EHDD Architecture

A Mumbai master plan

2012-01-24T17:03:00.000-08:00

I recently returned from a trip to India, as a part of an EHDD team lead by Michel St Pierre (principal and director of urban design) along with Jennifer Devlin (EHDD India managing principal) and Dave Vogel, (associate principal). We were there to take part in an intensive, four-day design workshop with our client, a Mumbai-based developer who commissioned EHDD to create a new masterplan for a 24-acre site in a northern suburb of the city.

An initial masterplan was completed in 2009 with a mixed-use program that included four million square feet of housing, retail, office, and cultural uses. Recently, after construction on the first phase had begun, local authorities upzoned the area to incentivize greater development density in close proximity to a planned transit corridor and new station. Aiming to capitalize on the increased allowable density the client commissioned EHDD to redesign the original master plan to accommodate the increased development program, up to seven million square feet total.

Michel St. Pierre leads a workshop with the client team and other
consultant and stakeholder groups. Photo credit – EHDD Architecture

In the weeks leading up to the trip, EHDD’s design team worked tirelessly to devise several alternative schemes to meet the twin challenges of maintaining a sustainable and livable environment within the increased density, and working with the buildings and infrastructure already underway on site. The team produced 40+ full size color presentation boards describing and diagramming a myriad of options and alternatives for the site, enough to cover every wall of the conference room.

The EHDD and client teams were joined by a host of stakeholders, consultants and specialists, including local architects who provided the needed interpretation of the complicated planning codes in Mumbai; traffic engineers to strategize for the flow of thousands of cars through the site and onto nearby roadways; and sustainability experts to advise on the wide array of site development and green building features in the project and optimize them for the unique Mumbai climate.

The seven million square foot project sits on a 24-acre site
in Mumbai.Rendering credit – EHDD Architecture

After four straight days of lively debate, flurries of sketching and on-the-fly computer modeling, a new scheme emerged which addressed all of the competing factors of the large and complex project, while offering the flexibility for several future-phase variations. In the end, the preferred solution was a synthesis of many options developed during the workshop that incorporated all the critical issues discussed with the entire group. The EHDD team returned to San Francisco with a clear design direction, and we are now developing the overall design into a concept master plan that will form the basis for the overall development of the project for the years to come.

Joseph Schollmeyer
Designer, LEED® AP

Have Cricket, will travel.

2011-12-12T11:29:00.000-08:00

EHDD assembled a flash mob last Friday evening at its Mission office to showcase Cricket, a compact, hip version of the classic pop-up camper. Participants enjoyed Fin on the Hoof food truck and full showing of a fully equipped Cricket. The compact single-axle trailer was designed by Garrett Finney, a Houston-based grad school classmate of mine, who has parlayed his experience designing super efficient living modules for NASA toward this latest venture. I grew up travelling in a 1968 Airstream and instantly fell in love with Finney’s little camper on a recent visit to Houston. Now I have to convince my partners to purchase a Cricket. Why? To deploy to the next client workshop of course!

Marc, L'Italien, FAIA

Principal

Student Housing in 2011 and Beyond

2011-10-31T15:12:00.000-07:00

The new San Francisco planning resolution to encourage the new construction of student housing within the city—promoted heavily by the San Francisco Housing Coalition and approved unanimously in November, 2010 by the Board of Supervisors—comes at an interesting juncture in the evolution of that building type. While the ordinance serves several critical goals for the city and the 31 colleges and universities located in San Francisco, I realize, from my 25 plus years of designing student housing, that new projects are typically expensive to build.

New residence halls generally operate at a loss for the first five years of occupation. Often, universities rely on income from their older dorms—with paid off construction costs—to offset the typically high initial costs of their new, flagship housing projects.

The new San Francisco Planning resolution certainly eases some of these fiscal constraints, but new student housing projects remain difficult to “pencil out.”

What has driven up the cost of this project type? This is partly the result of changing student expectations about university experience and partly a broader demographic shift. More and more, students are looking for a highly immersive academic experience. It’s not enough to leave home, and live on their own: today’s students want the maximum academic and cultural “bang” for their (increasingly expensive) buck. They are looking for housing that is on campus or nearby, connected to research and classroom activities, and providing an ongoing engagement to campus life. More upperclassmen and even graduate students are choosing to live in student housing for these reasons.

Simultaneously, universities are experiencing an overall growth in student enrollment as well as an ongoing increase in foreign student enrollment, both of which place more demand on student housing facilities. What’s the new approach to student housing design? I have always believed in designing student housing environments, whether in urban areas or on non-urban campuses—which create community to allow residents to integrate into academic life.

This approach requires understanding that while students require privacy—the expanded range of unit types now includes apartments and suites with unit amenities such as kitchen—they also seek social engagement.

On campus, the monumental, central dining hall, long a fixture of student housing projects, is being replaced or at least supplemented with new types of food service, typically café-scaled and dispersed, and often more public than the traditional interior dining hall.

Baytree Bookstore & Graduate Student Commons, UC Santa Cruz

Yablokoff-Wallace Dining Expansion, UC Merced

Urban areas like San Francisco or Berkeley intrinsically (and free of charge to a developer) provide many of the amenities that traditional campus housing attempts to incorporate within the residence halls, particularly if housing is located in neighborhoods with active streetlife. In this case, the design solutions would address density and in-room amenities as well as access and security, particularly at the street-level.

