Green buildings are more than brick and mortar | Bryn Davidson | TEDxRenfrewCollingwood

So before we get started, I wanted to do a quick survey, so raise your hand who lives or works in a building. Okay, it's an easy question. The reason I wanted to mention this is that I would like to talk about the connection between

buildings

and climate change and a lot of the discussion about climate change is very abstract ocean levels rise a coal fired power plant somewhere place in the distance, but the

buildings

are tangible, they are one of the few things that really unites us all and that we have in common. But the problem with buildings, depending on how you look at it, is that they contribute almost half of the

green

house gas pollution that contributes to climate change, so when we wake up in the morning we turn on the shower and turn up the thermostat.

It's cold, we plug in our laptop, all those actions go through our building and somewhere that energy is creating that

green

house gas pollution, so this is a problem that we can't address climate change without thinking about buildings , now professionals from all over the world, people involved in the environment. Construction is trying to create greener options for the way we build. In fact, if you look at houses, you might think about what is a green house or an eco-friendly house and if you type that into a search engine, you might get a bunch of images like You've got this big house perfectly oriented to catch the sunlight. sun.

Very thick insulated walls. In some cases, you might even have solar panels on the roof, something we often refer to as green glow. It's been added a little bit there, but you know? Sometimes some wonderful things in terms of energy production, the challenge is that over the last 40 years, while we're trying to create these green buildings, we've still seen this steady increase in global greenhouse gas pollution, so it starts It's obvious that what we are doing is not enough a building like this has ecological features it has solar panels it actually produces an impact close to zero or Net Zero but we are starting to realize that we need something better, we need to go further, we really need projects that can be net positive now to become net positive as we start to dig deeper into this, we realize that it is not enough to do

more

of what we have been doing in the past,

more

solar panels, more insulation, what What we need is actually a fundamental element. change in the way we see and think about buildings, we can't just look at the object or thing, we need to see the change that thing creates in the world, only then can we start thinking about positive change.

What we can have when addressing an issue like climate change Now, to delve deeper into green buildings, we must first realize that there are some pieces missing in the way we see and think about buildings and why those pieces are missing in the way we That we set categories and goals for green buildings are pointing us in the wrong direction, but the good news is that there are actually many good examples of net positive projects that we can learn from and once we have internalized them. lessons, we can really figure out how to move forward, so to start I want to talk about this really amazing building built in the early '80s by a fellow named Amory Lovins.

He has done an enormous amount of work over the last 30 years in this field. sustainability this building is amazing it's super insulated it gets all its energy from the sun in the middle of Colorado in the winter they can go crazy inside without any energy input from the outside so it's an amazing building that has influenced generations of designers like me but when you look at the photos of this project, there is always something missing outside the frame of this incredible building: the building's parking lot. This incredible, amazing eco-friendly building is located in the middle of nowhere, so if you want to get there, you can get there. you have to drive, you want to, you know, drive miles if you want to get a loaf of bread, you have to drive miles, so this is a challenge that we have when we ignore the impact of location.

Now let's look at it another way. I have exactly the same green building, two different locations in the region in one place where you can walk, you can ride a bike, you have the option to take public transportation, somewhere else you have to drive, maybe all your family members have to have a car, what this means is that this exact same building, the family on the right, may have two or three times the climate footprint of the family on the left and this all has to do with where that building was located. Now a great way to visualize this is to go to Walk Score calm where you can enter an address and it gives you a score of how walkable that location is, so the Green Zone are our areas where you have the option to walk or drive to take the transit.

The red zone you depend on. The impact of car appearance and location is so profound that it would actually be better to live in a drafty old house in a walkable location than to live in that super green house in the middle of nowhere, and this is one way profoundly different from starting to think. about what that building does, when you look at the Leavens house, it uses a tenth of the energy of a typical house, that's amazing, but when you consider the additional impact of transportation, the footprint is actually a little larger than You might have thought at first glance that now there's another piece we'll get to.

