New Version of LEED to Incorporate Better Metrics for Historic & Existing Buildings

Posted on: March 24th, 2008 by Barbara Campagna 15 Comments

 

Trinity Church & Copley Square, Boston, MASustainable Preservation Coalition

The National Trust for Historic Preservation created the Sustainable Preservation Coalition two years ago in order to impact further development of the LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) Building Rating Systems. We partnered with several national organizations who were developing separate sustainability agendas including the AIA, APT International, the National Park Service, General Services Administration and the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers. We realized we could make a bigger impact integrating historic preservation and green building values by working together.

Our first goal was to meet with the U.S. Green Building Council, the developer of LEED, and open up a dialogue to discuss improvements to their products which would better reflect the importance of existing buildings to sustainable stewardship of our planet and its limited resources. While LEED does much to encourage more sustainable development, and historic buildings can achieve the highest LEED rating, we believed it could certainly do better because the current version of LEED (LEED 2.2):

1. Overlooks the impact of projects on cultural value;

2. Does not effectively consider the performance, longer service lives and embodied energy of historic materials and assemblies;

3. And is overly focused on current or future technologies, neglecting how past experience helps to determine sustainable performance.

Our meeting with the President of USGBC (Rick Fedrizzi) and the Director of LEED Technical Development (Brendan Owens) was quite successful, ending with Rick inviting us to help them prepare preservation metrics for the revised versions of LEED. Over the past year, our coalition has been meeting with USGBC and are delighted to announce that soon LEED 3.0 will be unveiled.
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Windows, Part II

Posted on: March 24th, 2008 by Patrice Frey

 

An alert reader (Roberta Lane, Program Officer and Regional Attorney with the Trust's Northeast Field Office), reminded me that there is another great window study out there -- "Measured Winter Performance of Storm Windows," by Joseph Klems. I failed to mention that in a posting last Friday about windows.

Klems -- a researcher with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory -- completed the study in 2002. In short, the study finds that low-e storm windows perform "very similarly" to replacement windows. Happy reading.

 

 

 

Attention all Rhode Islanders…

Posted on: March 24th, 2008 by Patrice Frey

 

Another conference/workshop announcement -- this time for those of you in the Rhode Island area. The Providence Preservation Society presents "Balancing Sustainability & Preservation: Protecting Environmental & Historic Resources" on April 2nd. Visit http://www.ppsri.org/?section=events for the details. 

If you attend -- please visit my little corner of the PreservationNation blog again and share the highlights. We'd love to hear about it.

Notes from New Orleans: Affordable Housing Shortage

Posted on: March 24th, 2008 by Walter Gallas

 

Mercy Corps’ Rick Denhart was told by the demolition contractor of the C.J. Peete housing development that 15 buildings in one quadrant of the site could be available for salvage, yet total demolition of the buildings seems to be proceeding. Meanwhile, one source told us the demolition of Lafitte was likely indefinitely stalled, yet a city source said the Lafitte demolition would occur.

The March 23 Sunday Times-Picayune ran a story on the precarious state of many affordable housing projects in New Orleans given the turmoil in the financial markets. An accompanying map indicated that phases of C. J. Peete and B. W. Cooper have closed on their financing, while Lafitte and St. Bernard have not. The map also shows that one phase of C.J.Peete is completed—which is not true. Developers are also caught in a bind with rising construction costs yet constraints on how much rent to charge on some units.

The Times-Picayune also acknowledged the shortage of affordable housing this week in a story about the thousands who lined up in Kenner to apply for Section 8 vouchers from the Kenner Housing Authority. “Many people in line said the post-Katrina shortage of affordable housing prompted them to ask for government help,” the story reports.

Tomb of the Unknowns Update: Study Requires "Highly Experienced Specialists"

Posted on: March 21st, 2008 by National Trust for Historic Preservation 1 Comment

 

Shortly before Congress and President Bush enacted the temporary reprieve for the historic monument, the Army announced that it had “decided to pause” its effort to replace and discard the historic Tomb Monument “until … Congress has the opportunity to review the report.” The report is due at the end of July 2008.

In the meantime, the Army also announced that it was “considering repair of the Tomb Monument’s cracks[.] … If implemented, the repair … is part of the cyclical maintenance that is needed to preserve the Tomb Monument while we continue to explore long-term options.” Given the Army’s stubborn insistence that replacement is necessary, this announcement – under political pressure from Congress and thousands of Americans – is not reassuring to preservationists.

On March 13, therefore, the National Trust for Historic Preservation cautioned the Army and Department of Veterans Affairs that it is imperative that the personnel tasked with conducting the new study of the Tomb Monument be highly experienced specialists in the conservation of marble. For example, this expert must conduct technically sophisticated tests to assess the structural integrity of the monument, evaluate the feasibility of repairing the monument, and prepare cost estimates for repair versus replacement.

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