Autodesk and the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) recently announced the People's Choice and Jury selections for the 2010 Student Sustainable Design Challenge.

 

Elana Willey, who attends California's San Joaquin Delta College, took home the People's Choice award for her “Ji Lekol, the Little Haitian School that Juice Built” design, and Ian Siegel, a student at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, took home the Jury award for his “Aluminum Disaster Relief Schoolhouse” design.

 

In recent years, temporary shelters for disaster-stricken and otherwise depressed communities have become a necessary focus area for the architectural profession. Temporary housing and community structures such as makeshift medical facilities have been built by numerous organizations and individuals along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, in tsunami-affected areas of Thailand, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and elsewhere during the past several years.

 

The Autodesk and AIAS design contest wanted to draw attention to these efforts by challenging design students in North America and other regions to develop sturdy, eco-friendly, single-room schools that could be easily constructed in Port-au-Prince with minimal construction experience and locally and inexpensively available materials.

 

Ms. Willey's and Mr. Siegel's school structures were selected as the most original and most cleverly designed and described entries by peers and a panel of judges, respectively. Entrants were required to abide by a number of different design criteria and use Autodesk's Revit® Architecture software and Ecotect® Analysis software when creating their design concepts.

 

On a recent visit to one of my stone and countertop suppliers, I started looking at some wonderful glass products that offer beautiful and environmentally friendly alternatives to stone. I specified Bio Glass for a kitchen and bar area countertop and adjacent family room fireplace surround in a seaside home in the color "Oriental Jade," which picked up on the aqua color of the nearby ocean.

 

The unique, translucent qualities of Bio Glass are produced by recycling hollow glass, tableware and factory shards, and the results are reminiscent of sea glass.

 

The possibilities for kitchen countertops, bathroom vanity tops, shower seats, bar tops, and even walls and partitions are very exciting. The really wonderful thing about Bio Glass is that it offers a fresh and new approach for countertops and other surfaces.

 

Another product that offers recycled glass and great possibilities is Vetrazzo, from a company named Polycor. With a great website and a story behind each product, the Vetrazzo line offers countertops and surfaces for residential and commercial use.

 

Vetrazzo uses 100% recycled glass - most of the glass used for Vetrazzo products comes from curbside recycling, and 85% of the finished product is made from the recycled glass (the other 15% being cement, additives and pigments). The product selection ranges from finely grained to "chippy".

 

My current favorite is "Charisma Blue with Patina," which is made from recycled beer, wine and soda bottles. The color descriptions for each variation are really fun to read, and are powerful reminders of how effective recycling can be.

 

Another company, Fireclay Tile, offers products with recycled content. I particularly like their "Debris" tile, which is fashioned from recycled glass bottles. The Debris series is available in more than 100 fantastic glaze colors and in several sizes, shapes, trims and decorative options. The company is also developing a countertop surface called "Bottlestone" with 80% post-consumer recycled glass content. "Bottlestone" looks like it will offer a fine-grained appearance (rather than chunks of glass) in four unique colors.

 

Yet another company, Stardust Glass, offers tile with very high recycled glass content (87-97%), using pre-consumer recycled glass that is collected and harvested within 250-500 miles of the company's manufacturing facility that's located in Portland, Oregon.

 

With a wide variety of fun colors and shapes, Stardust offers some terrific ways to use tile in kitchen and bath design, as well as solutions for fireplace surrounds, floors, tiled walls and more. Commercial applications are highly possible as well, for interesting counter/service areas, funky commercial bathroom designs, and beautiful display areas.

 

Are you familiar with the Forest Stewardship Council?

 

The FSC is a non-profit dedicated to promoting responsible management of our world’s forests by offering certification for landowners and companies that purchase or sell timber or forest products to ensure that forestry is practiced in an environmentally responsible, socially beneficial, and economically viable way.

 

Independent, FSC-accredited certification organizations carry out assessments of forestry practices to determine whether FSC standards have been met. These certifiers also verify that companies claiming to sell FSC-certified products have tracked their supply back to FSC-certified sources.

 

Architects, builders and designers who purchase or specify building materials, furnishings, or paper or other products with an FSC label such as the one shown above can be confident that the products were harvested or manufactured using environmentally sustainable practices.

