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

so before we get things started I wanted to take a quick survey so hands up who here lives or works in a building okay it's an easy question the reason I wanted to bring that up 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 rising a coal-fired power plant somewhere in the distance but buildings are tangible they're one of the few things that actually brings us all together that we share in common but the problem with buildings depending on how you slice it is that they are contributing up to almost half of the greenhouse gas pollution that's contributing to climate change so when we wake up in the morning we turn on that shower we go turn up the thermostat one is cold we plug in our laptop all those actions are going through our building and somewhere that energy is creating that greenhouse gas pollution so this is a problem we can't address climate change without thinking about buildings now professionals around the world people involved in green building are trying to create greener options for the ways that we build in fact if you look in homes you might think about what is a green home or an eco home and if you punch it into a search engine you might get a bunch of images like this you got this great house really perfectly oriented to catch the sunshine really thick insulated walls in some cases it might even have solar panels on the roof something that we often refer to as green bling it's been kind of tacked on there but it does you know sometimes some great things in terms of producing energy the challenge is is that over the last 40 years while we've been trying to create these green buildings we've still seen this steady increase in global greenhouse gas pollution so it starts to become evident that what we're doing isn't enough a building like this it's got the green features it's got solar panels it actually gives close to zero impact or Net Zero but what we start to realize we need something better we need to go further we actually need projects that can be net positive now to get to net positive as we start to dig into this we realize it's not enough to do just more of what we've been doing in the past more solar panels more insulation what we need is actually a fundamental shift in the way we see and think about buildings we can't just look at just the object or the thing but we need to see the change that that thing creates in the world it's only then that we can start to think about the positive change that we can have in addressing an issue like climate change now to dig into green buildings first we've got to realize there's some pieces missing from the way we see and think about buildings and because those pieces are missing the way we set up categories and targets for green buildings are kind of pointing us in the wrong direction but the good news is is that there are actually a lot of great examples of net positive projects that are out there that we can learn from and once we've kind of internalized those lessons we can really figure out how to move forward so to start off with I want to talk about this really amazing building built in the early 80s by a fellow named Amory Lovins he's done a tremendous amount of work over the last 30 years in the field of sustainability this building is incredible it's super insulated gets all its energy from the Sun in the middle of Colorado in the winter they can go bananas on the inside with no energy input from the outside so an incredible building that has influenced generations of designers like myself but when you look at pictures of this project there's always something that's missing just out of the frame of this amazing building is the building's parking lot this great amazing green building is located out in the middle of nowhere so if you want to get there you've got to drive you want to you know drive miles if you want to get a loaf of bread you got to drive miles so this is a challenge that we have when we ignore the impact of location now let's look at it a different way say you've got the exact same Green Building two different locations in the region in one location you can walk you can bike you have the OP of taking transit another location you have to drive maybe everybody in your family has to have a car what this means is that this exact same building the family on the right may have two to three times the climate footprint of the family on the left and this all has to do with where that building was located now kind of a cool way to visualize this is to go to Walk Score calm where you can actually punch in an address and it gives you a score for how walkable that location is so the Green Zone our areas where you have the option to walk or drive to take transit the red zone you're dependent on a car and this impact of look location is so profound that you might actually be better off living in a drafty old house in a walkable location then living in that super eco home out in the middle of nowhere and this is profoundly different way of starting to think about what that building does so when you look at the the leavens house great it uses one-tenth the energy of a typical house that's amazing but when you put back on the additional impact from transportation the footprint is actually a little bit bigger than what we might have thought at first glance now there is another piece that we'll get to I wanted to emphasize this bit about location with this little green icon just so it's kind of seared in our brains that this importance of this location but the next missing piece which we get from this kind of hint of this great sort of landscape that this building is nestled in is the question of what was there before if it was a field a farm or a forest that's what we would call a greenfield site and on a greenfield site nobody there was burning fossil fuels before he showed up the squirrels weren't driving little cars or anything like that there was no fossil fuel being burnt so when we look at the change that this created from before to after even though this is a super green building it's having a negative impact on the climate and this is where we have to start to think about this because there's a magical way we can make this story better if that new green build Bing had replaced or renovated of drafty old building it's a completely different story all of a sudden we are reducing emissions and we've 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 so it's not enough to just say it's a great building we have to look at what was the change in the world that was created and those are pieces that are missing we have to start asking where is it located and what does it replace and once we've done that then we can start to set up better categories for how we benchmark buildings now if you're like me and you create buildings for a living and you're trying to be green you'd like to see how many points do I get where is it rated how do I stack up next to everybody else so I've put together this sort of hierarchy of green building systems and they're all asking how good is your building and the reason it's a pyramid is that at the bottom are all the old buildings there's tons of them way more at the top are the green buildings a relatively small amount now those green buildings the lessons that are learned there trickle down 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 target so when we look at green buildings there's kind of two categories the first is your typical green building like lead maybe you're familiar with a building that's LEED Gold any of these green systems they're always rating that building relative to some typical buildings so this lead home might be 30 or 50 percent better than a typical home of the same size it's always this kind of abstract comparison now above that if you want to do even better you have this category of buildings that are actually striving to not just be 30% less bad or 50% less bad but actually get down to zero impact and there are a lot of amazing things that are now happening all around the world in this category one of these systems these sort of rating systems is called passive house I know it's exciting so with Passivhaus what a passive house is is a building that's so well insulated has such great windows is so airtight that it doesn't need a central heating system even in the middle of winter it can run off the heat of your body heat from the Sun that's all it needs and there's thousands of these things now being built around the world