I agree with you, James - no one ever said that LEED (or any other rating system) is perfect. It's a starting point, and it's been a good start in my opinion. Now it has to keep evolving. It's simply a tool that we can choose to use, or not. LEED 2009 addressed a number of issues, but I feel very strongly that it needs to go much further. We have a long way to go before we are approaching anything close to real sustainability in architectural design & construction.
The problem we still face in practice is just getting to that starting point. Asking clients (private, not government or institutional) to build to a LEED standard can still be very difficult because of the cost of certification. I know, I know, it's a small percentage of the overall project cost...but try telling that to a client who needs to get the greatest value out of every penny. It's a tough sell, and as the certification costs continue to go up (along with the costs of exams, workshops, reference guides, etc.), it gets harder to make the case.
I agree with something that Rick said in the interview about what happens when people move in and start using a green building. I believe that human behaviour is the greatest challenge of sustainability. We can achieve LEED Platinum or even the Living Building Challenge in our designs, but it doesn't matter if the building occupants don't understand how it works and how their actions are intertwined with the building and its systems. That's the missing link: we have to connect people to their environment, both built and natural. And that requires thinking beyond credits and points.
Eric Johnson
271 thumbs up
September 15, 2010 - 4:13 pm
With a project team that knows what it's doing there is no cost increase for LEED and actually a cost decrease. "At LEEDuser, we've analyzed LEED credit by credit and found that the cost of LEED really depends on which strategies you choose. The payoff can be immediate.
http://www.leeduser.com/strategy/cost-leed-report-and-understanding-cost...
– Tristan Roberts
Editor, LEEDuser.com"
As green buildings are currently 33% of the market from 2% I think the green barrier is coming down.
"Any architect who complains about LEED isn't a very good designer. A piano "only" has 88 keys and some people are only capable of rendering discordant garbage, but it's certainly not the fault of the piano.
LEED can and should demand continuous improvement in this area, but a chain breaks at its weakest link. By requiring minimum performance that is too far beyond the ability of the market to deliver, we risk ignoring the sage observation by Gandhi who once said: “A leader who is 100 paces ahead of his followers is revered and called a visionary; one who is a thousand paces ahead is stoned and called a heretic.” - Rob Watson"
Eric Johnson
271 thumbs up
September 15, 2010 - 4:19 pm
An old article but one worth reading. http://www.edcmag.com/Articles/Feature_Article/44b973b231d98010VgnVCM100...
Eric Johnson
271 thumbs up
September 15, 2010 - 4:51 pm
"First of all, what is LEED? LEED is not a regulation or a law; it's not a stone tablet sent down from the heavens. It was intended to provide guidance for and verification of a project's green attributes. It set up a gradated series of requirements, both technical and procedural, intended to guide people toward making better buildings. Not perfect buildings, greener buildings.
When we were building the system we were very cognizant that our knowledge and the tools available would be improving over time and that our expectations should match. We considered an "It's LEED or it's not" type of approach, but realized it is simpleminded to expect binary answers to multidimensional questions, particularly when the current knowledge base was so limited.
Or, as Aristotle put it, "It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible." Rob Watson http://in.reuters.com/article/idIN361459205420100625
Roxanne Button
Architect & Sustainable Design Consultant, AIA, MRAIC, LEED APDesign Synergies Architecture
65 thumbs up
September 15, 2010 - 4:56 pm
I'm not one of those architects who is "complaining" about LEED, Eric.
It's the actual cost of certification that I'm talking about, not the "credit by credit" cost of designing a LEED-certified building. At my previous firm, that was consistently presented to clients as being anywhere from $120k to $200k just to cover the documentation for the project, and it was treated as a separate line item from the design fee. I know a lot of architects who treat it like that.
I had a LEED for Schools project that went through a very painful cost-cutting exercise which not only eliminated the LEED certification (one day before the Design Submission was going in) but also much of the highly efficient HVAC system. The project team, as good as they were, couldn't convince the client about payback in that case.
I don't know where you're located, but green buildings are definitely NOT 33% of the market in Upstate NY.
Eric Johnson
271 thumbs up
September 15, 2010 - 5:17 pm
Roxanne,
I wasn't attacking you, just listing some of my favorite thoughts about LEED applicable to the NPR article and your comments. My thoughts to your comments would be that you can't exclude the cost for documenting the certification and what value does the project receive? If someone spends three days a month on a project for 18 months then the cost seems correct to me. $200 x 36 = $7,200 x 18 = $129,000
A school that ends up savings 50% of the energy they could have used for 50 years ends up with a pretty good value for their money. You can't fix shortsighted in some people. Maybe the USGBC should wave the fees or the USG should pick up the costs for LEED? Sounds like a way to create jobs that pay for themselves, but I could be wrong.
A commercial developer who ends up with even a 1% increased value on a $50 million dollar project ends up with a pretty good value. The cost of all the R 7 (or worse) glass is 10 times more than the cert fee who the LEED guy ought help reduce from the typical WWR.
"ENR’s fourth annual Top 100 Green Contractors list provides evidence of this healthy environment for green building. The Top 100 generated $43.05 billion in 2009 revenue from projects registered with or certified by third-party ratings groups under objective environmental or sustainable development standards. This total marks a surprising 11.3% increase over the group’s $28.69 billion in 2008. The 2009 green revenue figure represents 33.6% of the Top 100’s total contracting revenue last year. " www.enr.com
Eric Johnson
271 thumbs up
September 15, 2010 - 5:32 pm
"While much of the U.S. real estate market has been floundering, one area has not seen a dip. Green building now accounts for nearly one-third of new construction in the U.S. That's up from 2 percent in 2005, according to McGraw-Hill Construction, which tracks the industry." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129699450