Sweet Onion Creations

2007 will most likely go down as the year that Green went blue, as in it’s now cool. Listen to any NPR station, watch any nature show on television, or read any major news outlet and you’ll run across people waking up to the climate change problem. Marketing huckster are jumping on the band-wagon to try and “greenwash” everything from consumer products to oil companies.

People tend to focus on automobile emissions as the major problem for the planet warming up. Yet, the energy use of buildings is often glossed-over and rarely do you see mention that buildings use on average 71% of America’s electricity and are directly responsible for 38% of all greenhouse-gas emissions (Department of Energy).

So, the US Green Building Council (USGBC) sets up the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) in 2000, as a way to promote green building. The problem is the program has grown so fast (more than 6,500 projects and counting since 2000) that the organization has struggled with defining its long-term vision in the marketplace.

FastCompany ran an excellent article in its October issue, detailing how LEED is at the cross-roads going forward. It has the power to dictate what is sustainable building AND the marketplace is demanding that green be a component of any architecture project.  Design a building and get LEED certification and you’ve got a PR home-run on your hands.  This sells property faster, developers look like heroes, and the architects are slapped on the back for saving the planet.  But as always, the devil is in the details:

The opportunity for LEED to grow and exude more influence is tied directly into its different rating systems.  Points are accumulated from the following categories:  More points earns a higher certification (or a rarer metal certificate like platinum)

• Siting
• Water Use
• Energy
• Materials and Resources
• Indoor Environmental Quality
• Innovation

The article points out a couple of glaring omissions in how it awards the points for different levels of certification:

1. The point categories are not weighted.  Installing a bike rack and buying 50% of your energy from renewable sources are each given the same credit.  Ouch.  A couple of these are freebies to get the ball rolling.  That makes sense but it would be great to see a project being rewarded for really ponying up and making a serious investment.

2. No regional adjustments.  If sustainable design is about melding with your local environment, than why shouldn’t a building in the southwest have water conservation as a key metric?  What if every LEED building going in Las Vegas had to specifically address this issue to get approval by the US Green Building Council?  Developing water conservation standards based on annual precipitation data and tying this back to the water use criteria is a no-brainer.

A couple things in closing…LEED is good but its still an infant.  It’s moving the needle and provides a basic barometer for the general public to rate sustainable design being done by architects and engineers.  The opportunity for really changing the world lies in tightening up that rating system and when that does LEED will grow up.

Living in a college town like Bozeman, you start sense when college finals week rolls around. The coffee shops are full disheveled, edgy students hunched over laptops and pounding espresso. Young people everywhere have the thousand-yard stare. No one else has it worse than with architecture students. Late nights turn into late weeks…

So, we received a call a few weeks back from a student in Boston that had seen our short video on YouTube regarding how 3D printing works for architecture models. He was designing his semester project in Rhino 3d and was curious about building a model and lead times.

Now, file preparation continues to be the biggest wild card in the equation of going from a digital design to the physical object. It can be smooth or it can be a nightmare to create a “watertight” 3d representation in the .STL file format. It can be days or minutes depending on how the design was done in CAD.

We set up a rough timeline and agreed to touch base. Well, the file never showed up on time. No big deal…

Then on a Monday morning I get an email and the final file. Now, I was like all students myself and waited until the 4th quarter to turn everything in. However, to make matters worse the model had to be turned in by the following day. In Boston.

We’ve never flipped an architecture model that fast…here’s a screen shot from Rhino:

Here’s the timeline:

• 10:00 - The Rhino file is prepped and sliced up for the machine
• 10:15 - The 3d printer is fired up and begins building the model
• 3:00 - The model is finished. We begin depowdering and hardening the structures
• 4:30 - Pack the model (it’s still warm) and race to FedEx
• 4:45 - FedEx loads the box and we begin crossing our fingers…

I got a call the following morning from the student saying the model had arrived perfectly intact. He was able to sand and paint it and turn it on time that afternoon to his professor.

We were pleasantly surprised. Given the right variables, it’s now possible to take an architecture design from a computer, build it in 3d, ship it, and have it under 24 hours. Hopefully, architects can start to sleep better at night and not relive final’s week when it comes time to build that physical model for a presentation.