Footprinting Our Projects & Operations

High-performance building standards and goals typically focus on operating energy. But how much energy does it take to build (or retrofit) that high performance building, or operate your company in the first place? We'll try to answer this question by examining the South Mountain Company carbon footprint project and a Byggmeister analysis of the embodied energy of several retrofits. Finally, we'll discuss what we can do about it — what we can change in our business operations and building practices to reduce the footprints of our work.

Putting Attention Where it is Needed Most - Building Resiliency in Multi-family Affordable Housing

A number of multifamily affordable housing developments in the New York City area were hard-hit by Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Affordable housing organizations have learned from that experience and are working to improve the resilience--and sustainability--of their facilities, in ways both large and small. Alex Wilson and Jim Newman have been facilitating some of this work. This session reports on these efforts and presents practical strategies for making multifamily affordable housing--and all multifamily buildings--more resilient.

Inspiring Change: Campus Mission and the Living Building Challenge

The RW Kern Center is designed to embody Hampshire College’s mission of fostering positive change in the world—and to meet the Living Building Challenge. This new ‘gateway’ building creates an opportunity for a powerful transformation of Hampshire’s 1960's vehicle-dominated, Brutalist campus core into a pedestrian friendly naturalistic landscape. The Kern Center will “operate as cleanly, beautifully and efficiently as nature's architecture”, and contribute to Hampshire Community values of active inquiry, creativity, social justice, entrepreneurship, and the sustainable future.

Resiliency: The Cynical Optimist's Path to a Better World

Resiliency has become about how many inches or feet of sea rise we will experience before 2100. It's currently a data driven goal, but it should not be. What about past 2100? How about we design, build and live for true resiliency, by making decisions with which we create no new problems, and even solve several issues at once (think green infrastructure)? Learn some concepts to drive true resiliency, and understand how these conceptsshould be applied to our work with individual projects, communities, and teams.

Lessons from Scandinavia (Part 1)

Paul, Chris, Andy, Tom and Heather went to Scandinavia to learn about what the Swedes and Danes are doing about climate change. In two sessions, we'll present what we learned in visiting buildings, building professionals, city officials, and researchers in these two countries, and how it may or may not relate to our efforts here at home. 

Lessons from Scandinavia (Part 2)

Paul, Chris, Andy, Tom and Heather went to Scandinavia to learn about what the Swedes and Danes are doing about climate change. In two sessions, we'll present what we learned in visiting buildings, building professionals, city officials, and researchers in these two countries, and how it may or may not relate to our efforts here at home. 

Community Energy Footprints: Taking Residential Efficiency to Scale

For all the Non Net Zero Homes out there, how can energy tracking at the community level help achieve 2030 goals? Four diverse building pros share lessons learned from their experience tracking the energy use of a typical Boston suburb using several benchmarking methods, and discuss how cross referencing tools and technologies can help create community buy-in for achieving C02 reduction targets. The session will close with an open discussion of how to scale up expertise to the community level.
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