I wanted to emphasize this bit about the location with this little green icon so that it's burned into our brains how important this location is, but the next missing piece. What we get from this kind of hint of this great kind of landscape that this building is in is the question of what was there before, whether it was a field, a farm or a forest, that's what we would call a totally new place and on totally new ground. At the site no one was burning fossil fuels before he showed up, the squirrels weren't driving little cars or anything, there was no burning fossil fuel, so when we look at the change this created from before to after, even though it's a super Sustainable construction is having a negative impact on the climate and this is where we have to start thinking about this because there is a magical way we can improve this story if that new sustainable construction Bing had replaced or renovated the old building with drafts, it's a completely different story, suddenly we are reducing emissions and we have had a positive impact on the climate, so this is where we have the exact same building but two very different stories in terms of how that building impacts the climate, for which is not enough just let's say it's a big building, we have to see what the change was in the world that was created and those are missing pieces, we have to start asking where it is located and what it replaces and once we have done that, then we can start to establish better categories for how we compare buildings now.

If you're like me and you create buildings for a living and you're trying to be green, you might like to see how many points I get. Where is? I rate how I stand next to everyone else, so I put together this kind of hierarchy of sustainable building systems and everyone asks how good their building is and the reason it's a pyramid is because at the bottom are all the old. buildings there are tons of them much more at the top are the green buildings a relatively small number now those green buildings the lessons that are learned there filter through the building code and influence the way everything else is done, so this is not just a pyramid, it's almost like a wedge or an arrow, it's like pointing in the direction, this is how we are changing our entire cities by having this goal, so when we look at green buildings there are two categories, The first is the typical green-as-lead building, maybe you.

If you're familiar with a building that is LEED Gold, any of these green systems, it always rates that building relative to some typical buildings, so this main house could be 30 or 50 percent better than a typical house of the same size, it's always that abstract. Compared to the above, if you want to do even better, you have this category of buildings that actually strive to not only be 30% less bad or 50% less bad, but they actually reduce the impact to zero and there are many Amazing things that are now happening all over the world in this category, one of these systems, this type of classification systems is called passive house.

I know it's exciting, so with Passivhaus what a passive house is is a building that is so well insulated, has such big windows, is so airtight that it doesn't need a central heating system, even in the middle of winter, it can take advantage of the heat from the body coming from the sun, that's all you need and now thousands of these things are being built all over the world again, emphasizing with this little green. icon that says the passive house is all about the building envelope, the shell, the other piece is this green energy technology, so solar panels are windmills, the green glow we can add to any building, but if you put it in a really good building like a passive house, you can actually get to Net Zero impact, where this building doesn't have a carbon impact like a typical building would and this is pretty good, it sounds like it. that we should be doing, but if we take a second and zoom out to the big picture, go back and look at the growth of greenhouse gas emissions over the last 40 years and think about what's going to happen in the future, of course If we just build buildings to the minimum code, if we continue to expand by building new buildings to the minimum code, those emissions continue to increase, so what if we build everything to the LEED Gold standard or some other green rating system?

We are still growing, but not as fast. We are being a little less bad now if we are Net Zero every new buildings that are built are Net Zero, we are still seeing that they are not getting us to where we need to be because if we are expanding construction to new sites, even if there are impact buildings zero, they are not zero impact and all of this is substantially different. from where we really need to go in terms of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, so what do we need? We actually need a new goal at the top of this hierarchy, something better than Net Zero, it's what I'm going to call net positive, these are projects that go beyond Net Zero to actually have a measurable positive impact on the world, but it's a different kind of category, all these other sustainable building systems say how good your building is, they're just looking at the thing, but Net+ asks how good your building is, where it's located, what replaces net positive, it's about of all of history and this is the change that we have to make, so we have this toolbox or is it a lens, this type of lens that we can now use to look at a project and ask yourself if this really makes a positive change and fortunately , there are great examples of this already happening.

