I was honored to attend the Sustainable Cities Design Academy this past Monday to Wednesday at the American Architecture Foundation. With sponsorship from UTC, the AAF brought 12 sustainability, design and development practitioners from around the country to apply their knowledge to four city scale projects in various stages of development. Each project had four representative on hand who worked with a resource team on their respective projects. The resource members and project teams each gave a Pecha Kucha style presentation about themselves and their work and then we broke off for a day and a half of brainstorming and on the spot design. Aside from being a great way to advance challenging projects, this was an exciting and educational opportunity for all attendees to meet and learn about others advancing the field of sustainable building.

I was assigned to a fascinating adaptive reuse project from Minneapolis with a great team headed by David Frank of Schafer Richardson Inc. and a fantastic fellow resource member, Phil Esocoff FAIA of Esocoff and Associates. The site we worked on is a former grain mill located 5 minutes from downtown Minneapolis. It has an existing water tunnel in the basement formerly used to provide the mill with mechanical power. A few quick calculations revealed it could produce 20-40% of the sites total power. The team spent a lot of time discussing possible ways to reuse about 25 100′ tall, 25′ dia, circular concrete grain elevators. Possibilities included everything from adaptive reuse apartments to water storage and stack effect conditioners.

What do you think? How can they be reused? Should they be saved or are they an imposing barrier to community integration? More about the mills can be found here, and the white grain elevators can be seen here.

Sidwell Friends School. Image from Natural Systems International.

A little noted fact about Sidwell Friends, the Obama family’s choice of school for Malia and Sasha: It’s amazingly green! Designed by Kieran Timberlake Associates, this LEED Platinum middle school is part of the Sidwell Friends School campus. Among the school’s many green features:

• Local materials - 78% sourced within 500 miles to reduce transport costs
• Water efficient landscaping - local vegetation reduces need for irrigation, and allows reestablishment of native ecological pathways
• Recycled Materials - 11% + Forest Stewardship Council certified wood
• Passive solar design - 60% energy reduction + solar panels for electricity generation
• Green roof and natural ventilation - for health, energy, stormwater, and ecological benefits
• And best of all, a constructed wetland that treats 100% of the school’s wastewater before returning it to the school for toilet flushing.

This is a boon for those of us seeking to sell our clients on features such as constructed wetlands, solar power etc. If they are good enough and safe enough for our first daughters, they are good enough for any facility.

Of course, once one starts to look at the many studies done on green schools and realizes the many benefits (increased test scores, decreased class disruption, increased teacher productivity, decreased infrastructure cost, etc. etc.), one starts to wonder why one WOULDN’T build this way. To build a school that isn’t green and deprive the next 25 to 50 years of kids that will be taught in the building’s lifetime these many benefits is borderline negligent.

That the Obama’s have chosen to have their daughters educated in these cutting edge green facilities has largely stayed under the radar (I only just realized myself). While the green features of the school were probably not their deciding factor, it certainly conveys a trust in the systems and a recognition of their many benefits.

You can take a tour of the school at http://www.sidwell.edu/green_tour and monitor the infrastructure systems at http://buildingdashboard.com/clients/sidwell.

Sherwood Design Engineers recently attended the launch of the Business Council on Climate Change in San Francisco. Held at the South Light Court in City Hall, this event featured Mayor Gavin Newsom; Jared Blumenfeld, Director of the SF DOE; Jim Wunderman, President and CEO of the Bay Area Council; RK Stewart FAIA, Principal at Gensler; Gavin Power, Senior Advisor at the UN Global Compact.

The event was to announce the partnership of the City of San Francisco with the Bay Area Council of businesses with the United Nations Global Compact to commit the city and its businesses to Five Principles of Climate Leadership.

The five principals are as follows:

1. Internal Implementation

2. Community Leaders

3. Advocacy and Dialogue

4. Collective Action

5. Transparency and Disclosure
The BC3 is seeking more Bay Area Businesses to sign on and support these initiatives. SDE will step up and do so. In later postings we’ll go into more detail about these principals and our company’s response. For now, if you are interested in more information, check out this link to learn more about the principals.

Posted by: Mike T.