Metal Buildings, Concepts For Building

This is a guest post by Benjamin Preston.

A century ago, architects and engineers began a building height-race that created some of the world’s most iconic structures. Freed from the limitations of masonry, designers erected steel-framed towers, from New York City’s Empire State Building to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. But as climate change enters the global vocabulary and energy prices increase, a more important rivalry has come into being: The race to create the world’s most efficient buildings.

The incentive is simple: money. Heating, cooling and powering buildings accounts for 40% of America’s energy use. Energy efficient, ergonomic buildings are cheaper in the long run, because they use less energy and typically create greater employee productivity (when you think about it, it’s hard to imagine that a guy or gal working in an over-airconditioned, underheated, windowless basement of some government building in Washington, D.C. would be all that productive). Now, not only environmental organizations but also deep-pocketed corporate entities are taking notice of the sustainability trend.

At the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting last week, green building leaders met to discuss using greater cooperation between CGI members to expand sustainable development. The Big Apple’s rich urban backdrop was an appropriate subject, given that much of the city’s attention has been focused on greening its buildings. Rick Fedrizzi, founding chair of the U.S. Green Building Council, was a key speaker — in a recent op-ed in the Huffington Post, he pointed out that residential buildings, which account for more than half of U.S. building energy consumption, are becoming more of a focus. The U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED (Leaders in Energy and Environmental Design) certification program is already working in 74 million square feet of commercial building space, but building codes for homes have fallen behind current needs.

Buildings’ impact on water and energy consumption and carbon emissions are clear enough, but when you consider how those individual items affect climate change, the impact is magnified. Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., said that building efficiency essentially boils down to a series of hard choices for policymakers and designers to make as building technology evolves. In a November 7, 2010 op-ed in the Washington Post, he wrote:

As the physicist and White House science director John Holdren has said: “We basically have three choices: mitigation [cutting emissions], adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be.

Today’s conservatives would do well to start thinking more like military planners, reexamining the risks inherent in their strategy. If newly-elected politicians do nothing, they will doom us all to bigger government interventions and a large dose of suffering – a reckless choice that’s anything but conservative.

Let’s start with costs. The investment needed to slow carbon pollution might total from 1 to 2% of global GDP each year for several decades, according to a 2006 study by the British government. This spending would pay for advanced technology, better land use and modern infrastructure. The same study put the cost of inaction – including economic harm from property damage and lost crops – at 5 to 20 percent of global GDP, lasting in perpetuity, with the risk of vastly higher catastrophic damage. You tell me which option is more fiscally responsible.”

From new construction to retrofits, there are a range of options available for bringing buildings up to 21st century energy efficiency standards. Offsite modular fabrication reduces construction site waste. Whatever waste there is can be reused to create new building materials. Water, power, and insulation retrofits are becoming more popular in homes, and have been sweeping the commercial sector for some time. The Empire State Building recently received a $500 million ecomakover, earning it a LEED Gold certification and projected annual energy savings of $4.4 million. It will take time for residential standards to reach commercial levels, but at least we’re on the right track. If we play our cards right, retrofits, new construction, and continually evolving efficiency innovation will create employment as new industries form around emerging technology.