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Seattle Space Needle

When you think about the “big cities” in the U.S., and the ones that are usually at the forefront of trends, you usually think of New York City and San Francisco.

But Seattle?

According to a recent article in Sustainable Industries, Seattle is proving to be a powerhouse when it comes to energy efficiency in commercial buildings.

“Seattle’s buildings provide one of the greatest opportunities to generate energy savings and boost economic development for the city,” Department of Planning and Development director Diane Sugimura said in a news release. “This new program will help building owners take a key step toward increasing building energy efficiency, which, in turn, helps lower operating costs, makes buildings more competitive and creates good local jobs.”

That’s what it’s all about after all. Increasing energy efficiency within buildings for a truly sustainable future. The savings in terms of money is a bonus.

Next week, Seattle Energy & Design Roundtable will be hosting an event at the US Bank Center Building. Our U.S. Business Development Manager Nathan Kegel will be discussing VE-Gaia from early phase design all the way through project completion and submittal to rating authorities. Dan Munn and Matt Glassman from DLR Group will then present on how they used IES VE for early phase design and highlight training programs used at DLR to help architects reach the Architecture 2030 goals.

Speaking of Architecture 2030, the Architecture 2030 District mentioned in the article certainly sounds like a model for success. I’ll be interested to see the successes there.

So we’ll be keeping our eyes on Seattle and the many other cities developing and implementing energy efficiency standards for commercial buildings. It’s an exciting time for sustainable design!

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Tags:Architecture 2030, DLR, IES VE, Seattle, Sustainability

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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Tags:AIA, Architects, IES, Sustainability