Interview by Sara Hart - May 2013

This interview with Jerry Yudelson originally appeared on the GreenSource website.

Sara Hart: You and Ulf Meyer wrote The World’s Greenest Buildings: Promise Versus Performance in Sustainable Design (Routledge, 2013), aneffort to feature how buildings actually perform. How did you collect and interpret the data?

Jerry Yudelson: The book started with the premise that it was possible to find examples of high-performance green buildings that were low-energy-using and architecturally significant. We scoured all publicly accessible databases in the U.S. and Canada and in other major green-building countries—Europe, Asia, and Australia—looking for projects that met several other key criteria: occupied after 2003, at least 50,000 square feet, nonresidential typologies that would provide at least one year of energy data at or near full occupancy and, where possible, water-use data. The cutoff for data was the end of 2011, so only projects completed and occupied by the end of 2010 were considered.

We then went via several routes to collect data, including contacting architects, engineers, owners, and facility managers. We took great pains to determine if reported data represented just the base building or included tenant or occupant energy use, typically for lighting and plug or equipment loads. We have also documented now that we can easily achieve the stretch goal for energy performance in sustainable building: an annual energy use in office buildings of 30,000 Btu per square foot (before renewables). What counts is absolute performance, not relative improvement. After all, nature bats last!

We hope that this book, which requires and features documented performance, will put an end to the current practice of declaring a new building as “the world’s greenest” before it is even finished, certified as LEED Platinum (or equivalent), or has at least a year’s worth of documented performance data.

You chose to be photographed at the Arizona State University (ASU) Biodesign Institute, a building that qualified to be in your recent book. What makes this project stand out?

The Biodesign Institute comprises two large buildings, one LEED Gold and one LEED Platinum, both designed nearly 10 years ago in response to ASU president Michael Crow’s mandate that all new buildings had to achieve at least LEED Gold certification, a revolutionary stance at the time for a university leader. It also responds beautifully to its desert climate, with rainwater harvesting, native vegetation, and solar power.

What are the challenges you face when helping manufacturers to develop sustainability programs and green building products?

In a way, product manufacturers have it the most difficult; they now face more than 300 different certification programs, increasingly stringent requirements for environmental product declarations, life-cycle assessments, Red List avoidance, and so on. I believe that sustainability will move decisively from whole buildings to individual building products over the next decade. We’re just beginning to design and distribute products that meet all key environmental attributes demanded by sophisticated users while still providing longevity (the ultimate sustainable attribute), functionality, beauty, low embedded carbon, and economy.

Many in the industry are cynical about the LEED certification process. Some pursue it merely asa marketing strategy, while others seek ways to game the system. Will LEED v4 change this attitude?

LEED v4 once again illustrates why LEED is so important. By continually “moving the needle” for what constitutes a sustainable building, LEED has become the most important driving force for market transformation to sustainability.

LEED v4 promises to deliver the benefits of green building up and down the supply chain. What do you consider as the biggest challengs facing its implementation?

The biggest obstacles continue to be cost, complexity, and the unwillingness of design, construction, and operations teams to commit to its exacting requirements. I consider LEED to be an unparalleled quality-assurance [QA] process, and I’m always amazed that people will spend $20, $50, or even $100 million on a building without a formal, documentation-driven QA process that incorporates third-party oversight. How does an owner really know what he or she has bought for the money?

Find Jerry Yudelson on google+.

Utilizing a series of charts from the book, the article presents a set of critical evaluation criteria including the sources of a building’s energy, how much water a building should use, how to improve water and energy efficiency in commercial buildings, and more. (Click on charts at right to enlarge.)

Confronting Green Building Performance Challenges

In the end, the article sites a number of contributing factors to the “conundrum” of green building performance—factors that ultimately limit the impact of these buildings in supporting a more sustainable planet. The issues indentified include:

• Actions of building occupants that go against what designers intended
• Engineers who don’t design the actual control system but leave it up to the contractor
• Building designs that are needlessly complex, well beyond the capabilities of standard green building operators to manage

The article challenges the green building industry in the following way, “Imagine buying a new high-end car that doesn’t work and that asks you to fix it… the building sector tolerates a similar situation when commissioning building controls systems.”

What to Do?

There are no simple answers, but as Yudelson’s book emphasizes, progress is being made in a variety of ways. Some that are offered here include:

• Continual commissioning as a third-party quality assurance process that runs from pre-design through the first few years of occupancy
• An extension of the “green buildings that work” ethos amongst ecological engineers

Please click here to read the entire article (registration required).

Happy New Year and it looks like a good year ahead for the green building industry. As a leading green building consultancy, Yudelson Associates has now established a tradition of projecting the top green building trends at the beginning of each new year.

Based on our experience, it seems clear to us that green building will continue its rapid expansion globally in 2013 in spite of the ongoing economic difficulties in most economies.  What we’re seeing is that more people are building green each year, and there is nothing on the horizon that will stop this MegaTrend or its constituent elements. However, the continuing slowdown in commercial real estate and the lower level of government project development will continue to put a crimp in new green building projects. In putting together my Top Ten trends for 2013, leading green building consultant and author, Jerry Yudelson is taking advantage of conversations with green building industry leaders in the U.S., Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australia during the past year.