again emphasizing with this little green icon that says passive house is all about the building envelope the shell the other piece is this green energy technology so solar panels windmills the green bling that we can kind of tack on to any building but if you put it onto 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 your typical building would and this is that's pretty great that sounds like what we should be doing but if we take a second and zoom out to the big picture we go back and we look at that growth in greenhouse gas emissions over the last 40 years and think about what's going to happen going forward now of course if we just build code minimum buildings if we keep sprawling out building new code minimum buildings those emissions just keep on going up so what what if we build everything to a LEED Gold standard or some other green rating system we're still growing but not as fast we're being a little less bad now if we're Net Zero every new building that gets built is Net Zero we still are seeing it's not getting us quite where we need to be because if we are expanding outward building onto greenfield sites even if there's zero impact buildings they are not zero impact and all of this is quite substantially different from where we actually need to be going in terms of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions so what do we need we need actually a new target 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 are going beyond Net Zero to actually make a measurably positive impact on the world but it's a different type of category all these other green building systems say how good is your building they're just looking at the thing but Net+ asks the question how good is your building where is it located what does it replace net-positive is about the whole story and this is the shift we have to make so we have this this toolbox or or it's a lens this kind of lens that we can now use to look at a project and ask the question is this actually making a positive change and fortunately there are great examples of this already happening it's happening all around the world we don't need new technology we don't need a whole bunch of money it's stuff we can do now but let's look at how that actually starts to play out in practice I'm going to go back to a Merle Evans house an amazing house we're going to look at this through the net positive lens so to begin with yes great envelope super windows amazing shell of a building but it's on a greenfield site so we're not getting any credit for replacing an old building and maybe perhaps worse a walk score of zero that's pretty bad that's about as bad as it gets so we are out in the middle of nowhere so we have this kind of deficit and we can get to net positive but we've got to make up with a whole lot of green bling a whole lot of solar to offset those additional impacts so this this idea of the green building that we've held in our mind is actually the hardest most expensive way to get to net positive and this is maybe where we need to shift away because let's look at something quite different this project maybe doesn't even look like a green building what this is is a renovation to a brownstone in Brooklyn and it was renovated to the Passivhaus standard so if we look at this really cool thermal image you've got all the old buildings that are just leaking heat out everywhere and that heat is producing greenhouse gases this building it's not leaking Heat this is a radical transformation to an existing building on top of that walk score of 100 you have the option of living here without a car if you move here from anywhere else in the country you're going to be producing less pollution in your transportation now on top of that this project is also cool they renovated the existing brownstone but they also did an addition on top so not only were they renovating but they were actually creating more living space more living space 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 net-positive project and if we could just start doing this type of thing we'd be well on our way to starting to address climate change so we look at it through the lens great building envelope replaces an old building lockable location we don't need to do the solar panels the windmills all that other kind of stuff the green bling don't have to do it we can do a project that's affordable is something that we can do today and have a positive change on the world now let's take those ideas back over to this coast this is a project that our team is working on here in Vancouver we've actually got two of these projects on the go right now what this is is a passive house duplex walls are 17 inches thick great windows it's replacing an old bungalow and in Vancouver we're also able to build a little extra house a laneway house facing the alley so we've gone from one unit of housing to three units of housing this is the existing bungalow that it's replacing and it's being done at a location with a great walk score so there was one family now there's gonna be two new families living there and they're probably coming from somewhere where they drove more so we're having a positive change on the transportation but also the building's so one unit of housing 2/3 double the square footage on-site but still having a net positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions again looking at this project through the lens great envelope walkable location replaces an old building doesn't have to have the solar panels and other expensive features so these have all been kind of small-scale I want to jump up a scale and say okay what about our downtown cores this is a great amazing project in Seattle called the bullet Center five-story mixed-use office building has this kind of crazy hat this kind of visor at the top which is the solar array that powers the entire building the reason is five storeys tall is because that's how tall they could go for the amount of Sun that they could catch on their property so this building produces all its own water processes waste does all these really cool things but on top of that it's got a great Walk Score it replaces this old building so we're getting a credit for taking away the emissions from this old building and we're doing everything this project it's sort of version 1.0 but it shows us what's possible in our downtown cores so we can do this we can take this lens and realize that it's also a toolbox we can pick different pieces so if you've got a rural site if you're downtown if you're in a walkable neighborhood or not there are ways that you can do net-positive projects we always start with a really good building envelope we add the green bling as its needed but we also look really carefully at where is our project located we often ignore this but that is an incredibly important piece of it and then asking the question what does it replace because as a designer when I see that greenfield site so tempting you know great view sunshine I can totally design whatever I want to do but as you start to think about what we need to do to be net positive you realize these old buildings are actually gold mines of potential Carbon Reduction and so now we actually hunt these out and we look and we 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 this is where I'm trying to get at the shift for the last 30 or 40 years this idea of this standalone self-sufficient building has been the direction we've been thinking about for green building 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's it located what does it replace because then we can actually start to create a positive change in the world now as you go out walk out the door today go home maybe you're not in the building industry maybe you're a renter that's okay go to WalkScore comm punch in your address and see what your walk score is you're your choice of where you live where you work is important and if you can move to a better place with a higher walk score that's a profoundly profoundly net positive action and something that everybody here can do now if you are in the building industry or in any way connected to building projects maybe you're in finance maybe you're an urban planner if you are an architect or engineer or a homeowner you have the opportunity now to be a leader to go beyond green buildings to create the projects that aren't just trying to be less bad but actually make a positive contribution to the world and I think you'll find that when you start doing that it feels pretty damn good thanks

