Business
& Labor
2006 COTE Winners Reflect Green-Building Trends
(archrecord.construction.com - 07/26/2006)
By David
Sokol
A decade ago Gail Lindsey, FAIA, remembers
“begging and pleading” architect friends to submit
the 14 projects she needed to be considered for the Top Ten
Green Projects Program, which she had initiated as chair of
the AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE). Times have changed.
This year’s crop was chosen from more than 70 submissions;
where entries were once limited to residences and environmental
centers, the winners range from a Paul Rudolph-inspired home
to a dog-adoption park to a warehouse turned corporate headquarters.
The
2006 Top Ten list was announced this spring, and while
they are exemplary projects, they also take the pulse of green
building in the U.S., according to Lindsey and Henry Siegel,
FAIA, a member of the COTE national advisory group that revised
the COTE Measures of Sustainable Design last year.
For example, Siegel says, “In my
perception, some architects think that sustainable design
is all about the technological solution—they don’t
get that an architect has a lot of influence about how they
shape it and shade it.” The 56,000-square-foot Benjamin
Franklin Elementary School in Kirkland, Washington, demonstrates
that they’re coming around. Mahlum Architects deployed
natural ventilation and used the surrounding forest as a protective
screen to eliminate unnecessary systems—including ceiling
fans. (As part of last year’s metrics revisions, such
passive design elements were given more prominence on COTE’s
Top Ten application.)
This year’s list also confirms
that green design is developing its own aesthetic vocabulary.
“We don’t mean tacked-on solar panels,” Siegel
says, “but how you are integrating it in a meaningful
way. The Solar Umbrella House in Venice, California, designed
by Pugh + Scarpa, borrows the namesake element from Rudolph’s
1953 Umbrella House, but clads the canopy in photovoltaics.
Lindsey and Siegel add that buildings like Seattle’s
Ballard Library, designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, are
more sustainable because communities are less likely to knock
down beautiful designs.
The buildings also may be harbingers
of change. More green buildings emphasize long-term evolution,
and what Lindsey calls a “regenerative” stance toward
context. While Susan Maxman & Partners renovated the Motherhouse
convent in Monroe, Michigan, with an eye to ecological targets,
it was also prepared for reuse when its order of sisters can
no longer use it.
Even if the Top Ten Green Projects
Program doesn’t pave the way for evolution in green building,
there’s a good chance that a wide range of architects
will feel its effects: The AIA, Siegel says, is considering
adapting COTE’s rigorous submission process to its other
honor award programs.
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