Tag: buildings and structures

Building Industry, Exploring our World

Just Do It: Strategies for Projects

Materials Matter is a five-session series from the AIA Seattle chapter that delivers comprehensive, high-level knowledge and strategies for assessing and selecting healthy, sustainable materials. I had the opportunity to attend the first run of the newly-developed series with many of the local industry leaders who helped create the innovative course materials. AIA Seattle is currently hosting the series for a second time.

The series encompasses everything tied to building materials and how they impact our lives: human health, the tools and data available for assessing and prioritizing materials, and strategies for integrating informed decision-making into projects and practice. Join me as I discover exactly why Materials Matter.

AIA MM 4

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Building Industry, Exploring our World

Healthy People: Materials Science & Human Health

Materials Matter is a five-session series from the AIA Seattle chapter that delivers comprehensive, high-level knowledge and strategies for assessing and selecting healthy, sustainable materials. I had the opportunity to attend the first run of the newly-developed series with many of the local industry leaders who helped create the innovative course materials. AIA Seattle is currently hosting the series for a second time.

The series encompasses everything tied to building materials and how they impact our lives: human health, the tools and data available for assessing and prioritizing materials, and strategies for integrating informed decision-making into projects and practice. Join me as I discover exactly why Materials Matter.

AIA MM 2

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Building Industry, Exploring our World, The Seattle Scene

Healthy Planet: Materials & the Environment

Materials Matter is a five-session series from the AIA Seattle chapter that delivers comprehensive, high-level knowledge and strategies for assessing and selecting healthy, sustainable materials. I had the opportunity to attend the first run of the newly-developed series with many of the local industry leaders who helped create the innovative course materials. AIA Seattle is currently hosting the series for a second time.

The series encompasses everything tied to building materials and how they impact our lives: human health, the tools and data available for assessing and prioritizing materials, and strategies for integrating informed decision-making into projects and practice. Join me as I discover exactly why Materials Matter.

AIA MM 1

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Expanding the Scope of Now, Exploring our World, The Seattle Scene

Getting to Net Zero with AIA: Change Your Mind

Our world is changing, and with 82% of the population living in cities, how we design and build our cities should be changing too. At this point, we need drastic measures that reverse the effects of years of planetary neglect. The Living Building Challenge, developed by the International Living Future Institute, is a rigorous set of building, material and operations criteria that result in beautiful, contemporary net zero energy projects. Only five buildings worldwide have achieved certification so far, but over 190 additional projects are in some sort of design, building or operation phase. And Seattle is pioneering net zero energy in a new way.

Typical commercial buildings of the same size have an Energy Use Intensity of 92, while the Bullitt Center is designed to have only 16 EUI. Photo credit: Louisa Gaylord
Most large commercial buildings have an Energy Use Intensity of 92, while the Bullitt Center is designed to have only 16 EUI. Photo credit: Louisa Gaylord

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Expanding the Scope of Now, Exploring our World, The Seattle Scene

Getting to Net Zero with AIA: Integrated Design

It’s impossible to deny that Seattle is at the forefront of sustainable building design in the US. Although there are more than 500 LEED-certified buildings in the city, LEED only lessens the damage of large construction projects. More developers are aiming for a Living Building Challenge, which creates net-zero buildings (and Seattle already has twice the number of certified projects than most other US cities). In order to reach these ambitious goals, integrated design is becoming increasingly important to the building process. Many investors see it as a serious commitment of both money and time, a commitment they are often unwilling to make. But Seattle’s variety of green buildings prove that integrated design produces structures that are economic, environmental, and enjoyable to work in.

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Exploring our World, Interview, Music and Art, The Seattle Scene

Metropolis Editor Susan Szenasy Talks Seattle Design

Susan Szenasy has been the editor in chief of Metropolis magazine, a New York-based publication devoted to world design and architecture, for almost 30 years. She is an internationally recognized authority on sustainability and design, and sits on the board of organizations like the Council for Interior Design Accreditation and the Landscape Architecture Foundation. Susan recently came to Seattle to share a dialogue with an interested audience at an overflowing Seattle Design Festival event at Cornish College. I had an opportunity to sit down with Susan the morning after the event and hear a bit more about why she thinks the next big thing in art and architecture will come out of Seattle.

metropolis covers

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Music and Art, Photo Gallery, Reviews, The Seattle Scene

Franz von Stuck at the Frye Art Museum

Franz von Stuck did not begin as a painter, but as a graphic designer and an architect. Born in Bavaria in 1863, Stuck showed an early talent for drawing and caricature. He attended the Munich Academy from 1881 to 1885 where he refined his artistic style. Stuck first became relatively well-known when he began illustrating cartoons for the German weekly satirical magazine, Fliegende Blätter, a publication with 95,000 copies at its peak circulation, and featured other artists such as Wilhelm Busch and Julius Klinger. Stuck supplemented his magazine work with providing drawings for book covers, pamphlets and promotional posters. Here Stuck begins exploring the creation of icons and the legendary, biblical and mythical symbols that will later dominate his painting career.

Poster for an international science expo
Poster for an international science expo

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Expanding the Scope of Now, Photo Gallery, The Seattle Scene

Hurtling into the Future, Faster Than a Speeding Bullitt

If anyone is qualified to be the president of the super-sustainable Bullitt Foundation, it’s Denis Hayes. On April 22, 1970, he organized the first Earth Day, an environmental protection event that is now celebrated in over 190 countries. Hayes was also the head of the Solar Energy Research Institution during the Carter administration, was named Time Magazine’s Hero of the Planet in 1999, and has received a national Jefferson Awards Medal for Outstanding Public Service. Hayes has been with the Bullitt Foundation since 1992.

Bullitt Center 3

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The Seattle Scene

Another Chapter in the Epic Saga

Gather ‘round children, and I will spin you a tale as old as time itself: Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct. Originally completed in 1953, the Viaduct was created to alleviate traffic congestion from trucks, trains and wagons bringing cargo to and from the Port of Seattle. Transportation studies showed that the best way to control port traffic was to have two north-south corridors running between downtown and the waterfront: the Viaduct was created first because the City of Seattle already owned the land, and I-5 was added in the 1960’s.

The Viaduct was the first tunnel designed by the City of Seattle Engineering Department, as well as the first example of a tunnel using forced-air ventilation.
The Viaduct was the first tunnel designed by the City of Seattle Engineering Department, as well as the first example of a tunnel using forced-air ventilation.

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Exploring our World, The Seattle Scene

Bertschi School: Living Building to Live Up To

Kids love gross things. It’s one of those constants in life that you can depend on like clockwork, like taxes or shoppers behaving like inhuman monsters at Black Friday sales. But Bertschi School in Seattle (also my alma mater) uses this fact to their advantage in their new Living Science Building, which is changing how kids learn about the world they stand to inherit.

Bertschi School, on 10th Avenue East in Seattle, was founded by Brigitte Bertschi in 1975.
Bertschi School, on Capitol Hill in Seattle, was founded by Brigitte Bertschi in 1975.

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