Every year in Pittsburgh, the SoArch Lectures Series, organized by Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture, hosts lectures by well-established architects from the US and beyond who are leaders in design and sustainability. The last SoArch lecture recently took place at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where the presenting architect was Peter Busby, the Principal Managing Director of Perkins+Will in San Francisco. After the merger of his firm with Perkins+Will in 2004, he became leader of the firm’s Sustainable Design Initiative. His work emphasizes regenerative planning... 

Local changemakers on stage, April 11th, Pittsburgh Last night in Pittsburgh, the Green Building Alliance and Phipps Conservatory held their latest INSPIRE Speaker Series event, attracting the largest and most diverse audience they’ve had so far. evolveEA is proud to have co-sponsored the evening, which we selected because headline speaker Majora Carter‘s approach to community empowerment through neighborhood planning and design parallels that of our own Urban Strategies work. Carter has been an inspiration to us and many others in the sustainability and urban revitalization... 

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The environmental imperative for saving energy comes in the reduction of emissions from the combustion of fuels. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, over 90% of our nation’s energy use comes from oil, gas, and coal; the combustion of these ancient carbon-based life forms as fossil fuels creates four primary greenhouse gases. Of these, carbon-dioxide is most mentioned, as it is the most prevalent. At atmospheric levels, these emissions trap solar energy, not unlike your car on a hot summer day. The rising level of these emissions can be graphed almost directly... 

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Our common framework for thinking about sustainability entails Triple Bottom Line thinking. Favorable decisions are beneficial to the environment, are equitable and make economic sense. We can argue that the more these properties are fulfilled, the more sustainable the project. The renovation of historic buildings has significant and meaningful overlap with this Triple Bottom Line approach. Reviving an old, underutilized building yields a significant societal benefit not typically accounted for by conventional means. The environmental benefit of historic renovation is clear.... 

Pittsburgh’s achievements in green building and neighborhood planning is increasingly gaining national attention, and evolveEA is proud of our leading roles in some of the city’s most impressive projects. Last month members of our team and some of our local partners traveled to the USGBC’s Greenbuild International Conference & Expo in San Francisco, and the Behavior, Energy & Climate Change (BECC) Conference in Sacramento. Greenbuild 2012 was attended by over 35,000 sustainability enthusiasts, making it the largest event in the international conference and expo’s... 

Scandinavia is known around the world for good design; whether you’re into products, graphics, architecture, or urban spaces, a visit to the region can inspire creative thinking. Over the summer we visited the city of Malmö, Sweden, an industrial-era harbor city which has reinvented itself as a modern sustainable cultural center. In particular, Malmö’s Western Harbor is known for its innovative approach to water infrastructure, which made our visit especially relevant to our urban strategies work here in North America. During our stay, I surveyed the city’s Västra... 

Do you recycle regularly? Do you reuse things whenever possible instead of throwing them away? I’m betting that for the majority of people reading this, the answer to at least one of these questions is yes. This is because in our consumer-driven culture where everything is disposable, the need for resource reuse and recycling have gotten widespread attention. So, if you answered yes to either of the previous questions, I have one more… Does your driver’s license say ORGAN DONOR? Just as its name implies, the Center for Organ Recovery and Education (CORE), located just... 

September 21 was PARK(ing) Day: An annual, one-day, international event in which artists, designers, activists and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform parking spots into “Parklets”, or miniature public parks. This type of design activism was the focus of this year’s US pavilion at the Venice Architecture Bienalle, in which pop-up parks, guerilla bike lanes, and similar urban phenomena were presented as an exhibit called Spontaneous Interventions. Pittsburgh is becoming a center for projects and actions like these. Over the summer, we saw a newly... 

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Imagine buildings that are able to produce all of the energy they need using renewable sources such as wind or solar, that capture and treat all of the water needed for building occupants and systems, eliminating the need for water or sewage treatment infrastructure. Mounting evidence suggests that buildings of the future must look like this to secure a sustainable future. The Living Building Challenge (LBC) is leading the charge by requiring these attributes of projects that are seeking its prominent certification. And as cities and towns transition to green building and sustainable... 

“Competition” is simply defined as a contest between individuals or groups for resources and/or prestige. It is the opposite of “cooperation”, and has been shown to be a powerful motivator. No matter what the goal, people and businesses alike are intrinsically motivated by what their peers are doing. Everyone wants to win, and nobody wants to fall behind. It follows that Sustainable Pittsburgh, whose goal is to promote sustainable development and systemic change for the region, has enlisted this valuable motivator to spur sustainable innovation among it network of member... 

I’m back from a month-long sojourn to South Korea in search of advancements in Green Building. The purpose of the Rotary International-funded trip was to see built environment sustainability from the perspective of South Korea. My major take-away from the trip: the U.S. as a country has a lot of catching up to do. It’s easy to understand why the States are so far behind when you’re standing at Korean Parliament talking to lawmakers and business leaders on both sides of the isle about their agreement on climate change. The fact is that Korea has their stuff figured... 