It's happening all over the world. We don't need new technology. We don't need a lot of money. They are things. we can do it now, but let's see how that really starts to play out in practice. I'm going back to a Merle Evans house, an amazing house, we're going to look at this through a net positive lens, so for starters, yeah. great envelope, super windows, amazing building structure, but it's on a brand new site so we don't get any credit for replacing an old building and maybe worse, a walk score of zero which is pretty bad, it's so bad as it seems, so we are. in the middle of nowhere, so we have this kind of deficit and we can get to a net positive, but we have to offset it with a lot of green jewels and a lot of solar energy to offset those additional impacts, so this idea The green building we have had in mind is actually the most difficult and expensive way to get to a net positive result, and this is where we may need to move away because we see something quite different: this project may not even look like a green building as much as it does. which this is is a renovation of a brownstone in Brooklyn and it was renovated to the Passivhaus standard, so if we look at this really cool thermal image, we have all the old buildings that are just losing heat everywhere and that heat is produced greenhouse gases this building does not leak Heat this is a radical transformation of an existing building in addition to that score of 100 you have the option to live here without a car if you move here from anywhere else in the country you go to produceless pollution in your transportation, on top of that this project is great too, they renovated the existing brownstone but also made an addition on top so they were not just renovating but they were actually creating more living space, more space habitable for the families that were growing and so what we have is before and after the existing building the new building this is a radically positive project and if we could start doing these kinds of things we would be on the way to starting to address climate change as well we look at it through the lens the big building envelope replaces an old building in a lockable location we don't need to make the solar panels, the windmills and all that other kind of stuff the green bling doesn't have to do it, we can make it a project that is affordable is something that we can do today and have a positive change in the world.

Now let's take those ideas back to this shore. This is a project our team is working on here in Vancouver. In fact, we have two of these. projects going on right now what is a passive house, the duplex walls have large 17 inch thick windows, it is replacing an old bungalow and in Vancouver we can also build an additional small house, a house with a street facing the alley, so we have gone from one housing unit to three housing units, this is the current situation bungalow that is replacing and is being built in a location with an excellent walk score, so there was one family, now there will be two new families living there and they will probably come from somewhere where they drove more, so we are having a positive change. in transportation, but also in the building, so a housing unit has 2/3 twice the square footage on site, but still has a net positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions again.

Looking at this project through the lens, the great walkable location replaces an older building. You don't need to have solar panels and other expensive features, so this has all been on a small scale. I want to jump up a scale and say, "Okay, what about the downtown cores? This is an amazing big project in Seattle called Bullet Center Five." -The multi-story mixed-use office building has this kind of crazy hat, this kind of visor on the top, which is the solar panel that powers the entire building. The reason it's five stories tall is because that's the height they could go for the amount of sun they could trap on their property, so this building produces all of its own water process waste, it does all of these things. really interesting, but it also has a great walk score, it replaces this old building, so we get a credit for eliminating emissions. from this old building and we are doing everything, this project is kind of version 1.0, but it shows us what is possible in the center of our city, so we can do this, we can take this lens and realize that it is also a toolbox, we can choose different pieces for if you have a rural site if you're downtown if you're in a walkable neighborhood or not, there are ways you can do net positive projects.

We always start with a really good building envelope, we add the green glow as its necessary, but we also look very carefully at where our project is located, we often ignore this but it is an incredibly important piece and then we wonder what it replaces because like designer, when I see that alluring brand new site, you know it's great. See Sunshine I can totally design whatever I want to do, but when you start thinking about what we need to do to be net positive, you realize that these old buildings are actually gold mines of carbon reduction potential, so now we look for them and look and say how bad, oh that building is really terrible, oh that's great, this is an opportunity to change things for the better, so this is where I'm trying to make change for the last few For 30 or 40 years, this idea of ​​This Free Standing, Self-Sufficient Building has been the direction we've been thinking in for sustainable construction, but we need to shift to something that's a little bit different in terms of our vision, something that asks those three questions. : how good is it, where is it located, what does it replace because then we can start creating positive change in the world now?

When you leave, walk out the door today, go home, maybe you're not in the construction industry, maybe you're a renter. Okay, go to WalkScore comm. Enter your address and see what your walk score is. You choose where to live and work. It's important and if you can move to a better place with a higher walk score, that's a deeply positive action and something everyone can do. here you can do now if you are in the construction industry or in any way related to construction projects maybe you are in finance maybe you are an urban planner if you are an architect or an engineer or a home owner, now you have the opportunity to be a leader to go beyond green buildings to create projects that not only try to be less bad but actually make a positive contribution to the world and I think you will find that when you start doing that it will feel very good, thank you.