First Law of green design - conservation of energy

The "sustainable" buildings seen in magazines and on TV are sending the wrong message - that green design is for the rich and famous. While green enthusiasts claim certified buildings will save enormous amounts of energy and other resources, the buildings reported to the public often are examples of conspicuous consumption. How does that exemplify green design?

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Energy +: CSI BPMA Meeting at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The energy required to climb the Berkeley Hills to get to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) was significant. LBNL occupies a magnificent site overlooking Berkeley, Oakland and beyond – all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. Just being in this impressive location was a powerful experience.

This is the setting where members of CSI’s Building Products Manufacturers Alliance (BPMA) met to hear firsthand from some of the country’s leading experts on energy and buildings.

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BIM Practice Group Notes: IFC, OmniClass, IFD Making it Possible to Share a BIM Object

What if an architect could pass a BIM object to an engineer for detailing, then take it back from the engineer and plug it into the model without worrying about using different software platforms?

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GreenFormat -- Got Your Free Listing, Yet?

CSI Technical Projects Coordinator Sarah Meyers, CSI, spotted several  "Listed on GreenFormat" signs in the booths at EcoBuild this week. There are also reports that the new format was mentioned in a few education presentations.

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Let’s Talk Specs in the Specifiers Practice Group on LinkedIn

 
In this day and age of instant information and communication, specifiers have many sources to tap to obtain the information they need; a number of which are on the Internet. However, few of these sources are specifically designed for and limited to construction specifications.

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Sustainable design - is it?

Not only is "sustainable design" not sustainable, but the meaning of the term is being changed to formally incorporate non-sustainable principles as part of the definition. Sustainability has nothing to do with creature comfort. In fact, our insistence on being comfortable is a prime contributor to the problems we now face. The closest thing to sustainable design is a grass hut on a tropical island; the more comfortable we make it, and the farther we get from that island, the less sustainable it becomes.

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Geotechnical Reports, Construction Documents, and the Proper Integration of the Two

I see it regularly on civil drawings or, when I’m lucky enough to get them, in the civil specifications. 
 
To what am I alluding?
 
I’m referring to statements such as, “A Geotechnical Report is included…and by its inclusion is hereby made a part of the contract documents” and “All paving, grading, excavation, trenching, pipe bedding, cut, fill, and backfill shall comply with the recommendations in the soils (geotechnical) report for this project.” These are actual quotes from a specification section and a civil drawing sheet I received from a couple of civil engineering firms. 
 
So, what’s wrong with these statements? 

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The Making of a Curmudgeon

curmudgeon: A crusty, irascible, cantankerous old person full of stubborn ideas or opinions.
With age come experience and perspective, valuable assets that cannot be acquired by reading what others have done. As we age, for better or worse, we tend to more strongly defend our opinions, firm in the belief that they are founded on fact and proven in the real world.
I recall buying gas at thirty cents a gallon, homes with little insulation, being taught to turn out the lights and not leave the water run. Conserving resources had nothing to do with being green, but everything to do with saving the green. I designed geodesic domes, sold solar collectors and composting toilets.
I have reached the point in my life - old enough to have accumulated a lot of knowledge about our business and young enough to still be an active participant - where I may become a curmudgeon.

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November BIM Practice Group Meeting Notes: CSI and Its Role in BIM

CSI has been using the tagline, “putting the ‘I’ in BIM” to describe its relationship to Building Information Modeling (BIM), but what does this really mean?

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Is the Building Code Infallible?

An interesting question.  Some people will believe that the building code, as printed, is a fully coordinated document--completely logical and without inconsistencies.

Wrong.

Although it is a carefully reviewed document developed by many experienced people from a wide field of building industry-related professions, the building code is still written by people and interpreted by people.  As the saying goes, “Nobody’s perfect”; which is one of the reasons why every three years a new building code edition is published followed by a supplement in the interim.

There are a couple of areas in the 2006 edition of the International Building Code that I’ve encountered on a few occasions that illustrate how a building code can be illogical and inconsistent.

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