Currently, very few universities (let alone cities) are looking at high-rise student residences, but this may well be a trend of the future.

One exception is the University Center of Chicago—a “super dorm” built to house 1,700 students on 18 floors from three downtown schools. Another is Nido Spitalfields in the United Kingdom, which at 34 stories is currently the tallest student housing building in the world.

Infill student housing entails a greater interaction with the surrounding urban environment. One particular challenge is how to provide outdoor spaces for student use. While this need is traditionally served by the surrounding landscape of a traditional campus, infill developments require a different typology. In designing Residence Halls Units 1 & 2 at the University of California, Berkeley, my team and I developed outdoor plazas that are roof decks above student support programs and which, while primarily used by students, are also a public neighborhood amenity.

Residence Halls Units 1&2 Infill Student Housing, UC Berkeley

Increasing student expectations for sustainable and environmentally progressive living situations means we at EHDD need to continue to push the envelope—Units 1 & 2 is designed to be LEED® Silver, and I lead the project team for a net-zero energy student housing project at the University of California, Merced. While many strategies are visible, such as energy dashboards, solar hot water, green roofs and grey water systems; others are not.

For our recently-completed historic renovation at the Clark Kerr Campus at UC Berkeley—a double LEED Gold certified-project—many of the sustainable solutions are literally inside the walls.

Clark Kerr Campus Renewal Sustainable Section

But it is also the client with an abiding commitment to sustainability who helps enable innovation. One such client is Chris Harvey, director of Residential and Student Service Programs Capital Projects at UC Berkeley, who oversaw both the Units 1 & 2 and Clark Kerr Campus Renewal projects.

How can one make the case for urban dorms? Student housing has, potentially, an important role to play in the larger process of urban vitalization. In bringing student activity, and business, to new neighborhoods—as UC Hastings College of Law envisions for its campus bordering the gritty Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco—student housing projects can contribute to an ongoing economic and cultural revival in these areas. Our developer-led proposal for housing along Bancroft Avenue in Berkeley is planned as the centerpiece of a broader business redevelopment project along Telegraph Avenue.

Mixed-use Student Housing

As someone who long ago lived in a standard double room on a double-loaded corridor on a floor with gang bathrooms on the University of Oregon campus, I am amazed at today’s student housing. What’s next? Here’s a glimpse into the future: If Nido Spitalfieds is any indication, it is the “five-star” dorm with hotel-like amenities. (See link to FT’s recent article entitled “It feels like a five-star hotel” regarding the project:)

It’s time to sharpen those pencils!
Duncan Ballash, AIA
President

#1 in 2010: Paving the Way to 2030

2011-09-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

In May 2011 the American Institute of Architects (AIA) released its first 2030 Commitment Annual Report for 2010. This is an anonymous and voluntary reporting of architecture firms’ progress towards meeting the 2030 Commitment goals leading up to all new building achieving net zero energy performance by the year 2030. The target reduction for 2010 was a firm-wide PEUI (predicted energy use intensity) of 60% below the existing building stock average. The good news is that many firms were able to assemble the data and submit a report. The bad news is that the average PEUI reduction was 35.1%, far below the target. The largest reduction by a firm was 70.6%. I am proud to claim that distinction for EHDD Architecture.

Packard Foundation 343 Second Street Office Building

The Exploratorium at Piers 15 & 17

The short story is that we had two large net zero energy buildings in active design phase in 2010 – the 50,000 sq. ft. Packard Foundation 343 Second Street office building and the 330,000 sq. ft. new home of The Exploratorium at Piers 15 & 17 – and this elevated our results beyond any other design firm in the county. This proves the obvious: the best way to meet the 2030 Commitment is to start designing net zero energy buildings before 2030. The inability of most firms to meet the target reduction proves the same point. It is hard to get where we need to go with incremental improvements. Instead, it is going to take radical leaps forward to net or near net zero energy buildings in the near term to get to all net zero energy buildings in the longer term.

"The best way to meet the 2030 Commitment is to start designing NZE buildings now."

The reporting process is a challenge in itself, this despite the praiseworthy efforts of Greg Mella, Rand Ekman, Bill Worthen and the others who labored to set up the protocol. The hardest part is gathering up – or more aptly prying loose – the energy model reports from active projects for 2010 and trying to determine how trustworthy they are. While some projects use energy models to try to predict actual energy use, others are merely compliance models. What you end up with is a bunch of models that are often based on different assumptions of what they are measuring. In the end these predicted results are being compared against measured projects in the DOE’s (Department of Energy) Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) database. Therefore, all of our modeling should be moving towards trying to predict real use instead of playing by the artificial rules set by energy codes.

The other challenge is that architecture firms these days do a lot of studies that stall in conception. I would recommend a change in the definition of applicable projects from “active design phase” to “projects finished with schematic design through construction.” Many projects are only beginning to get reliable energy models at the end of schematic design. Any predicted energy use earlier than that reflects aspiration, not perspiration.

"Energy literacy leads to energy efficiency."

After you gather your project data, the next step is to select the closest applicable CBECS benchmark category for your project to compare to. As you would expect there is no benchmark category for a 330,000 sq. ft. remodel of an historic pier building as a science museum that makes lightning as part of its exhibits. The CBECS database is widely known to be severely limited in scope, so you end up having to come to terms on your own with the benchmark category or EUI that most fairly compares with your building.

