IES Blog

Image Source: Philly.com

You might remember our post a couple of months back on the New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey, and how it did not seek LEED certification, despite an impressive list of green features.

Well, a hundred miles to the south, the Philadelphia Eagles are showing no such constraint with their home, Lincoln Financial Field. The team announced on November 18 that they will try to make it the “greenest stadium in the world.”

Constructed in 2003, “The Linc” was finished just before the green building boom really took off. The team’s owner, Jeffrey Lurie, launched the Eagles’ “Go Green” program in 2003, to “[incorporate] green initiatives, sustainable business practices and educational programs as our core operating principals.” Now, this new stadium initiative is set to be the crown jewel of the franchise’s efforts.

Among the features the team plans on installing:

• 2,500 solar panels on the roof
• 80 20-foot-tall wind turbines ringing the outside of the stadium
• A new power plant that runs on either biofuels or natural gas

When the $30 million retrofit is finished in September 2011, all these features will combine to produce at least 8.6 megawatts of electricity, much more than the stadium’s game day peak usage of 7 megawatts. The excess will be sold to a local utility company.

The end goal? To take the 70,000-seat stadium completely off the power grid through generating all of its own renewable power.

It looks as though, in America, green building is catching on quickly in the sports venue market. According to this Philadelphia Inquirer article, nine American stadiums have applied for LEED certification, and five more are considering it. The fact that these facilities are going with green retrofits to existing stadiums is a promising development for buildings that see the largest number of people gather at any one time in a given area, and thus, produce the most potential environmental waste. Now it seems they’re becoming almost as green as the grass on which their teams play.

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Tags:Building, LEED, Renewables, Sustainability

Is 2011 going to be another exciting year for sustainable design? We scanned the globe for some awe-inspiring projects as we welcome in the New Year.

Marina Bay Sands, Singapore: Dubbed a master class in green architecture, the lotus-inspired ArtScience Museum is a living, breathing embodiment of the ArtScience theme. The Museum will feature naturally illuminated galleries at its ‘fingertips,’ while a dish-like roof harvests rainwater for its 115 ft. waterfall.

Santiago, Chile: The Costanera Center, South America’s tallest towers to date, is aiming for LEED Gold with extensive sustainable design strategies. The center features a massive 30,000 square meter green roof and a natural cooling system that channels water from nearby San Carlos Canal.

Tainan, Taiwan: Also known as ‘The Magic School of Green Technology,’ The Y. S. Sun Green Building Research Center is Taiwan’s first and only zero-carbon building. Incorporating 13 green building design methods, it features the world’s first natural buoyancy ventilation system, which keeps an international conference hall cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

Florida, USA: A fantastic geodesic-inspired glass atrium in St. Petersburg, Florida is the new home to the surrealist artwork of Salvador Dalí. While its thick concrete walls were purposefully designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, its thermal mass doubles as a heat sink to minimize temperature highs and lows.

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Tags:Building, LEED, research, Sustainability, USA, Welcome

And is that a bad thing?

A recent study by Robert Gaarder, a leadership coach and consultant on organization development, thinks architects might come with certain personality traits.

ARCHITECH Magazine featured his findings this week, and there’s been quite the buzz on the Internet.

His findings?

“…the most frequent type among the architects was ENTJ—extraversion, intuition, thinking, and judging. ENTJs accounted for a whopping 31 percent of the architects that Gaarder tested, despite the very low frequency of the type (estimated at 1.8 percent) within the general population.”

But it’s not all bad.

In Gaarder’s less stilted words, “The good news is, the ENTJ has a lot of leadership qualities. They can envision the future. They are these grand-scale organizers; they think in terms of systems.” It makes sense, then, that the architecture-firm principals in Gaarder’s group overwhelmingly scored as ENTJ (16 of them) as opposed to other types (three ISTJs, for example).

How accurate is his study? Well, with just a sample of 100 architects, mainly at the senior level and based in Washington, DC, probably not wholly representative of the entire U.S. architect population. But it’s fun to see the results, nonetheless. If you’re an architect, where do you think you fall? Engineers, do you think the architects you work with fit this mold? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Tags:Architects, leadership, research

We’ve been discussing the incredible potential of green building, and how it can flourish even in this economy.

Well, potential has given way to actual proof.

According to a report by McGraw-Hill, “The value of green building construction projects begun in 2010 was 50% higher than in 2008…representing 25% of all new construction. The report projects that the green building market will continue to expand, reaching $135 billion by 2015.”

This is fantastic news, not just for the industry, but for all of us. A couple more points Buildaroo highlighted from the report:

• One third of new non-residential construction projects were green projects
• Green building reduced operating costs by 13.6% on average for new buildings, increased new building values by an average of 10.9%, and increased the return on investment by 9.9% on average for new buildings and 19.2% for retrofits

So it’s now a fact - green building can make you lots of money while saving the planet. In fact, it has become arguably the most lucrative sector of all green industries. It’s a credit to the engineers, architects, and builders who have worked tirelessly to advance the cause.

It just makes too much sense these days. Everyone wants to save money, and at a time when all construction has taken a severe hit, sustainable construction has been a catalyst for keeping the industry, and thousands of jobs, afloat.

But we must remember that we’re not done yet. While these statistics are very encouraging, we shouldn’t rest until every building is as sustainable as it can be. And you can bet that IES will remain steadfast advocates for making all buildings green buildings.

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Tags:Architects, Building, Engineers, IES, reduce, Sustainability