Yudelson Associates’ Top Ten Green Building MegaTrends for 2013 include:

1. Green building in North America will rebound strongly in 2013, using LEED project registrations as a proxy for this growth. The reduction in commercial real estate construction has not been offset by other sectors such as government construction, which continued to falter, and so the growth rate of green building projects in new construction fell dramatically from 2010-2012. Even so, in 2012, LEED in new construction accounted for about 20% of all put-in-place space, with domestic LEED green building project registrations up significantly vs. depressed 2010 levels. However, we continue to foresee faster growth in green retrofits, and note that surging college and university projects, along with NGO activity, are serving to backstop the fall in commercial and governmental construction. In addition, LEED growth has been and will be rapid in China, the Middle East, Latin America and other fast-growing regions for new buildings.
2. The focus of the green building industry will continue its switch from new building design and construction to greening existing buildings. One fast-growing LEED rating system the past three years has been LEED for Existing Buildings Operations and Maintenance (LEED-EBOM), with cumulative floor area in certified projects now greater than in new construction. We expect this trend to pick up in 2012. Jerry Yudelson’s green building book, Greening Existing Buildings, documents the strategic and tactical components of this trend. One driver of this MegaTrend is that green buildings have rents and asset prices that are significantly higher than those documented for conventional office space, according to recent major academic research studies on new and retrofitted commercial buildings in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, institutional owners and investors are increasingly focused on the sustainability performance of real estate in their portfolios, as evidenced by the GRESB annual survey.
3. Green Buildings will increasingly be managed in the “Cloud,” represented by the large number of new entrants and new products in fields of building automation, facility management, wireless controls and building services information management in 2011 and 2012. In fact, we’ve dubbed 2013, “The Year of the Cloud” for how quickly this trend will manifest.
4. Awareness of the coming crisis in fresh water supply, both globally and in the U.S., will increase. Leading building designers, owners and managers will be moved to take further steps to reduce water consumption in buildings by using more conserving fixtures, rainwater recovery systems and innovative new onsite water technologies. Jerry’s recent water conservation book, Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis, shows how this is being done in green buildings all over the developed world.
5. The global green building movement will continue to accelerate, as more countries begin to create their own green building incentives and developing their own Green Building Councils. Nearly 90 countries with incipient or established green building organizations, on all continents, will drive considerable green building growth in 2013. We’re seeing strong growth in China, other places in Asia (e.g., Singapore), Brazil, much of Europe, South Africa and the Arabian Peninsula countries. At the end of 2012, 40 percent of all LEED-registered projects were located outside the U.S. LEED projects are now being pursued in more than 130 countries, with the USGBC’s “Alternative Compliance Path” serving to facilitate the process.
6. Zero-net-energy buildings will become increasingly commonplace, in both residential and commercial sectors, as LEED and ENERGY STAR certifications and labels have become too commonplace to confer competitive advantage among building owners. Developers of speculative commercial buildings will also begin to showcase Zero Net Energy designs, to gain marketplace advantages. The largest such commercial office building, also registered for certification by the Living Building Challenge, Seattle’s 50,000-sq.ft. Bullitt Center, is scheduled to open early in 2013
7. Green Building Performance Disclosure will be the fastest emerging trend, highlighted by new requirements in California (AB 32), the City of Seattle and many other jurisdictions. Commercial building owners will have to disclose actual green building performance to all new tenants and buyers and in some places, to the public at large. This trend is already well established in Australia, for example, and will spread rapidly as the easiest way to monitor reductions in carbon emissions from commercial and governmental buildings. (However, we should note that as of the summer of 2012 only a handful of member states the European Union, which pioneered this requirement in its 2002 Energy Performance in Buildings Directive, had actually implemented it.)
8. Transparency and “Red List” chemicals will become increasingly a subject of contention, as manifested through such tools as the new Health Product Declaration and the inclusion of points for avoiding certain chemicals contained in LEEDv4, currently scheduled for release in June 2013. Environmental Product Declarations will begin to appear in large numbers in the next 2-3 years, as building product manufacturers increasingly try to gain or maintain market share based on open disclosure of chemical ingredients. I believe that there is huge potential for litigation here, as building owners and occupants begin to claim harm from chemicals in building products and architects, engineers and builders increasingly try to avoid liability from specification and use of such products. Think of the mess that arose around asbestos in building products and now multiply it a hundredfold, with lawsuits stemming from the use of building products with chemicals that are known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, etc.
9. Local and state governments will step up their mandates for green buildings for both themselves and the private sector. We’ll see at least 20 new cities of significant size with commercial sector green building mandates, mostly in the “Blue” states. The desire to reduce carbon emissions by going green will lead more government agencies, universities, hospitals and corporate owners to require green buildings from design and construction teams. As before, this effort will remain largely focused on the coastal states in the US, along with selected major cities such as Dallas, Denver, Chicago and Atlanta, with strong green building histories.
10. Solar power use in buildings will continue to grow, given the prospect of increasing focus on implementing aggressive state-level renewable power standards (RPS) for 2020 and the move toward zero-net-energy buildings. As before, third-party financing partnerships such as Solar City will continue to grow and provide capital for large rooftop systems on warehouses and retail stores, as well as on homes. However, we will see fewer very large solar and wind systems, as federal support begins to be phased out.