I will end on an up note by echoing what Jim Newman said on a blog post at buildinggreen.com about this year’s less than sparkling results: “It is worth remembering that this process and the data itself are meant to help firms get better. The point of collecting and publishing all of this is improvement. The results are secondary….The results can help us track the effectiveness of those changes over time.” I encourage all firms to start tracking their energy use. Energy literacy is the first step towards energy efficiency.

Brad Jacobson, AIA, LEED® AP
Senior Associate

Home Sweet Rome

2011-09-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

After visiting Rome four times over the course of 26 years, I can definitely say that the Eternal City does change over time. As an architect visiting Rome, I have always been attracted to the crazy riches of amazing art and architecture that this ancient city has on every corner. My recent visits there, including a three-week stay this summer, were also experienced through my eyes as a city-dweller, not just as the kid from the California suburbs who saw Rome before ever seeing New York City.

Sustainable building design and sustainable planning are important and timely topics here at EHDD Architecture and here in San Francisco. Despite my professed love of Italy and the Mediterranean lifestyle, I have always been baffled by the world-famous dysfunctional Italian institutions, such as their ever-changing government, the moribund postal system, and the unsustainable pension packages, to name a few. Sound familiar? My visit to Rome this summer, however, was one pleasant urban experience after another, and I found myself constantly asking if Rome can do it, why can’t San Francisco?

What follows is my short and personal list of things I saw in Rome that I would love for San Francisco to get to work on. The city by the Tiber is by no means the leader in any of these things, but if it can be done in the capital city of a country that is barely a functioning country, then we have no excuse not to get it done here in the city by the bay.

Streets

Overhead utility lines: I realize that after the destruction and bombardment of many European cities in World War II, rebuilding efforts included undergrounding overhead electrical and phone wires. While America was building freeways, however, Italy and other countries were putting the lines and wires underground. How can San Francisco profess to be the center of 21st century technological innovation when I look out my window and see a tangled mass of electrical and telephone line spaghetti (or is it linguini?), i.e.: 19th century technology strung from wood poles.

Sidewalk Commerce: Many of the traffic medians and islands, the sidewalks and leftover outdoor spaces in and around Roman intersections and public spaces, get turned over to small espresso stands, newsstands, flower stands, bars, and ristorantes. San Francisco can be chillier than Rome, for sure, but given our obsession with food and coffee, what better way to activate car-dominated public spaces and corridors than by adding a couple of chairs, umbrellas and an espresso machine or curry cart? The Parklets movement in San Francisco is a step in the right direction, as well as the Valencia Street sidewalk enhancements in the Mission District, but look down Market or Folsom Streets and imagine tables and chairs, coffee and tea, lawyers and art students all lounging together in harmony.

Aqua: I don’t think this idea would ever fly here in our dry state, so save your email retorts. Rome has drinking water fountains all over the city in piazzas, on sidewalks and in the alleys, all fed by the same aqueducts or sources that have been supplying potable water from the mountains to the city since ancient times. Here’s the best part: the water is cold, great-tasting, it’s free and it comes out of the spout continuously, 24/7. How civilized is that? No more bottled water. Dogs love them. Ornamental fountains and drinking fountains are everywhere. Just have a sip, or fill up your own water bottle.

Transit

Buses and Streetcars: Rome and San Francisco are pretty evenly matched here, but I will give Rome the edge on efficiency (yes, Italian efficiency—who knew!?) for a great transit system that covers the entire metro area and a single bus trip that still costs about $1.40. ATAC (the Roman transit system) has a fleet of small electric buses that traverse the pedestrian-only zones and medieval districts where the streets are very narrow. These electric “baby buses,” as my son dubbed them, are quiet, zero-emissions vehicles and are perfect for tight streets and busy tourist areas.

Congestion Pricing: There are certain neighborhoods in Rome such as the historic Centro and the Trastevere neighborhood that either get a lot of vehicle traffic (tourist and otherwise), and/or have a thick fabric of narrow medieval alleys and streets. To discourage drivers from entering these congested areas, electronic gateways notify when the congestion pricing is active and charge accordingly for outsiders (residents of those streets get a break and scooters are exempt). People will always get to Coit Tower or the Pantheon without driving their own car—this is a really great way to reduce congestion and fuel use, and it forces visitors to walk and experience things outside of their car.

Trains: Anyone who has any doubt about building a bullet train in California need only ride the Frecciarossa from Rome to Naples or from Rome to Milan to be sold on high-speed rail. Cruising speed is 225 mph, there is plenty of room for those infernal wheelie-suitcases, there are beautiful train coaches with comfortable seats, and there is an espresso cart coming down the aisle. These Italian train fares were comparable to Southwest Airline flights between northern and southern California and the trains were full. Jobs, civilized travel and fewer carbon-spewing airplanes and cars. Enough said.

Food

Health & Diet: Diet gurus and Bay Area chefs have been extolling the virtues of the Mediterranean diet for decades. Suffice it to say that eating fresh, locally produced food is good for you, good for your city and good for your planet, and it turns out it tastes better. Romans have a long tradition of growing some of their own food—either in pots, or plots within or outside of the city. They also eat only what is in season and pretty much stick to regionally grown food. No strawberries in January from Mexico or even artichokes from the south of France. You eat what is coming out of the ground, and when it is done you move on to the next crop. We here in the Bay Area are blessed with a similar climate to Rome and the local food movement is firmly entrenched here and in other cities, and is hopefully spreading to the lands of frozen and processed foods. Eating local means less fuel spent on shipping food across state lines or oceans and supporting local farmers and businesses, and eating fruits and vegetables, just like your mom told you to……and it tastes better.