 

According to a recent study by The Freedonia Group entitled Green Building Materials, U.S. demand for green building materials will exceed $80B by 2013 and FSC-certified lumber and wood panels are expected to be the fastest growing green products, with demand more than tripling between 2008 and 2013.

 

The Forest Stewardship Council maintains a list of retailers who sell FSC-certified product on this page where you can search for retailers or download an up-to-date PDF list of all retailers. Notable retailers on the list include Pottery Barn, Pier 1 Imports, Crate & Barrel, L.L. Bean, Williams Sonoma and Restoration Hardware. Buy Green! And remember, look for the FSC Seal!

 

 

I recently read a book entitled "Green Building Through Integrated Design" by Jerry Yudelson. Author of several books about green and sustainable design, Yudelson is a professional engineer who has chaired Greenbuild for six years running and who has trained 3,500 people in the LEED green building rating system since its inception.

 

While the author's writing style is a little stilted, I found the content to be quite informative. The book takes a look at where things are today and where they're headed relative to Green Building and the integrated design process.

 

Yudelson examines the business cases and costs associated with environmentally friendly and sustainable building design, architecture and construction, and then walks the reader through predesign, conceptual and schematic design considerations, as well as the development and documentation phases.

 

The author not only looks at the design process from an environmental and public health perspective, but also from a cost/benefit perspective. He gives information about critical success factors such as delivering projects on-time and within budget while managing domestic and/or international certification processes, and does so by studying over 30 LEED Platinum projects.

 

To learn more about the book or to purchase it, click here.

Ever read Contract Magazine online? You can read past issues two different ways. It's pretty neat, actually.

 

I subscribe to their newsletter, so when I click on one of their article links from a past issue, I'm brought to a virtual article viewing page which gives me a nifty way for me to read the article, almost as if I'm reading the actual magazine. I can flip through the pages, zoom in or out to change the font size and perform searches for specific keywords or keyphrases. There's even a little virtual crease down the middle of the page. The technology is provided by nxtbook.com.

 

Virtual Magazine Viewer - Flip through Contract Magazine articles online

 

 

If you don't have a fairly good-sized LCD display, you're probably not going to enjoy the experience as much as you would otherwise. But you can also read the same article on the Contract Magazine website. It's just not quite as fun!

 

There are a couple of important notes if you intend to use the virtual viewing pages:

The particular "Pure Platinum" article featured above is about the Audubon Society's newly-completed LEED-certified New York headquarters building. All materials selected for the project were sustainable at some level. Definitely a worthwhile read.. Enjoy!

 

With spring approaching, home and business owners often begin to contemplate restoration and renovation ideas for their homes and work spaces. Paint, of course, is a great way to quickly and economically achieve a sense of renewal. Environmentally friendly paints are becoming the standard rather than the exception, both as the result of recent state and federal regulatory changes and because of consumer demand.

 

Paints generally contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are organic compounds that are unstable. These compounds are off-gassed (gradually dispersed) into the air as paint dries, which means that fairly hazardous chemicals are typically dispersed into our indoor and outdoor environments.

 

Most paint manufacturers now feature less toxic "Low VOC" or "No VOC" paints, with their designation determined by the amount of VOCs per liter of paint. Unless paints are designated "natural" and contain only natural, raw ingredients, they will still contain chemical colorants, and possibly fungicides, biocides, or very low levels of heavy metals or formaldehyde. Note that "No VOC" (sometimes referred to as "Zero VOC") paints may still contain up to 5 grams of VOCs per liter of paint.

 

Natural paints have come a long way, and are rewarding to use from both an environmental and a color selection standpoint. The Real Milk Paint Company, for example, offers a very wide array of color possibilities.

 

For a great guide on natural, Low VOC and No VOC paints, check out EarthEasy.com's page about non-toxic paints.

 

And here's a New York Times article by Stephen Treffinger where the author tested 10 different brands of various vendors' self-proclaimed environmentally friendly indoor paints.

 

 

 

I came across the Genuine Stone website recently, a very nicely done website indeed - one that's owned by the Natural Stone Council, a collaboration between various business and trade associations that wish to promote natural stone for commercial and residential design and construction.

 

On its website, the council bills natural stone as an earth-friendly alternative to competing materials. But as with most everything when it comes to environmental sustainability, there are pros and cons to using natural stone products.

