving concepts for a variety of audiences are blogs. I set out to compile a few favorite sites and am still finding new blogs as I finish this review. This is certainly not an exhaustive list. But you can visit these sites to peruse a wide array of topics from talented writers.

News

Seen & Heard @Convention 2006 in Los Angeles

Peter Bohlin, FAIA: “Sustainability is life and death. Dealing with these issues makes design richer. This is not a matter of responsibility. It is a great pleasure.”

Randy Croxton, AIA: “There is no greater issue for our generation.” 

Click here for more news from, and quotes overheard during, the AIA National Convention in June.

Forest Certification and FSC
By Terry Campbell
Currently, there are more than 90 certification systems globally. In a world that is increasingly asking for more accountability, and witnessing environmental degradation at the hands of natural resource-based industries, a transparent multi-stakeholder certification process can provide assurances for protection. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is the only worldwide independent, nonprofit organization that promotes the responsible management of working forests through the development of standards, a certification system, and trademark recognition.


Mayors Adopt AIA Position on Sustainability: Call for Reduction in Fossil Fuel Use in Buildings
This is a reprint of an article that appeared in AIArchitect.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors voted unanimously to approve a resolution prompted by an AIA position statement that calls for the immediate energy reduction of all new and renovated buildings to half the national average for that building type, with increased reductions of 10 percent every five years so that all buildings designed by the year 2030 will be carbon neutral-meaning that they will use no fossil fuel energy.

IRS Issues Advance Guidance on Commercial Building Tax Deduction
NEWS from Government Advocacy at AIA
Reprinted with Permission
On June 2, 2006, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released a proposed guidance document on how commercial building owners or leaseholders can qualify for the tax deduction for making their buildings energy efficient. The proposed guidance establishes a process to certify the required energy savings to claim the deduction.

Book Reviews
The books our reviewers offer for this issue of COTEnotes are—

The HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design, Second Edition

Toward a New Regionalism: Environmental Architecture in the Pacific Northwest Smart Materials and Technologies

Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect

The Carbon War: Global Warming and the End of the Oil Era

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution




News and Notes From COTE, AIA, And Collaborators
Click here for the latest on upcoming competitions, conferences, and news items of note.

Resources

Check out the green calendar at Environmental Building News
EBN is published by BuildingGreen, an AIA partner, and AIA members get a discount on subscriptions.

What if the world cared as much about sustainability as soccer? Read the viewpoint of John Elkington and Mark Lee.

Green Building 101 Series by Inhabitat

Two looks at “portable light.” 

An interview with smart-growth expert and author Anthony Flint

Great resources from ADPSR Northern California

Design Intelligence on teaching and archiving design knowledge 

A blast from the past: Check out the text of the UIA (Union Internationale des Architects)/AIA (American Institute of Architects) Declaration of Interdependence for a Sustainable Future,”created at the World Congress of Architects, June 1993. The Congress was attended by more than 10,000 design professionals from around the world; its the theme was Architecture at the Crossroads: Designing for a Sustainable Future

The New Buildings Institute’s Getting to Fifty program

The International Energy Agency has released two documents, a four-page Renewable Energy for Dummies and a 106-page report: Renewable Energy Technology Deployment: Barriers, Challenges & Opportunities

Architects and other sustainability thinkers met last spring to talk about how to change mental models that have created our unsustainable world

Join the Conversation
Join the COTE Forum list-serve, an open discussion about sustainable design issues that matter to architects and their allied professionals. Send an email to lyris@lyris.aia.org and and type “subscribe coteforum” in the subject line. You will receive an auto-reply asking you to respond to confirm; you must confirm to join. Your confirmation email will have instructions on how to adjust their preferences and more.