Waste Management: Apparently when a city of several million people eats mostly fresh food and very little processed food, there is a resultant decrease in landfill that must be collected in a dense urban fabric and trucked outside of the city to be dealt with. I kept asking the locals I met in Rome where the garbage bins for their apartments were kept. By most accounts, there aren’t any. Most households just bring down a small bag of household waste when ready, and drop it in a mini-dumpster somewhere on their block or nearby. Fresh food in, less garbage out, less landfill, and less fuel used to transport waste to the landfill.

Many Europeans and Americans are quick to compare Rome to Washington, D.C. (seats of power, lots of museums, somewhat provincial) and to compare Milan to New York City (finance and fashion centers, and oh-so-cosmopolitan). I am here to tell you that it’s not that simple. There are a lot more scooters in Rome and women’s skirts tend to be a lot shorter there, than in D.C. I contend that Rome actually has a lot more in common with San Francisco: both cities have the Mediterranean climate and quality of light, lots of hills, great food, coffee and ice cream, and an aversion towards contemporary architecture.

Rome and San Francisco also have a reputation for being first-adopters of many things that seem crazy at first to the rest of the world, but often become the norm with the passing of time. San Franciscans, like Romans, are by and large thick-skinned, and deal with the funny looks or accusations of being weird with a shrug and a response that “someday you’ll understand why. Trust me.” It is my hope that we can continue to lead the charge on re-energizing and maximizing our wonderful urban fabric and infrastructure, to be smarter with our limited resources, and leverage all of the great public amenities and resources that we all enjoy on a daily basis that makes our fair city such a wonderful place to visit, or call home, just like Rome.

Kevin Killen, AIA, LEED® AP

Director, Residential Studio

Challenges in Creating Sustainable Cities

2011-07-05T13:54:00.000-07:00

A recent article in The New York Times entitled “Across Europe, Irking Drivers Is Urban Policy” raises some fundamental issues about how to create truly livable and sustainable cities. Several European cities are tackling the issue of car management full force, resisting the notion that a city needs to accommodate cars to remain commercially viable. The model that has characterized how North American cities have developed since World War ll has greatly emphasized the vehicle. It is inconceivable that such a model can prevail today, knowing its tremendous impact on the environment and given the sophisticated public discourse about what makes a great place to live and work. Nonetheless, when we are designing commercial and mixed use developments in many California communities, we are often required to meet parking standards that are not in sync with the public discourse. In fact, by mandating a high minimum parking requirement (rather than a maximum), municipalities are providing a de facto incentive for citizens to drive a private vehicle as a means of commuting. This is especially relevant today in light of new California state laws that require cities to address climate change. It is well known that, in most municipalities, the largest factor in green gas emissions (CO2) is private car usage.

Photo by: ELF

Photo by: John Hemming

Parking ratios determination is probably one of the most misunderstood aspects of planning. Parking requirements mandated by a given municipality are often based on precedents from other municipalities. Most of the time the underlying assumptions used in the original parking requirements are unknown to most, and thus difficult to challenge. It is critical to conduct a site specific study assessing all potential modes of transportation and potential carpooling to determine what is the appropriate amount of parking needed. Incentives towards promoting sustainable forms of transportation should be a key element of any planning regulation.

Cities like London and Montreal have taken bold step towards making cycling a true alternative form of commuting. In some areas of London, cyclists overtake rush hour drivers and dictate the speed of traffic. Montreal developed an extensive network of safe and segregated bicycle lanes throughout the city, not dissimilar to those in Holland and Denmark. The program has proven to be so popular that the city now faces a serious cycling congestion problem during rush hours, which leads many bike riders to veer off the path and take their chances amidst the automobiles.

There is a clear need to put greater emphasis on infrastructure for bike mobility and storage. Once that infrastructure is in place, we can make our cities drastically more healthy and livable, while considerably reducing our carbon footprint.

Michel St. Pierre
Director, Planning and Urban Design Studio

The Steps of Home and the Steps of Rome

2011-06-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

I am heading to Rome this summer for a couple of weeks as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Friends and some colleagues who have known me for some time were quick to ask “Why Italy again? Why not London or Paris or Prague or Switzerland?” My stock answer to that question comes from Harry Lime (as played by Orson Welles in “The Third Man”):

"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Not that I advocate war and chaos as a catalyst for great artistic leaps, but despite several millennia of imperial rise and fall, construction and wanton destruction, Rome will always have a special place for me as an architect and a lover of life. Much has been written on the glory and power and romance and chaos that Rome has left in her wake, and I write not so good…..so I will be brief and stick to stairs, Vespas and prosciutto.

I’m not interested in studying classical building orders or finding the perfect Corinthian column, but every time I have visited the Eternal City, I have been bowled over by the overwhelming layers of history and urban fabric and building technologies past and present from which I always learn something as a designer.