Bonus: Five Trends to Watch

While the following items are not “megatrends,” they deserve watching for future impact on the green building industry:

1. Building Performance: My new book, The World’s Greenest Buildings: Promise vs. Performance in Sustainable Design, due out in January 2013, makes a persuasive case that absolute building performance (vs. the relative improvement approach still enshrined in LEED) is going to be an increasing focus for project teams in designing all new buildings.
2. Green chemistry: the new Health Product Declaration, along with myriad other forces, will begin to influence product development and product selection in 2013 and beyond. The trend toward greater disclosure of the makeup of building materials has great momentum.
3. LEED v4: the first new version of LEED in four years will come into effect about mid-2013, but will not take effect for all projects until 2015. We expect to see project teams trying out LEED v4 with selected clients for projects that begin in the second half of 2013, aiming to get a leg up on the competition when LEED v4 reaches full implementation in 2015.
4. Green schools: the USGBC commitment to green schools, now five years old, has acquired considerable momentum in the past two years. We expect to see considerable take-up of LEED at the K-12 school level in 2013-2015, something that had been a hard sell in prior years.
5. Carbon management: while implicit in all green building calculations since 2006, carbon accounting and reduction in building design and operations will grow in importance under both the leadership of the State of California, which implemented carbon auctions for the first time in November 2012, and the federal government, which I expect to put a renewed focus on climate change mitigation measures with the re-election of President Obama.

Find author, writer, speaker, consultant, Jerry Yudelson on google+.

Integrated design ultimately must define both the form and the expected performance of a green building. In this interview, excerpted from Jerry’s new book¹—The World’s Greenest Buildings—German architect Stefan Behnisch talks about how to integrate them:

We have now the new discipline of designing for a more sustainable built environment, which requires a very holistic approach and thus influences definitely the form of buildings. And we are grateful for that, since the newer approaches to architecture are more content-driven and less purely form-driven. So, the criteria that actually define the performance of the building, or define the request for a certain performance of a building, also inform the architectural language and thus the form of a building.

Q: What comes first, form or performance?

A: This question is not really for me to answer, since performance and form are interwoven.

Q: What defines the performance of a building?

A: The performance of a building is closely linked with the prerequisites, the necessities, the purpose, the location, the cultural background, the climatic background and so on of the place where the building is to be built. And all these prerequisites also influence the form of a building. Most architects have perceived this as a contradiction, but actually, it is not.

Q: Did structure influence the form of a building?

A: Definitely; nobody ever questioned that.

We have now the new discipline of designing for a more sustainable built environment, which requires a very holistic approach and thus influences definitely the form of buildings. And we are grateful for that, since the newer approaches to architecture are more content-driven and less purely form-driven. So, the prerequisites, the criteria that actually define the performance of the building, or define the request of a certain performance for a building, also inform the architectural language and thus the form of a building.

Q:  What came first for Genzyme?²

A: At the Genzyme building, the outer form was pretty much given since a master plan defined the building very strictly. It was our first US project; here in Europe, we try to avoid building floor plates that are deeper than 55 feet, for reasons of natural ventilation, natural daylight, and so on. But the master plan and also the necessity of space demanded a deep floor plate, for an almost cube-formed building. And so we did cut a hole in the building, meaning, we gave it an inner atrium with daylight enhancement which brought light deep into the center of the building. This also went along with the client’s requirement to have a highly communicative, sustainable building. So we needed the inner center, the atrium. 

So, one of the first approaches was the atrium. Then we looked at the façades, as we wanted a high performance façade. External shading, which at that time was not very common in the United States, did lead to a roughly 45 percent of the building envelope being a double façade. This double façade was mostly to the south, it was ventilated to create an almost outside sun-shading device to be efficient. So, the form of the building was determined by the master plan, by the city planning, but also in detail by the necessity to have a highly communicative building. The more interesting form at the Genzyme building is definitely the inner form rather than the outer form, so the building, one could say, was designed from the inside out.

Q:  How do you make trade-offs between the architecture and the low-energy goals?

A: There are no trade-offs. It is misperception that architects think they can design whatever they want to and then add technical gimmicks to achieve low-energy goals. Actually, the whole discussion of low-energy consumption, of sustainability, enriches the architectural development. It is not an added aspect; it’s a fully integrated aspect from the beginning of the design. Nobody would ever ask the question, what is the trade-off between structure and architecture? So, it is important to understand that the need for a more integrated design approach between architect and engineers is a medium to lead to a new, more interesting, content-driven architecture. And part of this necessity is the aspect of sustainability. To create a more sustainable built environment, we have to take the cultural context, the geopolitical context, the topographical context, the social context of the site, the climatic context and so on into account. I would make here a strong distinction between sustainable and low-energy, since low-energy is one aspect of sustainability, but only one, there are far more aspects here.

