Modernism week is an annual event held every February in Palm Springs, California. Thousands of people descend on the Coachella Valley to tour some of the incredible examples of Mid-Century Modern buildings that exist here. To call them fans of modernism is an understatement. Most that I met had some deep, near fanatical, obsession with this particular period of Architecture – a period in which the term “modern” meant what it should.

Before it referred to that period of art history from 1920 to 1965, the word “modern” used to refer to a departure from traditionalism using cutting edge technology. It seems we have forgotten the beautiful power of the concept of something being truly modern. Practically all of the events around Modernism Week treated the past as something belonging to a bygone era, and a past that needs to be preserved. The general sentiment seemed to be that the unique conditions that gave rise to the Modernist movement is long gone and never to return.

While I agree the original examples of Mid-Century Modernism (1950′s and 60′s) that remain should be preserved, I found myself wanting more. One would think that Modernism itself should be so prevalent by now that we all live in our own Modernist house.

The reality, of course, we know to be much different. Truly modern buildings are reserved for special occasions: a new high-rise or maybe a new public library. In the last decade, even public buildings and schools are starting to embrace modem designs. The US General Services Administration (GSA) has committed to truly modern designs in its’ new buildings. While this progress is wonderful, the daily buildings we use are being overlooked.

Most of the houses being built today are adamantly NOT modern. Unlike the rare Mid-Century Modern examples here in Palm Springs, most existing homes are shy about doing anything beyond the traditional. In fact most subscribe to a style that could best be called, “Spaniterranean,” a hodgepodge of romantic, traditional styles that have little to do with the area in which they are built, and even less to do with the people living in them.

One of the pioneers of this Mid-Century Modernist movement is architect William Krisel. At 86 years of age, he is a wealth of architectural history. In a public conversation lecture held during Modernism Week, Krisel shared some stories of the feeling going on at the time.

“I found a group of likeminded developers and clients who felt the time had come for modern designed tract housing,” he explained.

Yes, the time HAD come. But then did it end? Today, the vast majority of tract housing (housing for the masses) is far from modern. The Tuscany-inspired, Mediterranean villas that blight our landscapes are uninspiring, boring and, worst of all, fake.

Krisel was able to convince clients to build a modern building, in part, because there was a movement going on around him helping to encourage others to join in. He told stories about looking for clients open to modern designs. Nearly 60 years later, architects are still having the same conversations.

Did Modernism fail in its’ mission? Perhaps we need a second Modernist movement.

A fact demonstrated clearly in Palm Springs. Surrounding most of these historical modern buildings are brand new, suburban sprawl, Spaniterranean buildings. New, modern buildings are still considered rare.

PHOTO CREDIT: Behr Browers Architects

While driving along the 101 Highway in Southern California, I almost got into an accident when I caught a glimpse of the Calabasas Shopping Center. Here was a new, everyday building that was clearly modern. Digging around, I was also pleased to discover it to be the first LEED Certified building in the county and the debut project of the Calabasas County Green Development Standard.

Project manager Jason Oliver, from Behr Browers Architects spoke to me about how it came about. With project designer was Francisco Behr, they began by involving the community into the design process. The community’s initial reaction was reluctant to embrace something different, and expected a more traditional design.

“Once the community members started getting educated about the goal of increasing daylighting and opening up to view corridors,” Oliver continued, “they got excited about a modern aesthetic.” By including them in the thinking that goes into the design, the community stopped seeing something modern as being imposed upon them, but rather as a clear design solution.

“Towards the end [of the process],” says Oliver, “the community was almost unanimous in their desire for a modern design.”

That this particular modern building is also the greenest in Calabasas County further helped sell the community and officials on the final design.

“Spec[ulative] developments are primed for modern, sustainable design as they are already designed to cut out the fat and superfluous spaces,” Oliver explained. Could this model be repeated in other areas?

A few hours from here, the small city of Elk Grove, California is facing their own challenge with a modern design. This Sacramento suburb, which the Census Bureau once proclaimed America’s fastest-growing city, decided to establish itself as a destination spot.

Back in 2006, they set a bold vision for the future of their city by holding an international design competition to create a master plan for a $159 million civic center complex on 78 acres.