As a special collaboration, we proudly feature insights by Stephen McKnight, Vice President of Community and Market Assessments, Fourth Economy Consulting. Small towns are hot. They’re hip. They’re attracting investment. Am I crazy? Don’t think so and here’s why. Large urban centers and small towns have more in common than you may first think. Big cities are really a mosaic of small towns (neighborhoods) that share a common economic market. That is certainly true of Pittsburgh, my hometown, with more than 50 distinct and colorful neighborhoods comprising the whole.... 

A truly transformative moment in our region’s history was witnessed by over four hundred people this week. Amid speeches by politicians and funders, the ribbon cutting for the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens’ long-awaited Center for Sustainable Landscapes allowed people to see this impressive building first-hand. Executive Director Richard Piacentini’s vision of the project was formed in 2006 after having heard of the Living Building Challenge, a new conception of sustainable buildings. The LBC sets a standard for a building that will generate more energy than... 

The national American Institute of Architects Convention draws over 17,000 attendees from around the world. These practitioners, professionals and enthusiasts have converged upon Washington DC and are learning about and engaging in the large role that architecture and design play in, well, everything. I had the pleasure of teaching a day-long workshop about the application of LEED and integrated design, the USGBC’s only workshop at the conference, and included attendees from as far away as India. Of particular note in this workshop is the need for project teams to openly... 

Part III of our series, Navigating the Sea of Sustainability Standards, will round out our overview of the complex framework and standard marketplace. While this series may not be fully comprehensive, it presents food for thought concerning leading framework and sustainability evaluation tools across a number of relevant industries and trades. Others continue to compile more complete databases, including very sector specific standards and certifications—one such database can be found at ecolabel index. We prefer to simply illustrate the importance for an organization to evaluate... 

The Era of $1 Gasoline and 7 ¢ kwh Utility Electricity is Over Everywhere we look we’re confronted with the rising costs of energy, whether you’re paying that monthly utility bill, booking a flight, or simply filling up your tank, it’s impossible to ignore the ever increasing cost of energy.  Politically, we’ve seen the latest iteration of the blame game and plenty of associated mud throwing. But in many ways this isn’t anything new—just a bit more global (and thus less ‘controllable’.) What’s more, we’ve watched every President since FDR try to create... 

At the end of Carnegie Mellon University’s fall semester, the School of Design held a one-day exhibition for the senior class, showcasing projects from all the areas of design that make up the school’s renowned curriculum. As an alumni and design professional, I found numerous points of interest in the range of work, the way it was presented, the topics addressed through design, and the evolution of CMU’s design program. The latter is indicative of the design field’s ever-changing character and multi-dimensional nature—design constantly redefines itself to encompass... 

Part one (Places) of our three part series, Navigating the Sea of Sustainability Standards explored the role of standards within an expanding green building market. In summary, certifications and standards have ushered in a new era of green building development, by establishing a set of shared principles, which has led to rapid market uptake. Given the success and widespread expansion of rating systems such as LEED and Energy star into the design, construction and operations industry, we ask next what certifications and standards might best apply to an organization and its... 

We may not realize it, but we rely on the process of benchmarking every day. Whether we’re in the market for a new car or simply choosing between cereal options, reviews and product information (think Consumer Reports, Angie’s List, and nutrition labels) help us analyze goods or services. Information shapes our decision making processes and is a powerful tool for consumers and businesses alike. The concept of benchmarking, a term commonly used in the design, construction and building operations industry, involves comparing building performance against industry standards... 

I bet you didn’t know that we are able to use a planet’s gravity as a slingshot to send things into space. It’s true. Spaceships regularly use Gravitational Assist in order to save fuel, time and expense on their journeys. Although not orbital mechanics, we have noticed an interesting phenomenon of gravitational assist with our green building clients. Green building initiatives, the tactile environmental representations of sustainable principles that house their employees round-the-clock, can be used to launch strategic sustainability pursuits and integrate sustainability... 

Strategic Data Use to Stabilize Neighborhoods was a conference I attended December 6-7 in Baltimore. Around 200 were in attendance, all of us connecting with data differently in our work: community leaders, municipal staff from cities across the US, researchers, urban planners, financial and real estate professionals and a healthy variety of folks from other backgrounds. Considering economic trends and the vast technological advances of the past 5-10 years, a significant range of topics within the realm of data and neighborhood stabilization were available for the conference... 

When it comes to making a difference, we’ve all been in a place that gets us feeling like what we are doing isn’t making that big of an impact. Research has shown that when the going gets tough, people change their attitudes, not their behaviors. That is to say: when the barriers to change are seen as too difficult to over come, people are more likely to stop caring as opposed to ramping up their efforts to brake down those obstacles. Yes, this is a bleak realization, but there is hope! While the research tells us that people do give up on things they care about, it also...