So, just as structure has to deal with Newton’s laws of physics, so also sustainability has to deal with social laws, cultural laws, and also with entropy and many other physical laws. And they inform architecture, they do not hide the architecture.

Q: Were there any trade-offs made for Genzyme?

A: There were no trade-offs since Genzyme was from the outset meant to be an experimental, highly communicative, sustainable building. Architecturally, this is what we wanted and also what the client and users wanted.

Would we have designed something different, if there wouldn’t have been the need for a sustainable building? Yes, we would have designed something different.

Would we have designed something different if there wouldn’t have been the need for a highly communicative socially balanced building? Yes, we would have designed something very different.

Would we have designed something different, if Newton’s law wouldn’t have applied? Yes, we would have designed something very different.

So, it is very hard in hindsight to think about trade-offs and actually, I personally also think it’s a mistake, since it makes designing for a more sustainable environment sound like a compromise, and it is not. To keep designing the energy hogs of the last 80 years is compromising our well-being, our environment, and especially our future.

Q: Do you get the engineers involved early enough so that as the form develops during conceptual and schematic design, the energy goals are pursued concurrently?

A: This again is not easy to answer, since I personally think the question should be asked differently. The question should be: If you include your engineers from the beginning, do they influence the outcome of the design? Yes, they do. They help us to develop a more informed, more holistic, more human-friendly architecture. And since so many disciplines today are involved in designing good architecture, there are more or less important engineers to be involved, like when designing a concert hall. You would have the acoustical engineers involved from the outset, unless you want to work with technical gimmicks afterwards to compensate for the shortcomings. The same applies to a more sustainable built environment. We need our engineers to actually avoid technical means that are applied afterwards to the building. Doing more sustainable and energy efficient buildings requires 60 percent designing the right architecture with the input of climate engineering, of structural engineering, of building physics, of, depending on the location, acoustic engineers, and definitely of natural and artificial lighting engineers. And they are even already involved in working on the first design phases or even in an architectural competition. It is a fully integrated process, a highly collaborative process, and not a one person creative process that later on applies problem solving means and methods to it.

Q:  Where do you see the concern over building performance affecting architectural design in the next five years?

A: I do not share this concern, I am absolutely convinced that the more holistic aspect of a more sustainable built environment enriches our architectural abilities, informs the form-finding in a very positive way.

In the beginning of the last century it was almost a miracle to seemingly overcome Newton’s laws of physics and be able to build high towers. And that informed, changed the architecture substantially till this day. That made itself very visible in the appearance of these buildings. A good example is the Eiffel Tower: a brilliant piece of engineering, but also a brilliant piece of architecture. Imagine Paris without the Eiffel Tower. The same applies to the Centre Pompidou in Paris by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, a brilliant piece of engineering that showed the possibilities of aseemingly highly flexible, high-tech architecture. Did it compromise the architecture? No, it enriched it. Or an even better example, the Olympic facilities in Munich designed by my father Günter Behnisch in the late Sixties, beginning of Seventies of the last century. A brilliant piece of engineering; but also a brilliant piece of architecture, enriched by the art of engineering. Here, suddenly engineering did not only enrich the buildings, but even more the landscape. Structure, space and landscape were unified.

And if we are really willing to accept this challenge, we will have the possibility in the near future to actually enrich our architecture, bring new aspects into the architecture, that help us to develop a new, enriched and more human friendly kind of architecture. I personally think the days are over, that architecture is perceived as an academic art, developed in a clean, unchallenged environment with a felt pen or 6B pencil, by a great master. We should never forget The Fountainhead was a book and a movie, it was never reality.

Q: Which sustainable systems (e.g., geothermal, PV) are still a hard sell even in LEED Platinum projects, and why?

A: There are many sustainable systems that are a hard sell. But in my personal experience the simpler ones are a harder sell than the high-tech stuff. Outside sun shading devices: I have had so many questions regarding maintenance, management and so on. Obviously, in US nobody is aware that actually this equipment has been used for the past 50 years in Europe. And sometimes it failed; sometimes it didn’t fail, depending on the quality of the product. It is like a car. You buy a Chrysler, you have problems. You buy another car, you might not have problems. And it is the same with the sun-shading devices.

Geothermal is, depending on the project, a pretty hard sell, photovoltaic not, because photovoltaic is subsidized and photovoltaic is seen by everybody. It is sort of a flag signaling to everybody that this is a green building. Geothermal energy is hidden in the ground. You have to put a sign on the building that you actually have done it.

Generally the elements you don’t see are always harder to sell than the elements you see. But let’s go back for a moment to talk about sustainability: Sustainable systems is a difficult term because geothermal might not even be sustainable, depending on the climate and where you are, it might be the wrong answer. The Genzyme building is looped to the cooling circle of a power station. So, all the energy Genzyme takes is the waste energy from a power station. Geothermal would have been absolutely not sustainable in this case, because it would have added energy demands, since waste energy is the cheapest and most eco-friendly energy you could have. There are some PV cells on the roof of Genzyme, they made sense, they are OK, but mostly they fulfill LEED Platinum points.

