Natural Swimming Pools: The Sustainable Pond
Natural swimming pools (NSPs) are a way to blend the sustainability and natural beauty of a pond with the functionality of a swimming pool. NSPs use biological filtration in lieu of the more common chemical or chlorine water cleaning systems used in most artificial swimming pools. The pools generally consist of a swimming area and [...]
Alkemi Recycled Surface Material: Sustainable to the recycled core
Alkemi is a recycled aluminum solid surfacing material made right here in Baltimore (Maryland). The product is composite of a polyester-based medium and post-industrial scrap waste soft-alloy aluminum flake fillers for texture. Recycled content is 35% by weight or 60% by volume as certified by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS). In addition, Alkemi’s manufacturer, Renewed Materials [...]
Life Cycle Assessment: Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES 4.0)
The Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES 4.0) software is a free Life Cycle Assessment tool developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with the aim of empowering designers with a ‘robust’, user-friendly tool for making informed material decisions. Analysis is broken into two general categories, economic and environmental, which can [...]
Radiant Heating: GCS Modular Radiant Flooring Panels
GCS Radiant Flooring is a modular, hydronic radiant floor system which is designed for easy installation, simplified maintenance and energy efficiency. Like most energy efficient radiant floor systems, GCS panels heat space using a network of plastic tubes circulating preheated water (or a glycol/water solution). Think of this system as a grid of pre-milled slots [...]
Ivanhoe Reservoir: Solving a problem / Illustrating another
Problem
Ivanhoe Reservoir (Los Angeles, California) has a problem. Bright sunlight, chlorine and natural bromides combined together to form the carcinogen bromate and now Ivanhoe Reservoir is contaminated. The only way to effectively remove the chemical is to drain the entire body of water and clean the bottom surface to remove all the bromate. In the [...]
Kelvin’s Conjecture: The Sustainability of Optimization and Integration
”to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible“ -Definition ‘Optimize’
The National Aquatic Center in Beijing achieves sustainability through the optimization and integration of its structure, envelope, and building systems. In doing so it tells the story of how a little known problem of theoretical physics, Kelvin’s Conjecture, influenced the design of a prominent international [...]
Sustainability at the Museum of Art
Recently I was asked to do a presentation on ‘Sustainability’ as it relates to a Museum of Art. The presentation was geared to the museum facility board and included the definition of sustainability, sustainable decision making, unique considerations special to museums, case studies and a conclusion about sustainable metrics and LEED. My co presenter, Mike [...]
BLDGBLOG Comes to Baltimore
This week Geoff Manaugh, creator of BLDGBLOG among other things, lectured here in Baltimore. He was invited to speak through the AIA’s Michael F. Trostel Lecture sponsored by Preservation Maryland. The lecture was generally angled to cover historic preservation, but to my delight, Manaugh managed to move the discussion well outside the traditional boundaries [...]
Sustainable Museum: Provincetown Art Association and Museum
Downtown Provincetown, Massachusetts, has a new sustainable art center designed to promote the health of its occupants, art collection and the indoor and exterior environment. The 19,500 sf expansion of the existing Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) building “created new galleries, new storage areas, and an expanded museum school” and accomplished these programmatic goals [...]
World’s First LEED Museum Complex: Grand Rapids Art Museum
The Grand Rapids Art Museum (GRAM) has just completed a $60 million expansion of its facility which makes it the world’s first LEED certified art museum complex. The 125,000 sf facility is three times larger than it was previously and now includes 18,000 sf of exhibition, an auditorium, a children’s education center, art studios, study [...]
Big Dig House
(above) Unused material from the Boston Big Dig
What does 600,000 lbs of recycled materials look like? Pretty good actually.
The Big Dig House by Single Speed Design (SSD) is built with unused or recycled materials from the Boston Big Dig project. All in all, a total of 600,000 lbs of steel, concrete forms, roadway sections, and [...]
What is Energy Recovery Ventilation? And why should I care?
Energy Recovery Ventilation (ERV) refers to the recapture of energy typically lost through the building ventilation process. Conditioned air that is routinely being exhausted from both residential and commercial buildings contains significant energy in the form of heat or coolth and humidity which is lost into the exterior environment. As part of a preconditioning process, [...]
