First LEED Certified MedSpa

Our most recent project, the EpiCenter opened last week to a packed grand opening party.

You can read a review here. We worked with architect Justin Martinkovic, green consultant Zem Joaquin, and a great team of other brilliant people to build the first LEED Certified Med Spa in the country.

One odd thing that seems to get a great deal of attention is the ceiling. The initial ceiling was to be made of these gorgeous bamboo panels. When the price came in at $48,000, a cheaper product was needed. I came up with the solution, Homesote panels, cut into 2' x 4' panels and stained with AFM Safecoat Zero-VOC stains. The result is something that looks like leather, but the final cost: $1800. I painted the panels myself with help from the clients.

via Green Building Elements

Bay Area designers have long had green outlook

Last month, I sat on a panel for the Luxury Marketing Council to discuss the issues of sustainability in the luxury market. The packed audience consisted of high end real estate agents, bankers, jewelers, and the like. I always love exposing these ideas to groups who do not normally come into contact with green that often.

They usually become incredibly excited at these ideas, a testament to the logic and need for sustainability.

On the panel with me was Mike Freed, owner of Passport Resorts the company that developed various Eco Resorts: such as Post Ranch Inn and Cavallo Point .


BTW, The Post Ranch Inn was designed by a mentor of mine, and fellow organic architect, Mickey Muennig .

Zahid Sardar, Architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote an article today about the success of Passports resorts as luxurious architecture.

Also on the panel with Mike and myself were:
* Kimberley Gardiner
Marketing manager for Lexus Hybrid

* Helge Hellberg
Marketing director of Marin Organic
(who, by the way, charmed everyone with his enthusiasm and personality!)


Full Story via SFGate.com

Video of Steve Glenn's talk at The Commonwealth Club

We hosted green pre-fab visionary Steve Glenn of Living Homes at the The Commonwealth Club last month.

The video is now available at Fora.tv by clicking here or watch it below.

Steve and Living Homes demonstrate a wonderful combination of passion and business saavy, as you will see in this talk.

Interview with Living Homes Green PreFab

Like most architects, I have a special place in my heart for pre-fab buildings, especially if they are part of the new crop of green pre-fab ones. Financial Times has this great article with Steve Glenn of Living Homes:

Please don’t call it the greenest home on the planet,” says Steve Glenn of his house in Santa Monica, California. “A yurt or a mud hut in Africa might be the greenest home on the planet – not this house.”

His first living home received an impressive Platinum LEED certification.

Hear Steve Glenn live at The Commonwealth Club on July 9th

Learn more about Living Homes here.

How Green is the new Federal Building in San Francisco?

Wonderful article on Thom Mayne's new Federal Building that just opened here in San Francisco. It touches on some of the larger issues, namely, how the LEED Green Building Rating System often does not apply to such a large, unusual and design driven building. Although the building original hoped for a rating of LEED Platinum, Mayne no doubts they will even obtain base certification.

I do not accept Mayne's cry of hardship.

While a Platinum level is very ambitious, it would seen any new, urban, dense building in California would be able to easily get base Certified. Our state requirements alone would bring you 19 of the 23 points needed.

A lovely excerpt:
"...if architecture, unlike painting or sculpture, is at heart an exercise in balancing purely artistic goals with more prosaic ones — budgets, gravity and so on — then green design shouldn't require extraordinary skills or lamentable compromise."

LEEDing Us Astray?
Top green-building system is in desperate need of repair

We're concerned that LEED has become expensive, slow, confusing, and unwieldy, a death march for applicants administered by a soviet-style bureaucracy that makes green building more difficult than it needs to be. The result:

* mediocre "green" buildings where certification, not environmental responsibility, is the primary goal;
* a few super-high-level eco-structures built by ultra-motivated (and wealthy) owners that stand like the Taj Mahal as beacons of impossibility;
* an explosion of LEED-accredited architects and engineers chasing lots of money but designing few buildings; and
* a discouraged cadre of professionals who want to build green, but can't afford to certify their buildings.

Article
Full Essay

Is it too easy for buildings to get certified as eco-friendly?