I personally think photovoltaic makes sense also in the climate in Boston, but then it should be used in a more integrated way. It should be part of the façades; it should not be an added element. The glass you need for photovoltaic should also serve as rain screen, sun shading, or something similar to use the physical properties typical for glass.

We experienced this lately on another project for the first time, where we calculated costs with a construction manager and a construction company, that sustainable systems were also even cheaper in constructing the building than traditional air-conditioning. We didn’t even have to look at maintenance, at energy costs; capital costs were cheaper. So we experienced a major shift. Also we ended up supporting our argument that sustainability pays off on several levels: maintenance, energy, human friendliness, comfort, and thus productivity in buildings.

¹ Excerpted from Chapter 5 of The World’s Greenest Buildings: Promise vs. Performance in Sustainable Design, by Jerry Yudelson and Ulf Meyer, to be published in January 2013 by Routledge Taylor & Francis (London/New York). Stefan Behnisch is the founder of the well known firm, Behnisch Architekten (www.behnisch.com), based in Stuttgart, Germany.

² Genzyme Headquarters, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the first large (350,000-sq.ft.) LEED-Platinum-certified building in the world, completed in 2003.

In the interview, Yudelson explains that integrated design for green building expands and refocuses the linear, “silo’ed” production process of traditional building design, construction and operations and turns it on its head by establishing a new approach that aims to include all building project stakeholders in a creative dialog that continues from the beginning of the design process through construction and operations.

Some of the key points of the interview are:

• The integrated design approach is sometimes referred to as “Everyone Engaging Every Issue Early.”. Integrated design uses a systematic approach to discovering interrelationships between project elements that minimize cost, redundancy and waste while still maximizing performance for all stakeholders. Its best analog is in the product production approach known as “lean manufacturing.”
• Integrated design involves a series of multi-stakeholder charrettes, or intensive design and discussion workshops. These are based around an extensive climatic engineering analysis, as well as methods to tease out stakeholder issues that will positively affect cost, building quality, environmental performance and operational ease.
• Integrated design is a results-oriented method that’s finding increasing popularity with architects, contractors, owners/developers and green building consultancies. It can also be known as Integrated Project Delivery, or IPD, which typically involves all parties signing a contract obligating them to resolve disputes without change orders or cost increases, effectively putting all parties “on the same side of the table.”
• A related approach is to hire a process management consultant. This approach is used todevelop and run a method known as “fixed-cost, variable scope” procurement in which the owner/developer creates a hierarchical or “laddered” set of project goals, each with a defined measure of success, and then invites design/build teams to bid on the project while indicating how many of the goals they will commit to achieving at the fixed cost. In this type of project, the owner lets go of design oversight early on, giving the design/build team freedom to achieve project goals within the scope of the fixed budget. This approach contrasts with the typical “fixed-scope, variable-cost” procurement method, in which the cost is never really fixed until the end of design and which often leads to the cost-cutting method known euphemistically as “value engineering.”

In his book, Green Building through Integrated Design, Yudelson profiles more than 20 LEED Platinum projects that used this process to achieve high-performance results and describe an integrated design approach that works for most green buildings. He points out how mechanical and electrical engineers need to figure out how to provide comfort, power, water, lighting quality and other building amenities while reducing the overall cost of such systems, so that there can be a “cost transfer” back to the architectural and operations part of the project.

As a leading authority on green building consulting and an international keynote speaker, Yudelson recommends hiring a process management consultant for each green building project. This might be the LEED consultant, if they have relevant experience, or it can be someone else. He says, “Outlining the process, getting buy-in from all parties, conducting effective design ‘eco-charrettes’ - these are all things on which money is well spent in the long run. To get the design right the first time, the process also has to be right the first time.”

Subscribe for a FREE Download

Subscribe to Jerry Yudelson’s GreenBuild Bulletin (email newsletter) via the blue box at the top of the right column and receive a free PDF download of this interview (subscribers will receive this link in the next newsletter).

In October of 2012, we received word that the UniSource Energy corporate headquarters building in downtown Tucson had finally received LEED(r) Gold status, more than nine months after initial occupancy. A good-looking, 270,000-sq.ft. office building along Broadway in the downtown core area, the UniSource Energy (NYSE: UNS) building is designed to serve nearly 500 people working for southern Arizona’s main electric utility, Tucson Electric Power. The nine-story building provides improved working space for employees of Tucson Electric Power (TEP), the company’s principal subsidiary. It also includes nearly 11,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space as well as a conference center, meeting rooms and 500 parking spaces.

Yudelson Associates began this project in February 2010 as the LEED green building consultant, assisted by Nicole Isle of Brightworks, working with a team led by Ryan Companies, Phoenix, with architectural services from The Davis Experience of Tempe and Swaim Associates Architects of Tucson. Ryan Companies was both the developer and general contractor, using a design/build approach to deliver the project’s green-building features according to UniSource’s requirements.