San Francisco, like Rome, has seven famous hills (The Beranlium, The Telegraphian, The Potrerotine, The Rinconium, etc.) and as a resident of San Francisco, I have always been fascinated by all of the urban fabric of the stairwalks throughout its’ hilly neighborhoods. While in Rome, I will be mapping, sketching and photographing stairwalks throughout the city, including the monumental, the sacred, the seats of power, and the everyday neighborhood stairs. Also, I should mention that my desktop calendar of daily Italian phrases says (for July 29th): Salire le scale fa molto bene alla salute delle gambe (Climbing the stairs is very good for your legs’ health)

Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday” (IMDb.com)

As a card-carrying urbanite and lover of food and Mediterranean climate, I look forward to wallowing in the density and chaos of a city of 400,000 scooters, with the open-air markets, decent public transportation, fountains that you can drink from, and fresh pasta, bread, and espresso from Giacomo the Fruttivendolo on the corner. Although my house is almost as old as Italy has been around as a country, there is still a lot to learn from a city that has been continuously occupied (as a City!) for over 2000 years, in a country that never really wanted to be a country.

Kevin Killen, AIA, LEED® AP
Director, Residential Studio

Livable Cities: A former Vancouverite makes the case for San Francisco

2011-06-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

Vancouver again topped the EIU's (Economist Intelligence Unit) World’s Most Livable Cities, with San Francisco placing somewhere unknown behind 29^th ranked Pittsburgh. As a transplant to San Francisco from Vancouver, I find this rather comical. Why do we have a constant need to rank something that is so subjective? Especially when the reasoning seems to be rather irrational? That said, it’s interesting to consider what makes a city livable. Vancouver is most often trumpeted for its dense downtown, yet most of my friends and family live in single family homes outside the downtown area. San Francisco on the other hand, is consistently dense. Where before I would have had to bike ten minutes to get groceries, I now walk out my door to any number of stores or restaurants within minutes of my apartment. My bike commute has gone from a 45 rainy minutes to 10 mostly sunny ones. Where there may have been one concert a month in Vancouver I would want to go to, there’s dozens here for me to choose from. I do miss the mountains, people, health care, and Asian food but in terms of livable, I think San Francisco has it pretty well nailed.

Janika McFeely, LEED® AP BD+C
Designer

Earth Day

2011-04-21T13:36:00.000-07:00

The 41st annual Earth Day – April 22nd – falls in the shadow of the first year anniversary of the BP oil spill. The sad synchronicity of these two events is further amplified by Earth Day’s beginnings: Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson first hatched the idea in 1969 after returning from viewing the Union Oil disaster off the coast of Santa Barbara (now bumped to the third largest oil spill in the US behind 2010’s Deepwater Horizon and 1989’s Exxon Valdez).

Earthdaysf.com explains that the senator was inspired by the teach-ins of the anti-war movement and “thought that tapping into local community concerns would be the way to advance an environmental agenda in Washington, D.C.” The success of the event spurred the passing of major environmental legislation later the next year, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

According to organizers, the 41st annual Earth Day will be celebrated by more than a billion people internationally, making it the biggest civic event in the world. San Francisco will debut a free full-day festival dedicated to music and environmental education in Civic Center Plaza. It also starts off a month long EHDD “teach-in” focused on redefining sustainability within the office. Lectures from the likes of Architecture for Humanity, Kiva, Hyphae Design Laboratory, and LMS along with internal dialogue, knowledge blasts, and community volunteer opportunities will give us a fresh perspective on our personal and professional understanding of sustainability.

Sustainability implies a commitment to meeting economic, social, and environmental goals now and in the future; however, in application it rarely refers to all three aspects of the definition at once. Every firm has a sustainability tab on their website now, but which ones actually get it? In this context, sustainable design is an oxymoron. Most LEED Platinum projects may reduce energy use and be made of recycled content materials but which ones could truly be called “sustainable?” The more I think about it, the more I feel that we need to move beyond metrics and checklists to a more embodied understanding of what environmental, social, and economic sustainability means in order to make design decisions that have a real positive impact. As William McDonough constantly trumpets, it’s not good enough to just do “less bad.”

We need to be inspired – it's in our nature as designers. So how can the environmental, social, and economic crises inspire rather than paralyze? The economic crisis is already forcing innovation, charging us into new markets (like planning) that we haven't focused on before and these new endeavors provide an opportunity to reset how we conceptualize what sustainability means to us as professionals and as people. My challenge for you then this Earth Day is to answer this question: what does sustainability mean to you?

- Janika McFeely, LEED® AP BD+C
Designer

The Passively Aggressive House

2011-04-21T13:26:00.000-07:00

In the Pantheon of rock-god guitar players, somewhere between Jimmy Page and Stevie Ray Vaughn, there is undoubtedly a statue niche for U2’s The Edge (aka David Evans). Here on earth, however, he has decided to build a home on the cliffs above Malibu that will reportedly be around 10,000sf, and pursuing LEED® certification. How does a 10,000sf single-family residence get to be eligible for LEED certification? Talk about diluting the LEED brand. Big homes are inherently not sustainable.

I am constantly asked what sustainable design means for a house. The quickest and easiest answer is: the way your great-great-grandfather built his house: a modest-sized home built with local materials, well-insulated to keep the cold out, and uses the solar orientation, trees and other features of the site to help keep your house protected from the hot sun and cold wind, as well as capitalizing on the sun’s path to keep you warm and happy in your home. Oh, and it would be even more sustainable if you were in a city, because you might be sharing walls with a neighbor, using your car less, walking to the corner store, etc.

