Designing Low Carbon Buildings Using Green Footstep
Workshop 13
(scroll down for detailed description)

Friday, May 21
10:30am to 12:30pm
Registration Price: $80 on or before April 1, $90 after April 1, $100 on-site
You DO NOT have to register for the conference to register for a workshop. On the Conference Fees page in the registration system, choose "Workshops, Tours, Special Events Only."
Presented by: Victor Olgyay, AIA, Principal, and Michael Bendewald, Analyst, Rocky Mountain Institute
Description: This workshop will highlight Green Footstep, the free online tool that shows architects, engineers, and developers how much their building is contributing to global warming, and reveals design targets required to achieve carbon neutrality. Just as a life cycle cost analysis of a green building design shows the operating costs you are saving over time, this tool shows the saved carbon. In addition to describing a project’s carbon footprint over its life cycle, Green Footstep also informs decision-making during the design process by revealing the footprint's sensitivity to variable design targets, such as building energy use intensity and on-site renewable energy. Green Footstep makes it easier for designers to make every building project part of the solution to climate change.
Materials to be provided to attendees include 1) A notebook containing the presentation in printed form, along with supporting information.
2) Digital media with additional software and references
Who should attend? Architects, engineers, sustainable design consultants, developers, sustainability planners.

2 AIA CEU's - Health & Welfare and Sustainability - available for this session

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Additional Workshop Details:

PURPOSE OF THE WORKSHOP – WHAT WILL ATTENDEES LEARN?
Attendees will learn about the various approaches to assessing the carbon impacts of buildings, and methods to reduce them through architectural design. They will become familiar with how to use the free Green Footstep tool to produce low carbon buildings.

CONTENT OF THE WORKSHOP
Designing low carbon buildings using Green Footstep: A tool for evaluating a building’s life cycle carbon footprint and informing carbon-related design decisions during the building design process

In this two- hour workshop attendees will learn about several methods of thinking about carbon and buildings, and then have an opportunity to participate in “hands on” learning, working Green Footstep on a few common building based examples. A tentative agenda follows:

  • Introduction to carbon and buildings: the issues
  • The metrics: how we might think and rank the issues
  • Introduction to Green Footstep and how it works
  • Exercise #1: applying Green Footstep to an office retrofit in Phoenix, Arizona
  • Discussion
  • Exercise #2: applying Green Footstep to a new office building in Seattle, Washington
  • Discussion and conclusion

A worldview is emerging that shows nature as the limiting factor to economic growth. This worldview is thoroughly and quantitatively represented by the Ecological Footprint metric for sustainability developed by Wackernagel and Rees. Designers of the built environment need tools that help them design within this ecological constraint, which, in the case of carbon emissions, is necessarily moving design toward carbon neutrality. Designers must integrally consider operational emissions, embodied emissions of construction (i.e., the raw material extraction, processing, transportation, on-site assembly and demolition of building materials), emissions from the permanent change in amount of on-site vegetation, and other sources (such as workers commuting to and from the building). These emissions sources can be presented over several years of the building lifetime to provide a whole-systems perspective of the carbon footprint in an understandable way.

Green Footstep (a free online tool –www.greenfootstep.org) is now available for this purpose. In addition to describing a projects life cycle carbon footprint, Green Footstep also informs decision-making about carbon during the design process. It does this by showing in real time the sensitivity of life cycle carbon emissions to variable design targets such as building energy use intensity, building size, on-site renewable energy, on-site native vegetation, and percent reduction in embodied emissions of construction. Green Footstep can take into account carbon offsets and clean power purchasing. Designers can use Green Footsep to evaluate existing buildings can as well as new construction. Green Footstep is an interactive tool that informs design decisions in the context of an ecologically constrained world.

The new tool was endorsed by Edward Mazria, Founder and Executive Director of Architecture 2030, the organization that has challenged designers to make all new buildings carbon neutral by 2030. Mazria says, “Rocky Mountain Institute's Green Footstep is an extremely valuable goal-setting and evaluation tool that will help building designers assess a project's carbon emission impacts with regard to site, construction, and operations. Because the 2030 Challenge is integrated into the program, this tool can also help designers in their efforts to meet or exceed the 2030 Challenge targets.”

PRESENTERS’ CURRENT POSITIONS AND EXPERTISE

Victor Olgyay
Victor Olgyay is a Principal Architect on RMI’s Built Environment Team and has a wide range of experiences in architectural design, planning, laboratory design and integration, environmental and acoustical systems, with specialization in lighting and daylighting design. Victor was an Associate Professor and Director of Research at the UH School of Architecture from 1993 to 2000 and has overseen numerous energy, environmental and lighting research projects under contract to various state and federal agencies. His recent research has focused on ecological restoration and on ecosystem services as criteria for green building assessment. This work was published by Elsevier (Solar Energy 77 (2004) 389 – 398) and has been expanded into building tool application, including Green Footstep, for demonstrating the reduction of carbon, water, and ecological footprints.

Michael J. Bendewald
Michael J. Bendewald is an Analyst at RMI, where he provides research, writing, and consulting on RMI projects. His main experience is with assessing life cycle carbon emissions of buildings and analyzing building design process. Other experiences include tool development, case study development, life cycle cost analysis, and technical consulting. Michael has led the development of Green Footstep, RMI’s online tool for carbon-based building sustainability assessment and goal setting. He is also the lead author of buildings case studies for Factor Ten Engineering, a project to produce case studies of radically efficient and highly cost-effective design. As a graduate student in the Building Systems Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote his master’s degree thesis on the incorporation of life cycle assessment and carrying capacity analysis with building sustainability assessment.