To kick off the sustainable design aspects of the project, Yudelson Associates organized and conducted an all-day eco-charrette which resulted in a clear statement of this green building’s environmental and energy goals, most of which were realized during the course of the LEED certification effort. The eco-charrette consisted of general group discussions and presentations facilitated by us as green building consultants, followed by breakout group sessions focused on key topics such as energy, water and indoor environmental quality. In this daylong event, while we used the LEED rating elements to guide our discussion, we didn’t introduce the LEED scorecard until near the end of the eco-charrette. By the end of the first day, we were pretty sure this project could achieve Gold certification, with an outside chance of achieving the Platinum level.

In this project, the constrained downtown site, adjacent to a streetcar line under construction, didn’t allow for any adventurous landscaping measures for stormwater management, but did help to garner a lot of LEED credits for sustainable site selection and low-impact development.  In particular, the urban location helped to achieve 22 out of 26 total points for the LEED Site Selection credits, including location to existing transit and the new streetcar project, along with three levels of parking tucked under the building, reducing urban heat island effects and proper stormwater management through onsite detention. (Insert Figure - LEED Facts).

As a green building consultancy, we welcome these kinds of opportunities, and we congratulate UniSource Energy and the whole development team on this milestone LEED Gold certification.

The LEED certification process showed me once again how easy it is to achieve a LEED Gold certification on a conventional building budget. Interestingly, the project started with a goal of achieving LEED Platinum - before the eco-charrette. I think that, just as in high school, everyone secretly wants to date the prom queen or the captain of the football team, every project owner wants to achieve LEED Platinum, at least until the reality of cost sets in! The eco-charrette quickly helped the building team ratchet down its goals one notch - to Gold. Given that we eventually realized 62 points, just two over the minimum for a Gold project, that decision turned out to be timely and realistic.

However, taking the LEED approach, with Gold as the goal, did allow the project’s designers to achieve a projected 24% lower energy use than the ASHRAE 90.1-2007 standard, reduce water use 30% from code levels, install a 100-kW solar thermal system for water heating and a 150,000-gallon rainwater collection cistern for site irrigation. Tucson’s heavy but very infrequent rainfall, mostly during the summer “monsoon” season, requires very large onsite storage, so as not to burden the downtown area’s antiquated storm sewer system with additional runoff from the developed site.

What were the lessons learned? The first LEED lesson, which will come as no surprise to experienced green building consultants, is that the devil is in the details, AND it’s all details! For example, we were surprised near the end of the certification process, to find out that our green-building team had not yet submitted properly dated photos of the soil erosion and sedimentation control measures, a LEED prerequisite quite easy to meet, and so we had to back up and resubmit those, otherwise the whole effort would have failed.

A second LEED lesson, related to the first, is that the LEED consultants have to be very proactive in getting busy professionals to dot all the “I’s” and cross all the “T’s” for LEED documentation, because the reviewers are very thorough and will question any details that aren’t 100% in order, regardless of the clear intention of the measure(s) taken. After the first (design) review, we received a lot of reviewer comments on incomplete documentation that the team had to address when submitting the final review.

The third lesson is that no matter how much LEED experience individual team members have and how competent they are as professionals, the LEED project management team has to make sure that each staff person on every architect, owner, developer, consultant or contractor team, has a clear understanding of their responsibilities for documentation. The fact that a particular firm has done lots of LEED projects doesn’t guarantee that every team member fully understands LEED documentation requirements. Education is ongoing and never-ending in the LEED (and green building) universe. This was evidenced by several reviewer requests for documentation that we thought had been properly submitted by the consultants.

The fourth lesson is that sometimes decisions are made for reasons of economy that really stretch out and complicate the LEED process. In this project, the owner’s initial choice to do some of the building commissioning work in-house did not work well, since the owner’s team had no prior experience in commissioning. This led to divided responsibilities in commissioning, once they hired an outside consultant, and really stretched out getting the final commissioning report done.

But, in the end one should always celebrate successes! The project did get Gold certified, it got finished and occupied on time, it’s designed to be reasonably energy- and water-efficient, it employs healthy building materials and creates an interior environment that should work well for employees. Ultimately, that should be the end-game for any LEED project.

As a green building consultancy, we welcome these kinds of opportunities, and we congratulate UniSource Energy and the entire development team on this milestone LEED Gold certification.

Jerry Yudelson, PE, LEED Fellow, has been working on LEED projects since 2001. For eight years, he was a national LEED faculty member and trained more than 3,500 building industry professionals in the LEED system. He is the author of 13 books on the subject and also the founder of Yudelson Associates, a green building and marketing consultancy in Tucson, Arizona.

We are likely to continue to see more green building related Executive Orders, administrative mandates, grants and loans, along with other policy instruments used to continue the greening of the Defense Department and GSA buildings. Also, look for sustainability concerns to be brought into affordable housing and strengthening the nation’s green energy infrastructure. I believe we are likely to see the Republican House capitulate on some of these policy issues, e.g., withdrawing the “no LEED” requirement for Defense Department and GSA projects, simply because reduced numbers, fiscal policy, budgets and other issues are likely to preoccupy them.

What we are NOT likely to see is a return to the first two years of “anything goes.” Thus, I do not think we will see the DOE solar technology loan programs, a “green jobs” czar and other policy and program initiatives that have already fallen upon hard times. We are more likely to see greater use of “federalism,” with waivers, grants and other methods employed to let states experiment with accelerating green jobs, green energy, green building and energy efficiency when using federal money for projects and programs.