As told in the New York Times, this town of only 153,000 people saw a bold, modern building as the solution to their relative anonymity.

The council hoped that an iconic piece of architecture could vault the young city to higher heights, à la Bilbao in Spain and its Guggenheim museum.

PHOTO SOURCE: New York Times

To this end, the City selected the more often visionary than practical architect, Zaha Hadid.

Ms. Hadid’s resulting design is a fluid, organic and bold piece of Architecture. She is, after all, the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Although most of her designs have been on paper and unbuilt, the last decade has put her in high demand.

The mayor was thrilled that they had landed such a big fish. “We hit a home run on this one,” gushed James Cooper, the mayor at the time. “The citizens are so excited. The big thing is to let her be an architect and not stifle the process. We want her to think of something different. This is a new chapter in Elk Grove’s life.”

The community loved it when selected back in 2006, but now in a recession, the usual lack of vision is taking over. A new Mayor and new council members vehemently oppose the design, for no reason other than a fear of the new.

So perhaps it was no surprise that the council members did not attend any of the meetings — some of which included very positive comments from the public — over the nine months of planning until the final presentation of the master plan last week.

So, why this unfounded fear of Modernism?

It would be understandable had modern buildings been shown to destroy communities, bankrupt cities or prove structurally inferior… but cities did that through traditional planning, not through Modernism. Instead, modern buildings have been shown to attract visitors, revitalize cities and push the art of Architecture forward. We can’t afford to not build them.

The secret lie in learning from the past without copying it. Most town planners cling to traditional vernacular styles in the hopes of getting the good stuff they like in traditional styles (i.e.: maintain the street frontage, human scale awnings, etc.) in spite of the bad stuff they don’t (i.e.: an anachronistic collection of uninspiring repetition.)

Let’s study the styles of the past, learn from them and move on. Open our eyes to what worked in those approaches and adapt it to our modern sensibilities. Let’s have a new Modernist Movement. And this time, let’s make it a green one.

Originally posted at: KBB Collective

I spoke last week with Alex Wilson, founder of BuildingGreen and executive editor of the Environmental Building News.

Alex was just named the 2010 winner of the Hanley Award for Vision and Leadership in Sustainable Housing, and will be speaking at the upcoming West Coast Green Conference in San Francisco.

BuildingGreen has been in my secret toolkit for many years and it is the first place I turn when needing information on a green material. Looking for a “green” cabinet manufacturer? Well, BuildingGreen lists 74 articles and product listings for you to review, as well as a detailed discussion of the issues in cabinet manufacturing, including formaldehyde and wood species. Think of it as the Consumer Reports of Green Building. Their unbiased (and often surprising) reviews don’t play any favorites or have blind faith in any company.

For nearly two decades, BuildingGreen has published their Environmental Building News (EBN) and has always been ahead of the curve on controversial topics in Green Building. They explained the good and bad side of the vinyl industry way back in 1993. EBN discussed the controversy surrounding waterless urinals in 2002. Any green building issues you’re grappling with now are ones they’ve likely dealt with years ago.

While Alex and his staff are inundated with new product information, he continues to be surprised with new innovations in materials. He is particularly excited to see the West Coast Green innovation pipeline.

When asked for a wish list of products he’d like to see, Alex immediately asked for an alternative to polystyrene (you may know it by the brand name Styrofoam™). This oil-based product raises many concerns over the chemicals, flame retardants and the blowing agents used to install polystyrene. He is currently obsessed with finding below-grade insulation alternatives to polystyrene, and has been featuring some on his weekly blog.

Recently, BuildingGreen revised their previous position on another controversial subject—the use of fly ash in building products.

Fly ash is the powdery soot byproduct from coal-fired electric power plants. Since the burning of coal provides up to 85% of our electricity (depending on where you live), a great deal of this waste product is produced. Some 71 million tons of fly ash were produced last year, resulting in 71 tons of mercury byproduct.

Depending upon the use of the concrete, fly ash can be substituted for 20%-50% of the Portland Cement in the concrete mix. There have been reports of some people using as high as 70% fly ash substitution.