Granted, your great-great-grandfather may have had a privy out in the backyard (not so great in the winter) and he definitely did not have 3 televisions and cell-phone chargers or a Kitchenaid Mixmaster sitting on the counter, so yes, times were simpler back then. Our ancestors were not encumbered with all the gadgets that require constant energy in the 21st century home.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we are blessed with a truly Mediterranean-like climate and our heating and cooling needs are less moderate when compared to most of the country, not to mention our neighbors to the east in the Central Valley, where most of the projected growth is for the Golden State in the 21st century. Given the huge growth projected for the area of California that is currently the least densely populated region, we will need smart, energy and resource-efficient strategies for planning and building for the next million residents.

“Passive House” building strategies have been employed in residential and non-residential design in Europe for decades, and in 2009 EHDD Architecture started on the design of our first Passive House for one of our repeat clients, a couple who also happens to be a scientist and ecologist (practice what you preach, indeed). The philosophy behind Passive House design is fairly simple: super-insulate and mercilessly air-seal the exterior envelope of the house in order to create a volume that will maintain a very constant and comfortable temperature level inside the house year-round. A heat recovery ventilator system will enable the house to use only moderate amounts of energy to stay warm in the winter.

Our Passive House project started as an early 20th Century all-redwood cabin (read: no insulation at all) nestled among redwoods in a small town about 30 minutes south of San Francisco. The owners decided to keep the redwood interiors intact (beautiful old growth redwood and 90 years of embodied energy!), and a new house with an extra bedroom and bathroom and a kitchen was designed around the core redwood rooms, all to be placed on a new foundation. Triple-glazed windows and energy-efficient appliances will keep energy use at a minimum, and a future phase to add a photovoltaic array will produce enough on-site energy to make it a net-zero energy home. Good for the environment and good for your checkbook.

When I was a young student in college studying architecture, Passive House building techniques (like the roof garden, the rain-harvester, greywater systems and solar panels) were all the domain of hippies with hammers, but no more. These building techniques and systems, and the “take just what you need and don’t waste anything” attitudes behind them are now being written into our building codes and are more user-friendly and economical than ever.

I realize that The Edge probably has a sizable guitar collection to store in his new house, but those guitars don’t need their own bathroom or home gym, nor do they drive their own car. Surely there must be a way to accommodate everyone in the Edge household and maintain the rock-god credentials in something under 10,000sf (better yet, how about 3,000sf?). All joking aside, people and guitars are living in the age of diminishing oil and natural resources, with rising utility costs and more and more of our brothers and sisters across the globe moving into cities. With Earth Day right around the corner, now would be a good time to think about doing more (or perhaps the same) with less, and be smarter and more sustainable about the way we design, build and use our homes.

- Kevin Killen, AIA, LEED® AP
Director, Residential Studio

ROI (Return on investment): The economics of vision

2011-03-18T14:14:00.000-07:00

In Texas, in 1980 (as the stories go), all a body needed was an Armani suit and a Lincoln Town Car to get a $5 million loan. As a natural result of this state of affairs, the development and construction business flourished—subdivisions, strip malls, and office parks proliferated. Often, such projects lacked tenants, lacked a business plan, lacked long-term economic vision. But they were built anyway—they had capital.

Those days are obviously long gone.

Increasingly, cash-strapped cities are turning to private enterprise (or private/public partnerships) for large scale development projects. Simultaneously, financing for such projects, both public and private, is increasingly difficult to secure. These days, a business plan—and preferably a good one—is definitely required. Such a situation can be both an opportunity and a challenge for potential developers and their partners (architects among them). In such a cautious marketplace, the need for inspired and inspiring ideas is even more pressing. Cities require economic innovation as much as urban innovation. And, increasingly, urban interests and economic interests are intrinsically connected. There are neighborhoods, downtowns, whole cities all struggling to create, and recreate, viable public spaces. A first step in this process must be creating, sustaining, and maintaining new market activity. Enlightened development can offer the possibility of transformation.

Today’s enlightened developer combines conventional economic tools—market analysis, business development—with innovative ideas, a willingness to take risks, and a hefty dose of patience. It’s not enough to have a good, even an amazing idea. The development process is just that: a process. The dialogue can involve anyone and everyone from neighborhood associations to governmental regulatory bodies, to various city and state planning departments. (For example, there were 16 different agencies involved in the entitlements for The Exploratorium, for which EHDD is the design architect.) The developer must be prepared for their idea to evolve, and such discussion can be hugely beneficial to the overall concept.

Nonetheless, it’s also important for the developer not to lose sight of the larger goals. Much of this dialogue involves negotiation with rules, regulations and constraints. Creative—and flexible—approaches to a project will allow the developer to steer an innovative concept through the process without killing the idea.We’ve worked on a number of projects which are relevant in this regard—projects in which an economic and social vision led to the creation of unusual or innovative projects. These are singular projects that nonetheless subsequently transformed the larger area around them.

Monterey Bay Aquarium

In the 1970’s, Cannery Row was a ghost town. Abandoned sardine canneries lined the empty street—there was no business activity at all. Periodically, one of the warehouses would burn down under suspicious circumstances. Nonetheless, even such drastic and legally questionable strategies proved largely ineffective. The agent of transformation, in this case, were David and Lucile Packard, who were asked by their daughters, marine biologists, to finance a small aquarium and research center on Cannery Row. Instead, the Packards decided to finance “the best aquarium in the world”. Initial estimates suggested that an aquarium in Monterey would be lucky to get 1 million visitors per year. The opening year’s attendance was 2.3 million. The aquarium proved to be a catalyst for the transformation of the entire Cannery Row. Today, average annual attendance is 1.5 million, and the stores along Cannery row generate significant tax revenue for the city of Monterey.