In addition, I would not be at all surprised to see European Union climate initiatives such as mandatory disclosure of building energy performance; stronger renewable energy goals; and “retrofit upon resale” for commercial buildings creep into the US climate-change adaptation dialog. Certainly, there will be increasingly strong support for state and local initiatives along these lines.

Perhaps the most interesting short-term green energy battles will be over the Keystone pipeline, ethanol subsidies and EPA ethanol fuel mandates, the extension of wind power production tax credits and a possible renewal of residential energy tax credits, with the aim of stimulating the rise of the green economy. I would expect President Obama to have a more pragmatic second term, learning from the excesses and errors of first-term policy ideas. Look also for a new team to take over in all key sectors affecting everything green. Most cabinet and subcabinet officials get worn out in less than two years; but at slightly lower levels, many green advocates are firmly embedded in the policy apparatus and are poised to exert greater influence.

One other prediction seems certain: Bill Clinton is going to have a lot of influence, since he essentially rescued the President, both at the Democratic Party convention and during the fall campaign, by relentlessly attacking Romney’s proposals. Since the Clinton Climate Initiative is Mr. Clinton’s signature initiative, look for the Obama Administration to adopt a far more proactive climate change mitigation stance, a much more aggressive energy efficiency retrofit program, and possibly to push for a renegotiation of the Kyoto treaty, to bring it into accord with the fact of China’s new role as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? I look forward to hearing your views as we make the most of four more years of an Administration that is encouraging to the green building industry and all things green. Certainly, the election of a new Obama administration offers everyone working for a greener future more hope.

“[T]he federal government used a life-cycle cost analysis to go through the measures that were included in the building. That’s part of the rigor of the overall funding. They looked at a larger time horizon that really accounted for the life of the different systems. That was really a key. It’s a great way to think about our projects and our systems,” said Lisa Petterson of SERA Architects.

A 170,000-gallon tank will harvest rainwater and supply water for the building’s non-potable uses. Radiant heating and cooling, daylighting, smart lighting systems, and elevators that generate energy along with energy-saving façade treatments are all part of the energy reduction strategy. A rooftop photovoltaic array will offset up to six percent of the buildings energy consumption.

“The feedback we’re getting from the community is you couldn’t fit EGWW into a better location because we’ve ended up complementing existing historic architecture, architecture that defined its own era. It’s interesting how our ‘new’ EGWW fits in. And if you observe this building over a couple of days and watch the play of the light, it’s really quite stunning. It presents itself differently throughout the entire day and throughout every weather condition.  I hope it’s going to be a destination building for quite a while, because it has a story to tell—being sensitive to the geography and exploiting the benefits that it already provides,” said Pat Brunner, Supervisory Project Executive, US General Services Administration.

• Gross Area: 526,596 square feet
• Construction Cost: $126 million
• Anticipated Completion: May 2013
• Program: Federal Government Offices
• Distinction: (Targeted) LEED Platinum
• Owner: US General Services Administration
• Lead Architect & Interior Design: SERA Architects
• Design Architect: Culter Anderson Architects
• Mechanical Engineer: Stantec
• Electrical Engineer: PAE Consulting Engineers
• Plumbing Engineer: Interface Engineering
• Commissioning Agent: Glumac
• Structural & Civil Engineer: KPFF Consulting Engineers
• Signage Design Consultant: Mayer/Reed
• Contraction Manager: Howard S Wright
• Mechanical Subcontractor: McKinstry
• Electrical Subcontractor: Dynalectric
• Curtainwall Subcontractor: Benson Industries

A central atrium draws natural light into the center of the large floorplates. A rainwater harvesting system supplies more 60 percent of the building’s non-potable water needs. Although historic-preservation restrictions and other regulations prevented Vestas from installing windmills atop the structure, plans are in place for 112-kW rooftop solar array. The project is targeting a LEED Platinum certification and 50 percent less energy use than a similar building built to the Oregon energy code.

“One of our core philosophies is implementing as much sustainability in every project that we can. Why push sustainability on a historic renovation? Beyond the simple fact that it’s right thing to do, we think there’s a good business case for sustainability in buildings whether they are new or retrofitted,” said Patrick Wilde, VP of Development, Gerding Edlen Development.

• Gross Area: 184,000 square feet
• Cost: $ 64 million
• Program: Corporate office
• Completion Date: April 2012
• Distinction: (Targeted) LEED Platinum
• Developer: Gerding Edlen Development
• Owner: 14th & Everett RPO, LLC
• Architect: GBD Architects
• Structural & Civil Engineer: KPFF Consulting Engineers
• MEP Engineer: Glumac
• Contractor: Skanska USA

Fall is the perfect time to develop and execute a fourth-quarter green building marketing strategy that can feed into complementary initiatives that will meet the test of market conditions in 2013. As a green building and marketing consultant, I’d like to offer some of the most important ideas that we work with everyday that can help you to formulate an effective marketing strategy, one that you can then push into a Tactical Marketing Plan for the end of 2012 and all of 2013. This high-level advice is good for all kinds of green building and professional services firms (architecture/engineering/construction/planning) as well as green building and sustainability consultancies.