 

Let me first say that I absolutely LOVE granite and other natural stone surfaces!

 

While I marvel at the wonderful variety of options offered by all of the different types of natural stone and am amazed and inspired by the beauty of travertines and limestone, river bed granites, fossilized stone, and other natural stone products, I'm also greatly concerned about the environmental and local impact of granite mining around the world.

 

Once stone is in place, it's durability and permanent beauty is very evident. Just think of all of the enduring monuments and buildings throughout the world that are made of stone. With regard to permanence, stone is very sustainable. However, while the mining industry has made improvements in recent years, the mining and transportation of stone is generally not very environmentally friendly at all.

 

Issues include heavy water consumption, what happens to the mining site once the natural resources have been extracted from it, radon and other gaseous byproducts, and the use of heavy equipment for mining, processing and transportation.

 

One way to minimize the impact upon the environment when using natural stone is to use locally mined products. Not only does doing so minimize the impacts associated with transportation of the materials, but it also helps the local economy.

 

Another is to purchase products that come from mines where environmentally friendly practices are used. For example, refer to this Green Building Matters blog page for an interesting and thoughtful discussion regarding the Cold Spring Granite mine in Minnesota and some of things Cold Spring is doing to minimize the impact upon our planet.

 

One of my main goals for 2010 is to earn LEED "Green Associate" status and then LEED Accredited Professional (AP) status in Interior Design and Construction (ID+C).

 

One can earn a Green Associate credential separately or in conjunction with a LEED AP exam, depending upon one's past experience on LEED registered projects.

 

There are three tiers to LEED Professional credentials: Green Associate, AP, and Fellow. The "Fellow" status criteria is currently under development, but will feature an elite group of professionals who are leaders in the field.

 

Green and sustainable design will remain on the forefront of the construction, architecture, and design industries. It seems that there is less hype about green design as it becomes more mainstream, and projects and building materials/products will continue to incorporate aspects of sustainablity in order to be relevant and to be viewed favorably.

 

A recent report from Design Intelligence states that green and sustainable design has become "an integral aspect of good design". Indeed, focus upon good design often now starts with the use of environmentally sustainable practices and materials, and projects are evaluated equally for their "green-ness" and aesthetics.

 

I've already been working with a variety of environmentally sustainable products for several years now, but having a LEED accreditation can only help me with my design business.

I recently had the pleasure of shopping for tile at the Ann Sacks showroom. Every time I’m there, I find something new and inspiring. From glass to metal to natural stone, each product is top of the line.

 

Lately, I’ve been admiring all of the fabulous glass tiles from Ann Sacks and Oceanside Glasstile. The wide range of colors and finishes from clear, sea glass like colors to dark, stormy, metallic colors is amazing. The Lake Garda wall and floor tiles are really cool too.

 

The Lake Garda tile comes in 40 different matte colors and in a range of sizes from 2x2 and 12x12. Just beautiful!

 

I’m looking forward to using glass tiles on a couple of kitchen and bath renovations projects soon, for both flooring and wall tile in the bathroom spaces, and for backsplash accents on the kitchen job.

 

One would think that glass tiles for floors would be out of the question, but the Lake Garda tiles and some of the Oceanside Glasstile mosaics are manufactured for residential use, creating a new and exciting way to use glass tile.

 

Make sure you check out Oceanside's www.glasstile.com pages. The Glasstile products are made from silica sand and recycled glass material, are very strong and impervious to water, and can be used for a wide variety of commercial and residential applications. Simply gorgeous!

 

The U.S. Green Building Council's GreenBuild International Conference and Expo will take place in Phoenix, AZ, from November 11-13. This is the eighth annual GreenBuild Conference, with last year's being held in Boston, MA.

 

The Green Build Expo website gives details about speakers, educational sessions, exhibits, tours, and events.

 

Former Vice President Al Gore will be the keynote speaker at the opening ceremony. This year's theme is "Green building can and must come home to all people, boosting the quality of life across the country and around the world."

 

GreenBuild was launched by the USGBC in 2002 as "the world's largest conference and expo dedicated to green building". Greenbuild not only features speakers, seminars, workshops and products, but it also provides tours of green buildings in each host city.