The Green Design Lab Final Project Presentation
Thursday, April 10th, 2008| April 18, 2008 | ||
| 5:00 pm | to | 6:30 pm |
Join students from Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day School as they present the final projects from a class called the Green Design Lab. The projects investigate how to green their school building through sustainable design techniques. A brief presentation, poster series and 3D models of these sustainability strategies will be shown throughout the evening. Open to community members, family and friends, this reception is meant to stimulate a dialogue about how to green NYC’s public schools through innovative green design and student involvement.
The Green Design Lab, a joint project between Solar One: Green Energy, Arts and Education Center and Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day School was initiated fall 2007 to explore issues of sustainability through the lens of design, architecture and sustainable technology.
For more information, go to www.solar1.org/education.
Friday, April 18th | 5 - 6:30pm
The Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY
Refreshments will be served!
Posted in Education, Energy Efficiency, Green Building, New York City, Solar One, Solar One Events | Permalink
Energy Audit at Manhattan Comprehensive H.S.
Monday, March 10th, 2008
On Friday, March 7th, Solar One and the Community Environmental Center (CEC) teamed up to provide Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day School with an energy audit of their school building. Students followed auditors around the school as they performed their analysis, learning how to quantify the energy use throughout the building.
Posted in Education, Energy, Energy Efficiency, Green Building, Solar One | Permalink
Go Green East Harlem Presents Build It Green Conference
Friday, October 19th, 2007
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and NYSERDA are presenting a green building conference on October 25 at the New York Academy of Medicine in East Harlem. The conference will include presentations by the NYC Dept of Buildings, from architects and educators, with special breakout sessions on how to get financing for green projects and greening existing buildings, among others. With the enormous potential that New York has to be a great green proving ground, this is another step toward making that potential an actuality.
You can download the invite here. The registration deadline is today, so call and sign up now!
Posted in Green Building, New York City | Permalink
BiG! Press & Job Opening
Thursday, October 18th, 2007 Build It Green! gets a nice mention in today’s New York Times as part of an article on the growing trend of home deconstruction. As an alternative to demolition, deconstruction is a great way to reduce the flow of material into landfills, to reduce the use of virgin building materials and even to save some money. Among the more interesting points from the article:Today, according to the Building Materials Reuse Association, up to 85 percent of the average house can be recycled or reused; the hard part is harvesting the materials in a way that preserves their integrity
. . . . .
While the standard demolition quotes were around $25,000, the couple spent $38,000 to have a contractor….unpiece it over six weeks last summer. They expect to come out even or better after selling door hardware, windows, appliances and other components at a salvage auction and reaping a tax deduction by donating the rest to a reuse store.
. . . . .
Build it Green! NYC, a reuse shop in Astoria, sells sets from nearby film studios alongside items rescued from residential demolitions. Recently, $25 diner stools from “The Knights of Prosperity,” a short-lived ABC show, were for sale alongside $40 doors from “The Sopranos” and a set of cherry-finish kitchen cabinets removed from an Upper East Side apartment.
We encourage anyone considering a home improvement project to check out the great (and cheap!) stuff that Build It Green! has to offer. And if you’re interested helping to broaden the market for reuse in the NYC area, they’re also hiring a warehouse & sales associate.
Posted in Build It Green, Green Building, Recycling, Waste | Permalink
Solar 2 Featured in GreenSource Magazine
Thursday, October 18th, 2007Design for a Carbon-Free Life: The Pursuit of “Net” Zero Energy
October 2007
A Growing Number of Projects Focus Attention On An Elusive Goal
By Molly Miller
Buildings are responsible for nearly half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and consume more than 70 percent of the electricity generated by U.S. power plants, according to the Energy Information Administration. These numbers have become more and more widely cited in the press and are the mantra of Santa Fe-based architect Edward Mazria, who has long spoken out on the link between buildings and global warming. In 2002, Mazria founded Architecture 2030, a non-profit organization with the mission of dramatically reducing the building sector’s greenhouse gas emissions. In late 2005, the group issued the 2030 Challenge, calling for an immediate 50 percent reduction in fossil fuel use in new buildings and for climate-neutral buildings by 2030. (full article)
Posted in Green Building, S1 in the News, Solar 2, Solar One, Sustainability | Permalink
Global Warming Roundup
Thursday, October 4th, 2007 Another week, another spate of global warming-related essays, action and non-action.At the New York Times last week, former Czech President Vaclav Havel attempted to revive to moral argument for combatting global warming, saying:
It is also obvious from published research that human activity is a cause of change; we just don’t know how big its contribution is. Is it necessary to know that to the last percentage point, though? By waiting for incontrovertible precision, aren’t we simply wasting time when we could be taking measures that are relatively painless compared to those we would have to adopt after further delays?
There can be no doubt that for the past hundred years at least, Europe and the United States have been running up a debt, and now other parts of the world are following their example. Nature is issuing warnings that we must not only stop the debt from growing but start to pay it back. There is little point in asking whether we have borrowed too much or what would happen if we postponed the repayments. Anyone with a mortgage or a bank loan can easily imagine the answer.
Amen to that. I highly recommend reading the entire piece. Every day that passes with no movement on new CAFE standards, or that another non-green building goes up, or that we go without a comprehensive carbon-reduction plan is another day we get closer to seeing irreversible effects from climate change. Recent news reports say that scientists are stunned at how much the Arctic ice has receded this year, and our former colleague Ben Jervey is currently on a boat near Greenland making a journey that has only been made possible by the melting of sea ice.
Posted in Energy, Energy Efficiency, Global Warming, Green Building | Permalink