“Like most people in the Green Building field, we used to think fly ash was great virtually all of the time, since it kept this waste material out of the waste stream,” Alex explained. “But concern about the leeching of heavy metals [mercury, for example] has caused us to modify our position somewhat. We are no only recommending fly ash in applications where 1) it’s locked up, as in concrete, and 2) the fly ash replaces the carbon emissions that would normally come from manufacturing Portland Cement.”

Officially, BuildingGreen no longer considers the use of fly ash in products to be beneficial unless it offsets greenhouse gas emissions.

Portland Cement, the key ingredient in the mixing of concrete, is one of the most carbon intensive industries. The processing and heating of the cement are responsible for 8%-12% of all carbon emissions. Since concrete is a required part of virtually every building, a substitute like fly ash could go a long way to cut carbon emissions.

I wrote about it back in 2006 and the logic of using fly ash to replace a portion of the Portland Cement still makes good sense. After all, cement manufacturers are already substituting up to 15 percent of the Portland Cement with fly ash to save money.

You can read more at BuildingGreen, download the latest issue of the Environmental Building News and read Alex’s weekly blog.

Where is the future?
Originally posted here

I turned 40 last week. As friends were asking, “How does it feel?” I was reminded of a drawing I did when I was 10 years old. The year was 1980 and I was living in a dense urban block of Philadelphia. I had already been obsessed with Architecture since I was eight, but now at 10, I had asked my parents for some real drawing tools, and they obliged with a set of pens, pencils and paper. I spent hours dreaming up a future of curvy, organic buildings that defied gravity. Ink smudges covered my fingers from sketching visions of the future.

My mother was 40 when I was 10, and I clearly remember thinking how I would turn 40 in the oh-so-distant year 2010. What kind of buildings would we be building in 2010? Surely the world would be unrecognizable. The boxy, lifeless and grey blocks of my neighborhood would be replaced with things I couldn’t even imagine.

Little did I know that we would still be building with skinny sticks of wood, held together by nails and with punched openings for windows. My younger self never would believe how I now spend my time having to convince clients not to put toxic materials in their home or fighting to get a building inspector to approve the use of recycled water.

Would my 10-year-old self be disappointed in how ordinary and un-revolutionary the majority of todays’ buildings really are? Where is the future we expected?

In the 1985 hit film, Back to the Future, the character Marty McFly travels back in time 30 years to find striking differences in fashion, automobiles and music. The buildings, however, were relatively unchanged. If Marty were to go back in time today, he would return to 1980. He would be confused by our skinny ties, long cars and the sounds of Devo, but the buildings would go by unnoticed.

In the sequel, Marty travels ahead 30 years to 2015 to a world full of imagination. The future they present is exciting and very different from the present. But as intriguing as some of their predictions are, they clearly overestimated certain developments.

Is it safe to expect the next five years will bring us hoverboards, self-drying jackets or Mr. Fusion? Not likely. But you aren’t expecting those things. However, the buildings they showed (which don’t seem so far-fetched) are out of reach to us. What slows the innovation in our built environment?

In order to move forward, we must embrace our own long-term economic success. We need to rebuild our aging infrastructure, update those outdated systems and stop clinging to a romantic vision of old Architecture that embodies wasted resources, energy inefficiency and poor quality environments. Let’s rebuild our buildings and save ourselves in the process.

And this is the reason I am so excited about the upcoming West Coast Green Conference. Of the 40 or so conferences I attend each year, it is my favorite if only because of their focus on innovation. (Disclosure: I am on the Advisory Board). Hundreds of the top thinkers in architecture, planning and sustainability join together for three days to share ideas and develop solutions on how to design our future. You can hear more of my thoughts on this here.

Incidentally, the entire Back to the Future Trilogy is available in a special 25th Anniversary Edition on Blu-Ray on October 26th.

—-
MORE INFORMATION:
West Coast Green Conference
September 30 – October 1, 2010
http://www.westcoastgreen.com

——–

—Eric Corey Freed is an architect and author of four books, including Green$ense for the Home.

