Live from AIA 2011
Posted : May 13, 2011 by Tory, Category: events
New Orleans. NOLA. The ‘Big Easy.’ A city full of rich architecture and in the last few years, one on the forefront of the building industry as they rebuild.
Jane Kolleeny of Architectural Record noted the same thing in her blog post last night.
Yes its about 90 degrees and humid, but it’s a great pleasure to be in New Orleans whose recovery since Katrina seems remarkable.
Walking around the city on Wednesday when I arrived in town, I was truly amazed. Having never been here before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But this city truly is rebuilding, and it’s amazing to see how the city is evolving, yet still sticking to its root.
I caught some of the keynote presentation with Thomas Friedman yesterday. What I walked away with was a reaffirmation that we need to focus on sustainable design practices. (But we already knew that, right?)
“This is your warning heart attack,” Friedman told the nearly 4,000 architects assembled to hear him in New Orleans. “In both the markets and Mother Nature, we’ve followed two common economic principles—IBG (I’ll Be Gone) or YBG (You’ll Be Gone), leading us to do what we want now. There’s a deeper values breakdown behind that. Our parents built us a world of incredible abundance based on sustainable values. We’ve moved to a world of situational values and that isn’t sustainable.”
The theme for AIA 2011 is Regional Design Revolution: Ecology Matters. As I thought about this theme, and listened to Mr. Friedman, I was really proud of the work we are doing at IES. Reducing the energy consumption of buildings has been at the heart of IES since its inception 15 long years ago. The team here have worked hard to get to where we are today and we are now widely respected as the leading company in the performance analysis field – the one the innovators come to.
Bringing our knowledge and expertise to the US market has been a real privilege and in recent years we’ve seen the scales tip with US designers increasingly concerned with combining aesthetics and performance to ensure their design’s sustainability. We are happy to be playing our part in this revolution.
That’s all from the show floor today. We’ve got to get back to the booth and continue the great conversations about sustainability.
But we’ll be at the TweetUp tonight to chat. Will we see you there?
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