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 193,554

Keywords: Canada, Climate Change, ted x, tedx talks, English, Technology, ted talk, Architecture, tedx talk, tedx, Sustainability, ted talks, ted, TEDxTalks

Id: JEUShQ7r_tE

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 26 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/bbqroast]

I think "where is it located." is something that is so so understated in "green" homes.

There's an "eco" village near where I live, but it's truly in the middle of nowhere. They have to drive everywhere, what's more they produce large amounts of waste that isn't reused (because there not part of a larger community due to their isolation). Honestly, they'd probably be better off moving into a city apartment (probably nicer than their little city).

I think it's also notable, something that was missed perhaps, that how a building interacts with the buildings around it is quite important as well. Attached buildings, for example, don't need 17inch thick walls on every side. An apartment building can have communal facilities such as cleaning and infrastructure.

[u/Thefriendlyfaceplant]

"What is the change in the world that it has created?"

I really feel we're not asking this question enough. Human beings are narrow-minded perfectionists. We rather spent all our resources at making a single thing perfectly sustainable than spending a fraction of those resources at making vast amount of other stuff imperfectly sustainable.

[u/lurkersurfer1]

I think all the concepts he discusses make perfect sense and is something everyone should be aware of. Quick question though from a current college student minoring in sustainability studies...What as a young 22 year old am i supposed to do when learning all these wonderful ideas? I would definitely like to eventually live in a building with a net positive impact, but until those are more readily available and within a young persons price range, what should i be doin? I cant start my own architecture firm, or afford to hire someone to build me a net positive house.

Just a general question as I always ponder what I can do as a young man with limited finances regarding this topic and when learning about topics such as the impact agriculture and eating meat and other random sustainability issues.