Originally posted at: KBB Collective

How our dependence on oil has negatively affected our built environment

As the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig nears its three-month anniversary (on July 20th), the public is still waiting to see how the story will end. More importantly, the world is waiting to see how the worst environmental catastrophe in history is going to change America’s self-admitted addiction to oil.

SOURCE: NASA

The date July 20th shares the day with another anniversary. Just 41 years earlier, Man first set foot on the Moon in an impressive display of how technology can propel humanity to reach our highest achievements. The exploded rig, located just 41 miles off the coast, reminds us how technology can demonstrate the limits of humanity.

In light of the facts that have emerged over the last few months, it’s almost surprising an accident of this scale hadn’t occurred sooner. You’ve no doubt heard about the corrupt regulators at the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the horrific and shocking safety track record of BP, and the cost-cutting risks taken in the construction of the well itself.

The disaster at the Deepwater Horizon that left 11 men dead and continues to pour millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico is the final act in the story of our adolescence. This could be the ultimate sign that our way of life has to change if we are to survive. If any good can come out of the irreparable damage done to the water, the Gulf Coast economy, or the wildlife itself, we must change our relationship with oil.

SOURCE: Things Are Fine

In January 1969, a similar blowout occurred on a Union Oil platform six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara. For 11 days, oil leaked into the sea, affecting some 800 square miles of ocean and 35 miles of precious coastline. Prompted to action, then President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, which in turn led to the first Earth Day in 1970. In addition, Nixon issued a moratorium on offshore drilling in California. At the time, Nixon said, “It is sad that it was necessary that Santa Barbara should be the example that had to bring it to the attention of the American people…The Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”

How did we get to a place like this? It could be the control corporations have over our policymakers. According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, oil & gas companies have donated $238.7 million to candidates of both parties since 1990 (though 75% of that goes to Republicans). During this same period, the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy Act of 2005 ushered in an unprecedented era of deregulation and sheer disregard for the environment. Deepwater Horizon is a testament to what happens when corporate malfeasance meets regulatory failure.

The drive for cheaper and larger amounts of oil have led to some questionable decisions. These factors have added up to have an adverse effect on our built environment for the past century.




SOURCE: U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

Our national energy system is divided into two camps: combustion (oil and gas) or electricity. The chart above shows how oil is used in this country, with the majority going to transportation (52% for cars, trucks and planes). The rest is broken into heating (30% from various sources) and materials (15% for plastics & 3% for asphalt). You’ll notice that virtually no oil is used to produce electricity, but oil is a necessary evil to maintain our current lifestyle.

If nearly a third of our oil is used to heat our buildings, we can easily cut that figure in half by retrofitting them to be more energy-efficient. If you’re interested, there are a number of wonderful sources for information, such as Green$ense for the Home, GreenHomeGuide and EERE. We can’t afford not to do this. But for this discussion, let’s focus on transportation.

For most of my career as an architect, educator and lecturer, I avoided talking about cars. I felt it wasn’t my place to talk about transportation. I feared some heckler in the audience might yell out, “Stick to buildings, Architect!” So I eschewed any true, in-depth discussions about cars, trucks or transportation. But over the last decade of lecturing around the world, I found the topic of cars creeping back in.

The design of our cities and suburbs is dictated by the automobile. From the width of the street, location of driveways, distance between buildings and the drop-off location for the front door, the automobile has irrevocably changed our cities from human scale to vehicle scale. Often the entire structure of the building is based on the spacing of the column locations in the parking garage, spaced to allow enough space to fit three parked cars. People are corralled onto narrow sidewalks to make room for the car. Elevated freeways slice through neighborhoods, disconnecting the pedestrians from the other side.

For most cities, there is no alternative to the car. It is a requirement of daily life. Unless you live in a place like New York or San Francisco, it is nearly impossible to survive without one. Last year, National Geographic‘s “Consumer Greendex” found that Americans had the lowest percentage of people who use public transit on a daily basis and the highest percentage of people who never take it. A third of all of the public transit users in the entire U.S. are in New York City, which explains why more than half of the households don’t need to own a car. But other cities weren’t so lucky.

