Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Greenbuild”
Editorial, “This was a great session to illustrate what can be done with an existing museum. It shows how the Grand Rapids Art Museum reduced their Energy Utilization Index (EUI) 30% from 170 to 119. They are doing it by upgrading the air handling system and better controls. The project we are donating our time to help in Cincinnati is …
Our editorial, “These large cities are committed to carbon neutrality by 2050. It might be too late to save many species on earth but better sooner than later. The municipal buildings lead the way, larger private building are targeted next and finally smaller private buildings. Non-compliance fees will fund resources offered to achieve improvements like PACE does. Policy making is a difficult …
Our editorial, ” This session helped us think about what we could do for the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Cincinnati. It’s a 86,500 sf building designed by Zaha Hadid in 2003 and constructed in 2006. About the only things we can do to improve the energy efficiency is to air seal the building as much as possible and also …
Our editorial review, “This presentation reviewed the typical efforts to save energy in commercial buildings. The Contemporary Arts Center we are volunteering to help with, doesn’t fit into a landlord and building resale life cycle. We did learn about the incentives California utilities provide, we’ll be reviewing these with Duke Energy. There were some pilot programs that the CAC may …
Our review of the session, Steven Guttmann gave us the idea to use the city of Cincinnati’s sanitary sewer system to recover heating and cooling for the district system. You can meet 95% of the city’s heating and cooling by heat recovery. Asim Tahir with Google gave us the idea to store hot and cold water to use 6 months from …
Our editorial review, “This session had some very good solutions to eliminating fossil gas from a 100,000 sf building. At the Contemporary Arts Center project of 86,500 sf, we can’t build the building differently but there are a lot of mechanical solutions for the Midwest’s cold weather and four season conditions. We’ll be following up with John Andary and thank …
As the green building movement has matured, and an awareness of the urgent problems at hand – climate crisis, material toxicity, resource depletion, systemic racism, and now pandemic – has expanded, the list of sustainability attributes that clients are requesting has grown to seemingly unmanageable lengths. How can the green building community prioritize, balance, and consolidate market demands for meaningful …
Greenbuild 2020 session review: We’re glad clients are now asking if their carbon footprint will be lower if they don’t tear down the old building but renovate it. In early 2019, Gensler San Diego began working closely with Interface in combination with the materialsCAN effort to develop an embodied carbon case study. This initiative focused on reducing embodied carbon on …
Our editorial: Air sealing is a major way to improve the HVAC performance for existing buildings. Just a minor adjustment can have huge effects. We’ll be looking at ways we can improve the air sealing of the Contemporary Arts Center’s glass and concrete construction. From the session outline: “Since the 1990s, residential buildings have shown dramatic and consistent improvement in …
Our editorial: The journey to zero carbon will be an awaking to design aesthetics lost in history. The future will be like it was before coal and oil. These cheap fossilized carbon materials have crept into our lives in ways it’s hard to get your head around. In the future you will look at how what you own is recyclable …