Monterey Bay Aquarium, Monterey, CA
Photo by Jane Lidz

The Aquarium of the Pacific

Long Beach’s waterfront had no abandoned canneries. However, it had very little else, either. Although the city had constructed a large public park, it got very little use, and even less desirable and legal use. (Joggers and dog walkers in the morning gave way to drug dealers by the afternoon, making the park largely unusable by the general public.) Like Monterey, business was nonexistent. The Aquarium of the Pacific was the result of opportunistic action by the city manager, who seized the moment with a progressive city council and a progressive mayor in order to push forward an innovative, and risky idea. The aquarium was financed by $153 million in bonds. Since its construction, previously vacant lots around the waterfront were sold and developed into both housing and retail, turning an abandoned urban edge into an active, and economically viable, neighborhood. Currently, the housing seems to be flourishing, while the retail struggles.

Aquarium of the Pacific, Long Beach, CA
Photo by Timothy Hursley

San Mateo Public Library

In San Mateo, although the downtown was not as economically or culturally barren as in Long Beach or Monterey, the city government was still concerned about a lack of activity. They wanted to get more people—and more businesses—into the downtown, and looked to a new, large, public project in order to do so. The new San Mateo Public Library was conceived as a social center; it incorporates public gathering and seating spaces as well as more traditional library uses. The increased use of the library has led to increased downtown pedestrian activity, which the city hopes to leverage into future business development as well.

San Mateo Public Library, San Mateo, CA
Photo by Doug Snower

In all of these projects, a development entity—private, public, or public-private—took on a significant amount of risk in pursuing an unusual or unconventional project. However, in all cases, the project resulted in considerable returns—for both the developers and the cities in which the developments were built. The final project, in all cases, was a result of intensive, and ongoing negotiation between many parties. Although such back-and-forth can be frustrating—and it can certainly take time—the continuous dialogue also ultimately strengthened each project. The desire for change, on the part of the municipalities provided a way for developers and architects to negotiate better—and more profitable—solutions, which ultimately benefitted everyone involved. These strategies are critical for both architects and developers going forward.

- Chuck Davis, FAIA
Founding Principal

At Home with EHDD

2011-03-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

Fresh out of an East Coast architecture school, I was fortunate enough to find work with the San Francisco architect William Turnbull, who along with Joe Esherick and others, were founders and heirs of the “Bay Area style” of modern architecture. Bill Turnbull was equally at home designing houses or working in his vineyards, and from him I learned just as much about grape growing and farming, as I did about the character of a site and designing a home.

I learned many things from many people in over twenty years of architectural practice, but it was Bill who would remind you to smell the eucalyptus and the redwood, and look to see where the sun, fog, light and wind came from—all the things that the farmer was constantly attuned to. These characteristics of place and site were, by and large, the same things that the architect and client should discover before ever picking up the pencil and sketch paper.

Oceanside Retreat in Sea Ranch, CA

I’m pretty sure that Joe Esherick would have agreed with this approach. His remarkable body of residential work – from the modest little hedgerow houses at Sea Ranch to the exquisitely-sited McLeod Residence in Belvedere – share an intimate connection to their site, a sensitivity to climate, graceful proportions, balanced light, and elegant detailing. These qualities reflect how attuned he was to nature, helped him define a way of living unique to the West, specifically Northern California, and cemented his legacy.

My upbringing was torn from the pages of Sunset magazine so I am all about “Western Living,” and that has no doubt crept its way into how I view, and more importantly, how I practice architecture. I was born in Hawaii (a Quonset hut on the Navy base!), but I grew up in the Bay Area, experiencing first-hand it’s plethora of what has become iconic architecture: a 1950’s Ranch-burger in the South Bay; a William Wurster-designed beach house rented for summer vacations; mid-century Eichlers where friends lived; and an Esherick hedgerow house at Sea Ranch where Thanksgiving was spent with friends.

McLeod Residence in Belvedere, CA

In 1998, my wife and I bought a working-man’s Victorian in San Francisco’s Mission District, built in 1885 (a fixer-upper, to say the least). Our modest little house is now 125 years old, and we are most likely the fifth or sixth generation to sit and warm ourselves around the fireplace, to share a meal with family and friends in the dining room, to work in the sunny garden on a glorious August afternoon—to live in this house that is our home. I tell my son that while this technically our house, we are essentially just borrowing it for a while, and while we are here we should take good care of it so the next family can enjoy it, too.

This sense of stewardship for home, community, and the land is a strong trait with most architects, and at EHDD it is part of the firm’s DNA. My own path through various architectural offices in different parts of San Francisco always seemed to bring me closer to my house and shortened my commute with each change. Sitting here now on the corner of 18th and Folsom streets, it seems that maybe it was inevitable that I would someday end up here, four and a half blocks from my house, and at home with EHDD.

