Orca house was a top finisher in a design compeition for Aleutian natives, thanks in part to cultural research.
Rendering: David Munford

This is the story of a design competition, the goal of which was to design an affordable, replicable, sustainable and inspiring home for a family in Atka, an island in the Aleutian Islands chain in Alaska. Competitor teams were to make the house compliant with the Living Building Challenge.

Why we chose cork exterior insulation for our net-zero-energy house

Installing cork insulation on our farmhouse. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

Among the innovative—some might say weird—products we’re trying out at our Dummerston, Vermont farmhouse, none is more unusual than the expanded cork insulation we’re currently installing as a layer of exterior rigid insulation. As I mentioned in a blog last summer, cork insulation has a great story behind it.

Cork? You’ve got to be kidding!

I first learned about expanded cork insulation years ago when exploring the attic of a 1920s-era home in Brattleboro. I found a rigid boardstock insulation comprised of cork with plaster on one side. It was made by Armstrong, which was then a company making cork products but is today one of the world’s leading manufacturers of flooring and ceiling products.

It turns out that the product was invented by accident in 1893 in New York City by a boat builder, John T. Smith. The cork granules he used to fill life preservers became clogged in a large tin funnel, and that slipped into the coals of a fire used to steam oak staves. When the owner of the shop discovered the tin funnel the next morning he expected the cork to be burned up, but instead it had expanded to fill the form and solidified into a solid block.

With the HPD now available as a recognized format, design professionals have started to request its use by manufacturers.

[Editor's Note: This guest post comes to us courtesy of Russell Perry, FAIA, managing director of SmithGroupJJR's Washington, D.C., office.]

The global movement towards transparency gains steady momentum. In the design and construction world, the 2012 Greenbuild conference saw the launch of the Health Product Declaration (HPD) format, the launch of the eagerly awaited Declare format, and USGBC CEO Rick Fedrizzi’s spirited defense of practitioners’ need to know what chemical exposure comes with material choices.

Despite waiting till the last minute to study, I got a really good score and became a LEED Green Associate. Here’s where I spill all my secrets!

Let’s get one thing straight: I don’t usually procrastinate.

But when I read that being a LEED Green Associate (or, if you must, LEED Green Assoc.—but never LEED GA!) involved “basic” green building knowledge, I figured I had things pretty well under control. I started studying six days before the test.

Oops

There’s a second thing that everyone should get straight on: the exam goes far beyond the basics. It assumes extensive knowledge of the LEED building design and construction (BD+C) rating systems, and the only way to pass the test is to read, master, and in some cases memorize key parts of the LEED 2009 BD+C Reference Guide.

Owning the BD+C Reference Guide is not optional. Yes, it’s expensive, but it’s cheaper than re-taking the test, and you’ll need it later when you start working on projects anyway.

Building complex window surrounds for a deep-energy retrofit

Insulated, splayed window surrounds that will frame the exterior wall insulation. The Pro Clima housewrap on the window surrounds will be taped to the wall housewrap after insulating. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Alex Wilson

A few weeks ago I reported on the amazing, high-tech Alpen, R-12 (center-of-glass) windows that we installed on the north and west facades of our farmhouse in Dummerston, Vermont. At that time I promised to report on the other windows we were installing on the south and east facades (windows 2.0 if you will).

First some context:

With our new home, we are creating a demonstration with dozens of cutting-edge energy-saving and green building features and products that one can include in a new or existing home. As someone who has written about such products for several decades now, this is a lot of fun—though the decision-making often remains a challenge, since there are so many great products and materials to select from.

Read the article, take the quiz, and sit back while your CEUs get automatically reported to AIA, GBCI, BPI, and NARI.

BuildingGreen is now directly reporting continuing education (CE) hours completed through our website to the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) for LEED Accredited Professionals and LEED Green Associates who use our course catalog to maintain their credentials.

When completing CE hours on BuildingGreen.com, you can rest assured that your hours will be automatically reported with no further action on your part. BuildingGreen has long offered this convenience for AIA members and continues to do so. Reporting to GBCI took effect January 1, 2013.

To take advantage of this, you should double-check your account profile, however.

Check that your BuildingGreen account information enables automated reporting to AIA, GBCI, and more.

A definitive guide to how the federal government builds green—and why its leadership matters.

This post is the second in a series on the federal government’s use of green building certifications. Coming soon: The Hidden Beltway Lobbyists Who Shape Green Building Policy.

 The U.S. Treasury Building, completed in 1869, is the oldest building to achieve the Gold level of LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations & Maintenance. Federal green building policies have a strong emphasis on the measured performance of existing buildings.
Photo Credit: Library of Congress,
LC-DIG-ppmsca-07312.