Public transit was not always seen as the last resort to getting around. Back in the 1920s, nearly every city had a convenient and cheap trolley system. At the time, most of these were privately owned companies that generated their own electricity. Soon the trolly companies became small, local utility providers, until the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 forced them to sell off their less lucrative trolley businesses.

In order to expand their burgeoning car business, General Motors (GM), Firestone Tire, Phillips Petroleum and Standard Oil banded together to form a company to buy up these trolley companies. Their new entity, National City Lines, purchased the streetcar systems in 45 major cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Philadelphia, Phoenix, St. Louis and Los Angeles. Between 1936 and 1950, they systematically dismantled the trolley lines to increase the demand for the automobile. They removed the tracks to make room for cars and ensure no new systems could return easily. Known as the “Great Streetcar Scandal,” it hobbled our public transit systems. In the 1920s, only one in 10 Americans owned a car. By the end of their efforts in 1955, that figure jumped to eight in 10.

Pro-car lobbyists worked side-by-side with lawmakers to draft legislation to further change our cities. In 1953, GM President Charles Wilson was appointed Secretary of Defense under President Eisenhower and created the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. The cost was sold to the American people for reasons of National Defense. The new roads would be designed to carry our tanks to fend off an invasion by the Russians. The systematic dependency on the car was now complete.

Since the 1950s, practically every planning decision has been centered around access by private cars. The unintended consequences of this network of roads was never really considered. Faster roads enabled people to move from the cities and into the newly created suburbs. Having less city residents put more strain on the remaining public transit systems and city businesses became to close. With more driving came more air pollution, and the vicious cycle of our oil dependency was created.

Throughout all of this, we have been told that driving is less costly that public transportation. Planners argue the cost of creating new roads and parking spaces as “investments in our infrastructure.” But public transit is perceived as being “subsidized.” You’ll hear people say that public transit “loses money” while roads are “free.” But the true cost is anything but free.

The annual cost to maintain our network of 26 million roads is over $131 billion dollars a year. That translates to about $1100 per household and enough to buy everyone a really nice bike to use instead. While the trolley and rail companies had to pay to install and maintain their tracks, the car and oil companies managed to get the taxpayers to cover the costs and maintenance of their roads. Roads are not free, and we cannot afford to keep viewing them as such.

SOURCE: Hats in the Garment District by Margaret Bourke-White, Time Life

Local planning codes will require a certain number of parking spaces to build a new building. What if they instead required the business to be within walking distance of public transit?

Some companies provide free parking in their office buildings as a perk to their employees. What if they instead used the cost to build the parking structure to subsidize bikes or bus passes for every employee?

Most cities provide cheap parking along sidewalks at meters. What if they instead allowed hybrid and electric vehicles to park for free and charged more for gas guzzling SUVs?

Our addiction to oil is more than the gasoline we put into our car. It permeates into countless design decisions that prevent us from building truly sustainable cities.

If you wish to help correct the Oil Spill in the Gulf Coast, please make a donation to Healthy Gulf.

—Eric Corey Freed is an architect and author of four books, including Green$ense for the Home.

Making every drop count
Water efficiency is more important now than ever before

I spoke last week at the PCBC Conference in San Francisco about water efficiency. Although buildings only account for about 15 percent of water use (in California, as per the USGS), conserving water in our buildings is becoming increasingly important. Global-warming-fueled droughts, changing weather and water pollution are pushing our finite water supply to its limit.

It’s important for architects and designers to take responsibility for this water use. Water-efficient faucets, toilets and showerheads should be standard practice (and are standard in states like California, by code).

This illustration (pictured above) best demonstrates how fragile our water supply really is. The blue marble (shown) represents all of the water on Earth. After all, we don’t make water. There is no new water. All of the water on the planet is all of the water we’ve ever had on the planet. The water in your glass may have been sipped by Thomas Jefferson, or in your case, peed out by a dinosaur!

Water is one of the most abundant resources on Earth, yet also one of the most scarce. Although water covers 70 percent of the planet, we cannot drink most of it. A whopping 97 percent of the water on Earth is in the ocean and undrinkable, and another 2 percent sits frozen in the polar icecaps (though not for long with global warming), leaving the remaining one percent for us to drink. Unfortunately, 70 percent of that remaining water is polluted. We are running out of fresh drinking water at an alarming rate.

