energy efficiency

Friday afternoon: it is happening as I type this. At the office from which I'm writing this post, my co-workers are celebrating Friday afternoon by enjoying Cuban food from a nearby spot (spoiler alert: the consensus is that plantains are delicious); I am celebrating it by trying to figure out an unobtrusive way to watch the New York Mets' spring training tilt against the Florida Marlins from my cubicle (spoiler alert: there isn't one) and, for whatever reason, considering getting some Cuban food. On the off chance that things are similarly un-hectic at your place of work, I'm going to take a break from my usual gnarly riffage on green building issues of the moment to single out a nice, somewhat lengthy feature by the New York Observer's Roland Li that makes for an interesting afternoon read.

It was different in Martin Luther's day. Back in the 16th century, a monk could nail 95 theses to a church door and count on every one of them being read and discussed. Well, at least on them being read and discussed by the small percentage of people who could actually read in the 16th century. In the 21st century, when a 200-member blue-ribbon task force convened by the Mayor of New York City issues a 111-point report on greening the city's building codes, it doesn't even show up on gbNYC until a few days later. Which I guess is more my fault than the fault of the hyperspeed effects of 500 years of technological and cultural change. But even in the coverage I've read of the report, the report itself (download the summary here, full thing here) gets only the vaguest gloss. Yes, 111 recommendations is a lot.

Mayor Bloomberg today is unveiling a four-pronged plan developed by his Sustainability Advisory Board that would soon require New York City building owners to implement a variety of energy efficiency upgrades to existing buildings. Four separate bills would require energy audits, efficient lighting installations, including upgrades to commercial and residential common areas, and ultimately the creation of a new city energy code; the DOB has been asked to draft a set of rules based on the bills no later than December 31, 2010.

Earlier this month, Syracuse University’s School of Architecture announced the winners of its From the Ground Up housing competition that it launched last year in cooperation with the Syracuse Centre for Excellence and Home HeadQuarters. Design teams were charged with creating a compact (between 1100 and 1500 square feet), affordable ($150,000.00 construction budget), and modern green home for Syracuse’s depressed, 550-acre Near Westside neighborhood. Brooklyn-based Della Valle Bernheimer and Manhattan-based Architecture Research Office took top honors for their two-story R-House, which is designed to use as much electricity as a hair dryer while blending a modern architectural aesthetic into the jumbled existing building stock of the Near Westside.