Oventrop Solar Systems
Oventrop Solar Systems is a complete line of solar collectors, solar controls, radiant floor systems, and solar hot water storage tanks. The main components of the Oventrop Solar System are the evacuated glass tube collectors, The collector tubes have aluminum absorbers mounted in either 8 or 16 evacuated glass tubes. The absorber, coated with [...]
Danish Smart House Eco (Prefab) by Valbaek Brorup Architects
All photos by Mikkel Strange
The Danish Smart House Eco is an environmentally friendly housing system which can be optimized in a number of ways to meet the space needs of both individuals and families. Creators Eva Kristine Borup and Stefan Valbaek of Valbaek Borup Architects, designed the system to be flexible to the needs of [...]
The San Francisco Federal Building: A High Performance Sustainable Workplace?
The U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco is one of the General Services Administration’s (GSAs) most visible attempts at designing a high performance government building. The project is one of many started following the 1993 adoption of the “Design Excellence Program,” in which the federal government sought to “reach into the private sector to find [...]
Zollverein School Building: Active Thermal Insulation
30°C Coal Mine Water + Radiant Exterior Wall System + Structure = Active Thermal Insulation
The Zollverein School of Business Management and Design building is a model project for systems integration. It uses a sophisticated Active Thermal Insulation system consisting of preheated water circulating through the facade which allows for thin exterior structural walls perforated [...]
Smith House: A Passive House in Illinois
The Smith House, located in Urbana Illinois, is an all electric house built to the German Passive House Building Standard. To achieve the passive standard, architect and owner, Katrin Klingenberg, created a clean, efficient and comfortable house design using many of the passive house design strategies used in German model buildings. She describes the house [...]
Waldsee BioHaus: First Certified Passive House in the U.S.
In 2006, the Waldsee BioHaus became the first building in the United States to be certified with the German Passive House Building Standard. The house, built at the German Concordia Language Village of Waldsee in Bemidji Minnesota, uses about 85% less energy than a house designed to meet the Minnesota Energy Code. For that reason, [...]
The Passive House (Passiv Haus) Building Standard
(above) The original Passive Houses in Darmstadt
The Passive House (Passiv Haus) standard is an ultra-low energy building design system which uses extremely efficient building envelopes to significantly drive down energy consumption in structures. The standard is completely voluntary but does have an extremely rigorous set of requirements that must be met in order to be [...]
Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center
This story naturally falls into a category of posts Greenline has been exploring over the past few days focusing loosely on adaptive reuse and preservation. For more on this topic please take a look at recent posts: The Green vs Preservation Debate, Historic Preservation in Raleigh Hits LEED Platinum, The Greening of Montgomery Park, and [...]
The Green vs Preservation Debate: Round One
A recent article in Preservation Online by Wayne Curtis debates the complimentary yet combative relationship of environmental and preservation movements in architecture. The author is writing for Preservation Online so his argument is framed from the perspective of a preservationist, but does present equal and valid points from both sides of the spectrum. The article [...]
Historic Renovation in Raleigh Hits LEED Platinum
ZigerSnead has a 25 year history of making some of the Baltimore region’s finest architecture. That also means that many talented people have come through the office at one point or another. All in all we are fortunate to work with some of the most creative, intelligent and dedicated designers to be found anywhere.
It is [...]
Solarsiedlung by Rolf Disch
“Maximizing the use of solar energy and minimizing heat loss” – Rolf Disch
The Solarsiedlung or “solar village” is Europe’s most modern solar housing project. Solarsiedlung is the housing portion of a larger development which also includes an office/housing block called Sonnenschiff (solarship). The project’s goals are to follow both the German Passive House and Plus [...]
Dongtan Eco-city
Dongtan, a entirely new city being developed by the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC), is designed to be the first eco-city, sustainable environmentally, socially, economically and culturally.
The goal as stated by engineering and planning firm ARUP is to “create a development with low energy consumption that is as close to carbon neutral as possible.”
The island [...]