Currently, some 20 percent of the world’s population (over a billion people) lack access to fresh water. Someone in the world dies of thirst every 8 seconds. A child dies of thirst every 15 seconds. Conserving water is more important now than ever before.

In the United States, we consume more water per person than any other country. The average American uses more water per day than someone in Brazil, Germany, China, Honduras and the United Kingdom combined. More so than anywhere else, conserving water here in the U.S. is not only important, but also necessary as we are consuming more than our share of clean water.

It requires an enormous amount of energy. Some 50 billion kW of energy are used each year to pump, process, clean, filter and transport all of this water. This equates to about a half pound of carbon dioxide for every gallon of water we consume. We can’t solve the energy crisis or climate crisis without addressing our relationship with water.

Our homes consume an incredible amount of fresh drinking water, and most of it is used in places it does not need to be so drinkable. You could easily cut household water use by 30 percent through water-efficient fixtures. I wanted to share some of my recent finds that have me excited about water savings:

More than a third of all of the water used inside your home is being flushed down the toilet, literally. We don’t need to flush with clean drinking water. We can use some of the soapy water (called graywater) that gets dumped by your laundry and shower. A dual-flush toilet (pictured) lets you choose a half or full flush, depending on your needs.

Then of course, we don’t need to use water at all. A waterless urinal (pictured) doesn’t need flushing and saves thousands of gallons of water a year, paying for itself in about three years. The Kohler urinal is a work of art.

Showers add up to nearly 20% of all indoor water usage and are the largest users of hot water. By simply installing an ultra low-flow showerhead, you can save up to 4,000 gallons of water annually, and for every gallon of hot water you can save, that’s gas or electricity you don’t need to use to heat it. You can beat the federally required 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) with models that use 1.75 gpm.

Foot pedal controls are a nice design feature that also happen to save an incredible amount of water. While your hands are full with food or dishes, you simply tap the controls to release water only when needed.

Although dishwashers use only 2 percent of the water in your home, they do use nearly 20 percent of the energy. The new Bosch dishwasher is water- and energy-efficient in an incredibly attractive design.

Of course, there are a dozen simple things you can specify to cut water use and not sacrifice design quality. For the complete list of suggestions, you can download my slides from the lecture here.

—Eric Corey Freed is an architect and author of four books, including Green$ense for the Home.

Originally posted at: http://kbbcollective.com/the-case-for-non-toxic-buildings.html

The case for non-toxic buildings
Why we should stop using known cancer-causing chemicals now

I find it difficult to write about anything except the Gulf Oil Spill. In fact, I started writing about it only to find there was nothing hopeful to say. Obviously, the story is still unfolding, but it is clear this will be the worst environmental disaster in history. If any good comes from it, it will be a radical rethinking of how we view our relationship to oil, drilling and energy. And I am still not sure why the people who spilled the oil are in charge of the cleanup.

I do know that oil “spill” is too timid a word for such a disaster. I am currently leaning toward calling it an oil “transfusion.” For some wonderful coverage on the oil spill, I strongly encourage you to look at this incredible infographic on the spill.

PHOTO CREDIT: Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace

In addition, the Big Picture has an incredible archive of images from the spill.

This site allows you to compare the size of the oil spill to your city or state. You’ll notice how the spill is larger than the entire state of Connecticut.

While I will reserve my words about the spill for a few more weeks and once the full impact is known, it has gotten me thinking more and more about our toxicity on our environment. After all, the Earth itself is a self-contained system. We don’t make new water, new mass or new energy. Everything here on Earth has always been here. Speaking from a Physics standpoint, all we do is transform things from one state to another. Matter into energy, energy into matter.

The systems of Nature have evolved to a perfect balance. We call this balance “environmental equilibrium.” From this balance we get the services that Nature provides: filtering our air, cleaning our water and absorbing our waste. Unfortunately, mankind’s impact on the planet has overwhelmed these systems. The planet simply cannot keep up. If we “toxify” the planet, we have no other alternatives.

I used to think that Cigarette Manufacturers were evil. After all, they were selling things they knew to be dangerous and full of cancer-causing chemicals. For years, they denied it, dragged their feet and funded lobbyists to stall legislation.

