It is nice to see that Al Gore's We Can Solve It people get the benefits of renovation and upgrading as well as new green building. Not only does it reduce our carbon footprint, but creates more jobs- as Donovan Rypkema pointed our earlier, new construction...
TreeHugger is full of photovoltaic glass and ground source heat pumps, but ultimately all of those "green gizmos", as Donovan Rypkema called them, cost a lot of money to buy and to maintain. But he is just one of a growing movement of architects who are making the case that people have known for hundreds, maybe thousands of years how to build in ways that save energy and adapt to climate instead of trying to bludgeon it into submission. Steve Mouzon is another. He writes:
I really felt sorry for Richard Moe, and a bit angry, too. Here he is, the keynote speaker for Thursday morning, with a hall that can seat thousands, and there are maybe two hundred people. Downstairs they are crowding in to other seminars on how to build green buildings, not realizing that up in the ballroom the President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation is talking about what is by far biggest green market for architects in the country- fixing what we have.
Besides being a terrific actor, Diane Keaton is a former board member of the Los Angeles Conservancy and is currently a trustee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. She bemoans the loss of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
From photo essay by Alejandra Laviada
There are 8,000 vacant houses in Cleveland; the city is demolishing 1,100 by the end of the year. You can push them down and take them to the dump in a day, or you can carefully deconstruct them and recover almost all of the material to be used again. The lumber is drier, straighter, of better quality than anything you can get today.
New York isn't Shanghai, but it also is changing at a phenomenal rate. New York Magazine notes that "In the past fifteen fat years, more than 76,000 new buildings have gone up, more than 44,000 were razed, another 83,000 were radically renovated—a rate of change that evokes those time-lapse nature films in which flowers spring up and wither in a matter of seconds."
Leave it to the Japanese to come up with the best way to demo a building. No muss, no fuss. It’s just brilliant. And 20% faster than the old way, which is messy, indeed.
Via Pink Tentacle by way of Gizmodo
We have stated that the real big step in building would be to ban demolition and renovate, but if the building has to come down, at least it should be deconstructed. The demolition numbers from the US EPA are shocking; Greenstrides summarizes the extent.
Building demolitions account for 48% of the waste stream, or 65 million tons per year; renovations account for 44%, or 60 million tons per year; and 8%, or 11 million tons per year, is generated at construction sites.
...
John Vidal of the Guardian looks at last month's torching of "green" McMansions and asks a lot of questions, like " The Earth Liberation Front was to blame. But was it? Does it even exist? And why is the Bush government intent on casting 'eco-terrorists' as public enemy number one?
The Carrot Some Vegans Deplore"TWO things that you can find a lot of in Portland, Ore., are vegans and strip clubs. Johnny Diablo decided to open a business to combine both." New York Times catches up with the notorious vegan strip club.See TreeHugger's graphic exposé at ::Portland Opens First Vegan Strip Club
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