Coming Soon-the Green Building Advisor

Coming Soon—the Green Building Advisor

We at

EBN have been working over the past year on an exciting new computer program that provides suggestions for improving the environmental performance of buildings, and case studies to illustrate the results. The

Green Building Advisor prompts the user for some basic information about a project, such as location, building type, and size, and then searches its database of more than 700 strategies, returning lists of strategies that are “strongly recommended” and “moderately recommended” for the project. The user can then click on any strategy in the lists to learn more about it and access related references and detailed case studies.

“Use building elements to redirect daylight and control glare,” for example, will appear as a strongly recommended strategy for a commercial office building, but not for a single-family residence. The strategy “Rebuild degraded soils” comes up as strongly recommended for brownfield sites, but not for greenfield sites.

The

Green Building Advisor is a reincarnation of a program known as the

Environmental Knowledge Base, which had a great concept but suffered from a complicated user-interface and weak content. We’ve now resolved those problems, with help from an outstanding team. The programming and interface design has been done by the Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST), a leader in user-friendly software on energy efficiency and renewables. Our partner in developing the content for the Green Building Advisor is architect Gail Lindsey, outgoing chair of the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment. A team of technical advisors also participated in creating the content.

Green Building Advisor comes on a CD-ROM that works in both Windows and Macintosh operating systems, and includes a comprehensive printed user-manual. It will be shipped in January 1999. The program retails for $179, but

EBN subscribers can order it for $129, plus $6 for shipping. Just send us an e-mail or call our order line at 800/861-0954 to reserve your copy!