But are architects, designers or builders any better?

We specify products that require you to wear gloves and a mask during installation. We line the floors, walls and ceilings with products we know contain nasty chemicals. In fact, the entire painting industry knows its products are bad for us. Paints contain chemicals called “Volatile Organic Compounds” or VOCs. Why do you think that every major paint manufacturer is now offering at least a “low-VOC” version of the product?

Where are the gloves and masks for the people who stay behind and have to live and work in these buildings? When I ask manufacturers about this, they defend their products. Unlike cigarettes, you cannot point to the formaldehyde in that one piece of furniture and say that was the cause of your cancer. But the collective exposure to thousands of chemicals in your home and office all contribute to your cancer risk. Although the death rate for cancer has dropped, thanks to early detection and treatment, the incidences of cancer continue to climb.

We spend 80-90 percent of our time indoors. We spend another five percent in our cars, and apparently, we hate going outside and hate fresh air. Asthma rates have tripled in adults since 1980. In children, whose developing lungs are not as strong, asthma has gone from the seventh leading chronic illness, to number one in less than 20 years. The poor quality of the indoor air is largely responsible for this staggering increase.

The quality of the indoor air in your home is likely to contain more than 10 times the number of toxic pollutants as the air outdoors. During a painting project, that number can increase to 1,000 times that of outdoor levels. By switching to healthy finishes containing low or zero VOCs, you can greatly improve indoor air quality and remove some major health risks for you and your family.

If you’re wondering where to start, target the two biggest sources of poor indoor air quality: VOCs and formaldehyde.

By choosing healthier finishes, unneeded chemicals and toxins are prevented from entering our air, land and water. Making the simple change to a healthy paint will reduce some of the 69 million gallons of harmful chemical paints that end up in our nation’s landfills each year.

People with multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) or a severe sensitivity to chemicals will want to avoid placing formaldehyde in their home. Formaldehyde is used as a glue in most wood products. MCS sufferers will likely develop dizziness, headaches and sneezing from formaldehyde exposure.

The California Air Resources Board has reported that one in 10,000 Californians will develop cancer from exposure to formaldehyde. Since it is a “sensitizer,” exposure to formaldehyde can actually make you more sensitive to other chemicals. When buying any new wood cabinets or furniture, demand formaldehyde-free products. By not bringing new formaldehyde into your home, you’ll reduce the grave risks for you and your family.

Why specify toxic materials at all? Simply because they’re cheap? Doing so makes us as guilty as those cigarette manufacturers.

On April 14th, 2010, I gave the closing keynote at the Municipal Green Building Conference and Expo, help by the US Green Building Council’s LA Chapter, and SoCal Gas Company. You can watch the full hour-long video here. Continue Reading

This article originally appeared: http://kbbcollective.com/greening-restaurants.html

Greening restaurants
Restaurants will have to do more than change light bulbs; they need to grow their own food on site

Last month I spoke at the CHART Conference. Also known as the Council for Hotel and Restaurant Trainers, their annual gathering includes restaurant operators from around the country. Their impressive list of members include every family chain restaurant you’ve ever heard of, including Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Rubio’s, Chuck E. Cheese, Perkins, et al. The room was packed with a “who’s who” of lifestyle eateries.

Continue Reading

I spoke last month at the Green Cities Conference in Orlando.

It was the first times I did not speak about green building, but instead spoke about the amazing work of Urban Re:Vision, a non-profit on whose board I sit.

I was interviewed at the conference. An excerpt:

Our measurement of growth is that you continue growing, but in nature that doesn’t happen. Animals don’t keep getting fatter and fatter until they explode… and so our cities shouldn’t. They should grow to a certain size and then stop when they are sustainable. But we haven’t done that. We have presented the idea that it’s an either/or…

Read the full interview here.

Here is an interview I did with Chris Cheatham discussing the current design competition for Urban Re:Vision.

The competition is to design a city block next to City Hall in Dallas. The winning design is scheduled to actually be built.

Here is your chance at fame and fortune. Check out www.revision-dallas.com for the complete details.