Anyone who has ever filed an income tax return knows how extravagantly fussy the U.S. federal government can seem. Your yearly struggles over tax deductions pale in comparison, though, with the workaday world of a federal civil servant.

Take green building requirements: there are a lot of them. Even if you’re not a government employee, you need to have a passing understanding of these requirements.

That’s because the future of LEED in the federal government is at a turning point, and forthcoming decisions could affect the future of LEED in the private sector—where many corporations are already trying to find ways to build green without seeking a plaque. Do you know your EISA from a hole in the ground? If not, you’ve come to the right place!

Bruce Brownell's impressive track record with foam-insulated low-energy homes

Bruce Brownell has been building low-energy passive solar homes for four decades.
Photo Credit: Adirondack Alternate Energy

Bruce Brownell, of Adirondack Alternate Energy, has been creating low-energy, largely passive-solar-heated, resilient homes in the Northeast for forty years—and he’s still going strong. Since 1973, Bruce has built more than 375 homes in 15 states, a third of them in very cold (over 8,500-degree-day) climates. Most require just a few hundred dollars of heat per year.

Bruce told me that he’s done enough monitoring to know that even in very cold climates his houses will never drop below 47°F if the power and supplemental heat is shut off. The fact that these houses will never freeze makes them popular as vacation homes; they can be left closed up with no heat all winter without worry.

I’m surprised that Bruce isn’t better known. While a few of us hold him up on a pedestal as one of our leading low-energy pioneers, most of today’s low-energy designers and builders have never heard of him. I’ve pondered why that’s the case, and I think it must be that Bruce just rubs some people the wrong way.

As DoD rethinks its green building needs, a recommendation to keep using LEED is just the tip of the iceberg.

This post is the first in a series on the federal government’s use of green building certifications. Part 2: Sustainable Federal Buildings: What's the Law?

This shows the first few megabytes of the Unified Facilities Criteria documents found on the Whole Building Design Guide. The list goes on...but the standard still includes LEED, for now.
Photo Credit: WBDG, screen capture

Special-interest groups have been fighting the LEED rating systems on multiple fronts ever since LEED got a foothold in government policymaking. These groups (primarily chemical manufacturers and timber interests) are making headway.

LEED still matters, for now

Despite these pressures, along with LEED’s weakness as a policymaking tool (like all voluntary rating systems, it really doesn’t work as a mandate unless the government is explicit about credits and energy performance targets that must be achieved), a recent report recommended that the Department of Defense should continue with its current certification policy: LEED Silver or equivalent.

DoD’s updated Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC), hot off the press, has stood by that recommendation for new construction:

In accordance with OUSD AT&L Memorandum, “Department of Defense Sustainable Buildings Policy”, DoD Components will design and build all new construction and major renovations projects: 1) in compliance with the Guiding Principles, 2) third-party certified to the US Green Building Council (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver level (or approved equivalent rating), and 3) achieve no fewer than 40% of the certification points related to energy and water conservation. In addition, all repair and renovations projects must conform to the Guiding Principles where they apply. [emphasis added]

How important is it for the military to keep using LEED? For the sake of public perception, it’s extremely important: if DoD thinks LEED is the best way to ensure green building design and construction quality, then a lot of other people will too.

On the other hand, LEED does not—and was never meant to—meet all of the military’s building needs. They’ve got a lot of other things going on, from carbon requirements to energy performance reporting to enhanced security needs, and their UFC documents are a great demonstration of the difference between building codes or standards (like the IgCC and ASHRAE 189.1—both of which USGBC helped develop) and building rating systems (like LEED).

A gradual shift in the supply-and-demand balance for natural gas and increasing shipments of LNG will bring the prices back up, while the risks of fracking continue to be debated

Gas well in the shale country of Pennsylvania. Click to enlarge.
Photo Credit: Philly Workers Voice

In many parts of the country and for many applications, natural gas is considered a panacea to our energy challenges.

Comprised mostly of methane, natural gas is clean-burning, with just a tiny fraction of the particulates, nitrous oxides, and other pollutants that are emitted from burning coal or oil. Because the ratio of hydrogen to carbon is higher with natural gas than with longer-carbon-chain fossil fuels like coal and oil, less carbon dioxide is generated when it is burned. At the point of combustion, natural gas releases about 500 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour (kWh), compared to about 900 grams for coal. That’s good news in terms of climate change.

And the dramatic upsurge in natural gas production made possible through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has cut prices dramatically over the past five years. These low prices have contributed to utility companies replacing some of the nation’s dirtiest coal-fired power plants with advanced, natural gas plants—and this has lead to rather significant reductions in our nation’s carbon dioxide emissions over the past few years.

Natural gas seems like a winner. What’s not to like about it?