Sustainable Building

[Nick]

The word "sustainable" is a little too buzzwordy/empty for me, but it beats "green". Anywho, I thought we should have a thread for the topic. There's a pretty interesting article over at The Atlantic Cities about whether it's possible/worth it to save a lot of mid-20th century buildings if you're concerned with maximizing energy efficiency. It has a really good comment section, too, with folks rehashing some of the same things (brutalism, etc) we've talked about in other threads here.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design ... ings/5126/

The Case Against Saving Midcentury Office Buildings

Anthony Flint
Mar 29, 2013

Back in the day at the Harvard Design School, I had the pleasure of auditing a course called "Green Modern," a history of environmental consciousness through the 20th century in architecture. The instructor, Hashim Sarkis, explored the alleged green roots of modern architecture: at one with nature, of nature, planet-friendly.

Yet hermetically sealed office towers and concrete downtown parking garages don’t conjure thoughts of meadows and flowers. And in fact, the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s didn’t give us a lot of energy efficiency. Quite the opposite. Whatever you think of the avant-garde form of the era, its strong suit, and its essential motivation, was never conservation. Heat leaked wholesale from atriums; floor plates required the steady blast of air conditioning, sucking up power all the way up to the heavens.

A new report chronicles just how un-green mid-century buildings are. Midcentury (Un)Modern: An Environmental Analysis of the 1953-1978 Manhattan Office Building, by the firm Terrapin Bright Green, suggests that it would be on the whole better for the environment to tear down energy-inefficient buildings, rather than trying to retrofit them — or even compared to letting them continue to function, as is.

[...]

[mattaudio]

Usually, the most sustainable building is one that lasts as long as possible. These pro-forma LEED lovers usually never consider the huge amounts of raw resource gathering, manufacturing, transportation energy etc consumed by new construction.

Here's a North Korea Six Floor (NKSF) on Park Ave for contrast:
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/ho ... 51591.html

[FISHMANPET]

Mulad posted on twitter that the basis of this article is BS. Mulad said that it costs 7 times as much to cool a space 1 degree as it does to heat it. I'm sure he'll wander in here soon enough...

Also nice that we got a shoutout in the article as the coldest US Metro.

[mulad]

Regrettably, that's a factoid I heard years ago, and it may specifically be related to piezoelectric cooling, which is not very efficient at all. Looking into it, I've been coming across articles on heat pumps which say they can typically move 2-4 watts of heat for each watt going into the machine -- I had assumed that heating units were less efficient than that, generally only able to put, say, 0.5 to 0.95 watts of heat into a space for each watt consumed, and that cooling units would probably be limited to moving half as much heat energy as what they consumed. I guess I've got some research to do...

Still, since whatever machine you're using is going to generate heat itself, it's always going to be more efficient to heat an enclosed space than to cool it, but I'm not sure how much of an impact that makes.

Of course, the biggest heater out there is the sun. If we made broader use of solar heating, cooler regions would probably win all the time in these efficiency contests.