q. i. f?

In many cases, Yungmann calls the region’s utility, Baltimore Gas and Electric Co., for a bill estimate before writing a contract.
   Before last fall, “I could count on one hand the number of times people have asked me about gas and electric,” Yungmann said. “In the last year or so when rates have been going up steadily, almost every one of my first-time homebuyers will ask how much the gas and electric will be.”

From yesterday’s Sun. (BGE to Sarah Susanka: ‘We're the real trendmakers. Eat your heart out.’)

Frankly, the difference is so great that one wonders whether we inhabit the same world. No one talks about designing a sustainable building in Berlin because it is so ingrained in the culture.

Canadian architect of Berlin’s Canadian embassy, quoted in a piece about design/construction practice & regulatory environment for commercial and other large-scale building in the leading Euro countries and in North America.

On boosting ‘green’ ambition and the confrontation with Baltimore’s reality, a good article in February’s Urbanite.

Green buildings must be durable buildings. If you double the life of a building, no matter what the building is made of, you halve the environmental impact of its construction. But aren’t we building durable green buildings?
   Too often the answer is “no,” and too often the problem is moisture. . . .
   Astoundingly, most versions of LEED are silent on the critical matter of durability and its dependence on the relationship between energy and moisture control. LEED-Canada is an exception, with a Materials & Resources credit for durability . . . .
   The debate about using bamboo versus certified maple flooring is a worthy one. However, building professionals need to master building performance as well.

Peter Yost, talking straight in the Jan./Feb. Greensource.

Often the ways these projects have been diluted or hybridized means that they cannot deliver the hoped-for benefits of urbanism, including the environmental benefits. In some instances, projects pretending to be New Urbanism have been simply a pretty way to sprawl or to deliver density without parks or connected streets.

On resolving conflicts between ‘urbanism’ & ‘sustainability’ — a short book excerpt at ArchitectureWeek this week.

While it’s great to preserve pristine, historic and environmentally valuable land whenever possible, the effort is a drop in the bucket compared with the amount of land lost to inefficient, unsustainable and short-sighted development each day. Growth can be accommodated; sprawl cannot.
   Mr. O’Malley knows the statistics all too well (he repeated many of them at his GreenPrint unveiling). Since 1990, Maryland’s population has grown by 8 percent, but the amount of impermeable surface has increased by more than 40 percent.

The Sun, from a Dec. 7 editorial response to the news reported in the article I link to below.

It’s all about the soil. We’re all connected to the soil; we just don’t know it. If you can’t grow healthy soil, you can’t grow healthy plants. If you can’t grow healthy plants, you can’t grow healthy people. And if you can’t grow healthy people, how are you going to grow healthy communities? We talk about sustainable communities. Without healthy food, you can’t have sustainable communities.

Will Allen, of Growing Power, summing up in an interview in the November Urbanite.

An item this week in Annapolis newspaper The Capital reports a move made in builder-developer cooperation with environment protection interests, toward improved stormwater handling in the area. Only one builder, in only one of its ‘luxury home’ developments, but evidence of a turn to better practices underway, nevertheless. The builder-developer, consulting with a landscape architect and a Baltimore ecosystem conservation company, replaced standard stormwater collector construction for the site with construction adapted from stream restoration methods. The new approach promotes on-site absorption by plants and drainage through soil, rather than funneling large collection volume via pipe directly into a natural stream.

GreenSource  The kind of environmental work you do has obviously become much more mainstream in the past few years. What is your perspective . . . ?

John Todd  When you work with complex systems like nature, it takes a long time to accumulate enough — I’m going to use the word stories — about how nature works to be able to hold it all in your mental hands. It would have been impossible for me 20 years ago to talk about taking a whole region and using ecological principles to create a new and durable economy. (And I never, ever expected to win the Bucky Fuller Challenge, because I wasn’t offering a magic bullet.) But before then, it was impossible for me to imagine an eco-machine that would take toxic waste and render it harmless. Time is a big factor. I think there is also a shift today in how people perceive our relevance. In the past, people found our work to be . . . quixotic . . . . Everyone knew at the time we could drag petroleum out of the ground forever and that industrial foods were going to feed us all.

From an interview with biologist & ‘eco-designer’ John Todd in GreenSource.

Aside from the provisions designed to improve the financial system, I am pleased to report the new law extends a number of key tax incentives for energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy — long-standing AIA priorities. Specifically, the energy efficiency commercial building tax deduction, a critical federal incentive for green commercial building that was set to expire at the end of the year, will be extended until December 31, 2013. The extension of this deduction has been one of the AIA’s top legislative priorities for nearly two years.

From a letter praising the expansive bailout law just put through, sent yesterday by AIA president Marshall Purnell’s office.

Maryland-regional business & government news service The Daily Record has run a useful little series this past week on the USGBC’s ever more popular, ten-year-old system for establishing buildings’ and builders’ ‘greenness’ — ‘LEED,’ for Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design. There’s no head-page for the series, unfortunately. To read the whole, see the last article — a look at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s very successful headquarters, the first LEED-Platinum certified building — and trace the series back from article to article using links under the series’ ‘Uncertain Savior’ graphic.

Of the articles looking at criticism of the LEED system, this one citing building-performance guru Joe Lstiburek’s public concerns is worth specific notice. His critique is a bit narrow in focus and perhaps doesn’t sufficiently credit the USGBC’s holistic aims for built-environment reform, but it seems an important one for making sense of the green building problem.