Letter from the Chair

AIA/COTE Chair Kira Gould describes current and upcoming COTE activities and offers thoughts about collaboration, communication, and transformations ahead.
> Read the full article

News

DEADLINE EXTENDED! Calling Great Green Projects: Top Ten 2007 Submission Site Open Until January 31, 2007.

Biomimcry in the Bay Area: January 30 & 31, 2007
AIA/COTE is bringing the Biomimicry Guild to San Francisco for a lecture and workshop on Biomimicry for a Sustainable Built Environment; register here. 

AIA Grassroots Preview
Congressional issue briefs for the 2007 Grassroots Conference are available. Priority issues are: 1) Federal Building Energy Efficiency, promoting adoption of the 2030 Challenge in federal buildings; 2) Sustainable Design and Water Quality, promoting a Clean Water Act amendment to develop green infrastructure to reduce pollutants; and 3) Tax Deductions for Energy Efficient Commercial Buildings, promoting a tax break for green buildings.

The Building Sector Unites
AIA, USGBC, ASHRAE, and Architecture 2030 agree on benchmarks and targets … and that broad collaboration will be required. >Read the full article


The EPA ENERGY STAR® Challenge
Great project on the boards? An invitation for architects to submit projects that are in design now and have strong energy performance targets. > Read the full article

Sustainability Leadership Awards
AIA/COTE is a cosponsor of CoreNet Global’s Sustainability Leadership Awards for completed projects, policy, process, education, and mentoring.

Design Competition: The Lifecycle Building Challenge
EPA, AIA, the Building Material Reuse Association, and West Coast Green are partners in this competition celebrating lifecycle building principles. Check out the details here.

Features

 

The Clients Behind the Top Ten 2006 Winners
AIA/COTE asked some of the clients and owners behind recent Top Ten winners to tell us what drove their commitment and why measuring success—and assessing failure—is important.
> Read the full article



The Animal Foundation, Las Vegas


Design for Disassembly in the Built Environment
By Brad Guy and Nicholas Ciarimboli
AIA/COTE is proud to feature this new guide to closed-loop design and building, which was prepared for the City of Seattle, King County Green Tools, and Resource Venture, by Penn State University’s Hamer Center for Community Design. Design for disassembly (DfD) in the built environment is gaining support in the architecture community as a means to create robust buildings that can be more easily repaired, adapted, and eventually deconstructed—or in fact avoid removal by avoiding obsolescence. This guide is intended for architects, designers, builders, and owners and includes design principles, processes, products, and case studies that can help facilitate DfD in the built environment for environmental and economic benefits. (Also available at the King County Green Tools Web site.) > Read the full article 

Architecture’s MPG: The Btu
The British thermal unit, or Btu, is a standard measure used to refer to energy use in buildings. But what does it really mean? COTE asked its EPA ENERGY STAR® partners to help demystify this measure. > Read the full article

Sustainability and Health
An academic paper presented at the Healthy Buildings Conference in Lisbon by authors Vivian Loftness, FAIA; Volker Hartkopf, PhD; and Lam Khee Poh, PhD, with PhD students: Megan Snyder, Ying Hua, Yun Gu, Joonho Choi, Xiaodi Yang, of the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Building Performance. Reprinted with permission. > Read the full article

Reviews

Book Review: Design Like You Give a Damn
By Architecture for Humanity (Metropolis Books, 2006)
Reviewed by Lance Hosey
> Read the full article 


Resource Review: Green Guide for Health Care™
Adele Houghton, project manager for the Green Guide for Health Care, provides an overview of the Guide; Kevin Hall offers the practitioner’s perspective. > Read the full article

Book Review: Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace
By Vandana Shiva (South End Press, 2005)
Reviewed by Eric Delss
> Read the full article

Columns

Walking the Talk at Work: A Seattle Firm Tries Green Tags
The Miller|Hull Partnership reports on their use of “green tags” as a path to offsetting its greenhouse gas emissions to the tune of 1,005 over three years. A look at how they are doing it.
> Read the full article

COTE Around the Country
We catch up with the COTE activities from Greenbuild in Denver, and get a report from the AIA Washington DC COTE.
> Read the full article



Kids Go Green with AIA-DC and COTEdc 
   at the National Building Museum


Preservation & Sustainability 
By Kim Del Rance
A report from the National Summit on the Greening of Historic Properties hosted by the Green Building Alliance in Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
> Read the full article

Knowledge Community Exchange: Design/Build
By Kira Gould
What does a green design-build project look like? In Johnson County, Kans., it looks like a good investment of public funds.
> Read the full article
                                                                                                                                                                            
The Emerging Green Builders
By Joseph Snider
What does it mean to be a green architect? The chair of the USGBC’s Emerging Green Builders group offers a glimpse of the lens through which some emerging professionals are thinking about their lives and careers.
> Read the full article

The SEED Network: A Mission of Inclusion
By Laura Kreeger Niel
This group seeks to elevate voices; build structures for inclusion; and promote social equality, diversity, and discourse.
> Read the full article

Walking the Talk at Home: A Green House in Washington, DC
By Rick Schneider
An architect and COTE member brings green design home. We asked our friends at the American Solar Energy Society about “walking the talk” at home, and found resources in the pages of Solar Today; check out articles about passive solar and green mortgages.

Students Pushing Sustainability on Campus
By Emilie Brill-Duisberg
The winner of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education Student Leadership Award describes her group’s efforts to make an Arizona campus greener.
> Read the full article

Resources/Links

Check out the green calendar at Environmental Building News, published by BuildingGreen, an AIA partner. AIA members get a discount on subscriptions to this valuable resource.

Check out this Building Design & Construction article on postoccupancy evaluation by past AIA/COTE chair Sandy Mendler, AIA, of HOK.

Here’s Metropolis on BNIM Architects, that includes tales of AIA/COTE’s founding and long, close relationship with the USGBC.

Need some tips on selling the benefits of green to clients? Check out this article from Environmental Building News.

From GreenSource, BuildingGreen’s Alex Wilson talks with educator and author David Orr about what’s missing from architecture education (and education in general), and why there’s reason for hope.

What’s affordable? Business Week recently released a list of affordable suburbs. But Chicago’s Center for Neighborhood Technology shows that a comprehensive measure is needed to assess real costs; check out its Housing & Transportation Affordability Index.

Metropolis reports on a project under way in New York; the Public Information Exchange is an effort to funnel community and professional feedback into a roadmap for the city’s evolution. 

Eighteen papers picked up this McClatchy wire service article, suggesting that when retailers are talking green, there’s a revolution under way.

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