What is a Marketing Strategy?

An effective marketing strategy is about more than just the mundane aspects of marketing because it determines the nature and direction of your business, annunciates while it also fleshes out the specifics of the innovative products and/or services that you plan to bring to market. These products/services must provide appropriate value for your customers and reinforce on your brand image. In turn, brand image identifies the value you want to be known for delivering to your clients AND that your clients perceive represent value to THEM.

Too often, strategy falters in execution because there is a strong disconnect between what an architect, engineer, or builder believes represents value to the client and what the client is most concerned about. As someone once remarked, “For architects, design is a verb (it’s something they do), but for clients it’s a noun (it’s something they get.)” No client wants to buy a design, per se; they want to buy a finished product that will have more value than it costs. Here are some key questions that will help you make sure your green building marketing plan is well-focused:

• Is your firm delivering value to clients sufficient to stand out from the (equally talented, experienced, etc.) competition?
• Is the perceived value greater than the real cost? How will you know? How will the client know?
• When is the last time you surveyed your client base to find out what they really think about your services? That should be the preliminary step to formulating any marketing strategy, painful though it is on occasion.

The STP principles

I have written at length in Marketing Green Building Services: Strategies for Success (Routledge, 2008, Kindle edition available) about the importance of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning as key strategic steps to take prior to trying to differentiate your services (see graphic). After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, which clients comprise your targets and how you want them to perceive you, your chances of marketing success diminish greatly.

Marketing Communications

Marketing communications is everything you do to position the business in the minds of the clients and then to differentiate this positioning from that of close competitors. This means you also have to be clear about who your competitors really are. Most architects think the competition is other architects, but with the rise of alternative delivery approaches (think Design/Build or Integrated Project Delivery), this is no longer the case. In suburban office construction, for example, the competitor can even be a general contractor who can deliver a generic office building much cheaper using tilt-up concrete construction than can an architect using a standard “design/bid/build” approach.

Some of the tools of today’s marketing communications that you need to plan for include:

• Website and newsletter
• Social media, including at least Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest, the top four sites
• Events and exhibits
• Press releases
• Video (in which case, you can add YouTube to the social media list above)
• By-lined articles in trade and professional media, especially those read by clients
• Internal communications to staff to reinforce positioning and differentiation

The “STP Highlight Film”

Most professionals are too busy these days to watch and read anything but the highlights. When is the last time, for example, that you watched a complete sporting event on TV? Thus, we all need to consider:

• How are you delivering your firm’s highlights (sustainability, project types, key people, philosophy) to clients?
• Is it piecemeal or is it an organized and coherent whole, available at any time, any platform, in bite-sized pieces?
• How much of it is visual (vs. text), which most decision-makers prefer?
• How much use are you making of infographics to differentiate your offering?

Like it or not, we’ve all become nibblers of information, seldom having time or inclination to sit long enough to eat a full-course meal, even those eight-page “white papers” that large companies find so intriguing to produce.

The Audit and Gap Analysis

You need some outside help to audit your marketing offerings and to identify gaps between what you’re producing for distribution and industry “best practices.” An outside consultant is often the best way to do this. Here’s why:

• If you could (or would) do it yourself, you’d already have done it.
• An outside consultant’s viewpoint is extremely valuable because it’s very hard to be objective about your own work.
• An experienced outsider can often deliver the message about deficiencies much better than an insider whom you see and talk to everyday.

Once you’ve audited what you’re doing now and identified the gaps with “best practices” among competitors, then it’s time to determine what your priorities are going to be to close the gap.

The Budget is the Plan!

In the end, it’s still all about money and time. Among all the things that you can do to improve marketing results, i.e., to sell more stuff (“SMS” for short), you’ll have to assess what resources you have to devote to the effort. Ask yourself:

• How much of people’s time is available?
• Do I have the right people, or do I need to hire a marketing specialist/director/consultant to make this happen?
• How much out-of-pocket cash can the firm make available to improve its positioning and differentiation activities, such as producing video?
• Who is going to be responsible for results, and on what timetable?

Thought Leadership

If content is king on the web and content development is everyone’s greatest challenge, then your challenge is to assess where your clients want to go (or need to go) and then figure out how you can assert your importance in that process. Some architectural firms are very aggressive in promoting thought leadership; most engineering firms don’t even try. Why do we have “Starchitects” who stand out from the pack and get the most lucrative design commissions, often without much competition, if thought leadership doesn’t have its own dramatic benefits?

It takes a lot of consistent effort, applied over many years to become a recognized thought, especially in the green building industry, yet it can, and has been done! Finally, here are the bottom line questions that every marketer has to ask themselves:

• What are you willing to commit, in terms of time and resources, to advancing your thought leadership to center stage?
• Where are you willing to start from and what are the goals that you want to achieve?
• By when will you achieve these goals?

Feedback

Feedback is an essential component of any marketing activity. I’d welcome your feedback on the ideas in this article and your contribution to the ongoing discussion. Thanks.