The Omega Center for Sustainable Living (OCSL), which officially opens on July 16, 2009, is at the bleeding edge of green building. It's located on the 195-acre campus of the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, an education and retreat center. Not only is it on track to achieve LEED Platinum, it may be the first building in America to meet the requirements of the Living Building Challenge.
LEED Version 3 has some new aspects, and the green building community is trying to understand the ins and outs. One aspect has been talked about strenuously in the past week, and I thought we should ground ourselves a little bit. Let’s take a step back and look at Minimum Program Requirements (“MPRs”), the concept of de-certification, or certification revocation, and whether this all means that projects can lose certification if they do not perform as designed.
Just a quick jaunt north of Dallas right off of Central Expressway, there's a small community called Urban Reserve. In Urban Reserve, all the homes are modern and sustainably designed -- the minimum standards require Energy Star and a HERS of at least an 80. This home is just one of several architecturally unique homes in the development. Referred to as UR 45, it was designed by Shipley Architects for an executive of the development company, Rick Fontenot. And according to GreenSource, the architect and owner are aiming for LEED Platinum.
This newly constructed 3,200 square-foot building, Wetland Discovery Point, is the third LEED Platinum certified structure in the state of Utah, making it one of the greenest buildings around. WDP is part of the Utah Botanical Center of Utah State University and provides an indoor / outdoor learning experience for over 4,000 school children each year. The building was designed by ajc architects and built by Big-D Construction, and here are some of its green elements:
Just last month, these seven, attached, single-family homes received LEED Platinum certification -- the first homes in Arkansas to achieve the USGBC's highest designation! Vertical Modern Urban Lofts is located in downtown Little Rock, and the second phase of the project is under construction right now. The homes range in price from $299k - $399k, and they're destined to save owners some cash going forward. They exceed Energy Star standards by 41% and feature a number of green elements:
Architect Ray Kappe designed the first (and now iconic) LivingHome in Santa Monica, and now, he has a new multifamily design that LivingHomes will prefabricate for a site in Los Altos, California. The project includes three attached units, of which, two units will have three bedrooms and three bathrooms and one unit will have one bedroom and one bathroom. One of the units will be owner occupied, one will be low-income, and the other will be a standard rental. All of them will be green.
When you think of manufactured homes, you might think of the ranch house with vinyl siding that you gingerly pass on the interstate as it travels on the back of a wide-load truck. You might also think about a LEED Platinum home and imagine a roof spotted with photovoltaic panels, windmill in the front yard, and geothermal dug deep into the ground. The newest offering from New World Home turns both of these ideas on their heads.
Commentators take pot shots at the bike storage and showers credit available in the LEED Green Building Rating System, but I've always liked it -- it's hard to ride a bike to work when there's no bike rack. Certainly bike transportation is good for the environment, and Bike Arc has designed a modular bike park system that I believe will be huge in the next few years. The company incorporated the system into several designs to suit different needs: the Rac Arc is low profile, the Umbrella Arc saves space (see video below), and the Tube Arc and Half Arc versions protect vehicles from the elements.
This is a new urban nature center, the Discovery Center at the Chattahoochee Nature Center (CNC), which will open Saturday, June 20, 2009. Although the initial goal was to achieve LEED Silver, the 10,000 square-foot facility will likely achieve LEED Gold as a result of an early and collaborative effort by owner CNC, architect Lord, Aeck & Sargent, landscape architect EDAW, and general contractor Genoa Construction, et al. Here's what it's all about:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was kind enough to send us an invite to their media day for the super fresh Church History Library. This cutting-edge building is the embodiment of a mammoth effort spanning several years -- 15 years of planning, 4 years of construction, and countless hours tagging, archiving, and moving millions of artifacts and records to the new location. With several temperature controlled and sub-zero vaults, a building like this would generally use a lot of energy, but the design prioritized energy-efficiency and LEED certification.