- Kevin Killen, AIA, LEED AP
Director, Residential Studio

Images:
The McLeod Residence, photo by Roy Flam
Oceanside Retreat, photo by Jim Alinder

The Audacity of Architect Barbie

2011-03-03T12:01:00.000-08:00

The recession has hit architecture firms hard. There is the sense that Americans have cast their vote for worthwhile investments to ensure a better future, and buildings have not made the list. It is easy to lose hope amidst all of this, but there is reason to believe that architecture still holds an important place in the American psyche; a symbol of ambition, fortitude, integrity, keen discernment, taste and tact; the staunch and resolute:

America, meet Architect Barbie. That’s Ms. Barbie, AIA, to you.

She even comes with her very own self-designed house.

Mattel will offer the doll as part of the “I Can Be…” series, which features Barbie in various professional or vocational roles; several options are announced, and the public is asked to weigh in on the best career choice. Architect Barbie has been a repeat competitor over the years, but like a good project put on hold, it just never panned out. Considering winners of years past – Dolphin Trainer Barbie and Actress Barbie come to mind – one notes that America tends to direct Barbie toward careers that are exciting and glamorous, if not intellectual. Tellingly, Architect Barbie did not actually win the popular vote – Mattel chose her anyway. While we’re flattered, we’re also, well, maybe a little perplexed. Is Barbie ready, we worry, to settle down at a desk and pore over wall sections? More to the point, what happens when the hard hat ruins the hairstyle? Is the client going to listen to Hat-Head Barbie? AIA’s Young Architect Prize-winners, attending to these concerns with vigor worthy of an eleventh-hour redesign, have suggested such improvements as cutting her hair short, ditching the skirt in favor of site-visit-friendly pants, and carrying a laptop computer in place of the blueprint tube (seriously, no way would Barbie be so behind the times!).

Sure, that’s one way to look at it. But that sort of drastic redesign also seems like a Value-Engineering list that threatens to eviscerate a project. I submit that Architect Barbie is onto something. If Mattel has perfected the art of taking the pulse of American visions of their childrens’ futures, with Barbie as the particular litmus test of our ideals of women, I suddenly feel a lot better about architecture’s prospects. For one thing, Architect Barbie, as many critics note with disdain, is unapologetic about her incongruous and un-architect-ey appearance – from the dearth of black clothing to the unmistakable platinum ponytail. The crisis (if you’ll allow liberal cribbing from “Legally Blonde”) is not that Barbie doesn’t look like a “real” architect, but that without the blueprints and the black, we’re perhaps not sure what an architect does look like. The culture as a whole (viz. the musician Girl Talk and open-source software) is skewing toward appropriation and hybridity, and away from the identity and ownership as being fixed and discrete. In fact, with her shameless black-glasses-and-purple-dress mash-up, Barbie joins the ranks of Michelle Obama and Kirsten Gillibrand, who prove that style-consciousness and career success are no longer mutually exclusive for women. Forget the pilly black turtleneck and furrowed brow of architect icons past; Barbie suggests that women infiltrate male-dominated professions by bringing our own personality and unique talent to bear. Indeed, other recent “I Can Be…” winners, Computer Engineer Barbie and News Anchor Barbie, nod to the uniforms and accoutrement of their professions without taking them literally; News Anchor actually looks like she took the stiff Anchorman suit and handed it to the House of Chanel for revamping.

As for Architect Barbie as a believable purveyor of aesthetics and design, a preference for plastic and vinyl (pink or otherwise) puts her squarely in company with cutting-edge practitioners like Jeanne Gang and Kazuyo Sejima (SANAA), who combine unusual materials with subtlety and playfulness. If Architect Barbie can be forgiven the admittedly bad outfit (unless the skyline depicted on her dress is meant to be ironic), the audacity of the ultra-feminine icon as an architect is actually pretty inspiring. It points to the certainty that if Barbie’s hair was shorn, heels traded for sensible shoes, dress for khakis, the doll would gather dust on the toy store shelf, too ordinary and whittled-away. She’s much more charismatic as she is – unafraid of ridicule, goofy grin and all. What is so obvious to children is something we should remember: roles are for playing. One certainty is that, once purchased, Architect Barbie will irreverently lose the document tube, don pieces of other costumes, and inspire adventures far more varied and complex than any representational outfit could possibly suggest. That, to me, sounds like “I can be what I want to be.”

Photo by Dean Kaufman

“The New Museum has been characterized by SANAA as “fearless and tough… a combination of elegant and urban.” [from the architects’ statement provided by the Museum]. The aluminum mesh cladding “dresses” the building with a common material deployed in an unusual way.”

Photo by Jeffery C. Johnson

South Pond Pavilion, Lincoln Park, Chicago, by Studio Gang. Detail shot of bent wood members and fiberglass pods.

Putting aside the endless criticism of Barbie’s (and let’s not forget that Barbie stands in for women architects) clothing and accessories, the more serious concern, of course, is the doll’s own unrealistic measurements, for which Mattel has weathered (and ignored) endless criticism. How does a doll with totally ridiculous proportions represent a profession that uses the human body as its base metric? Again, this is lost on kids (who would probably argue back that SpongeBob Squarepants’ total failure to faithfully represent sponges and toast doesn’t bother them all that much) – we’re taking it too literally. When was the last time you met someone shaped like the Modulor? The true debate is reflexive: Mattel’s choice of Architect Barbie says much more about adults’ wishes for their girls’ futures than it does about girls’ own ideas. We can count on the girls to invent their own stories; the fact that Mattel sees the doll as marketable means that battle has, effectively, already been won.

For architects, perhaps the dubious honor of our own Architect Barbie is best seen in that light; a vote of confidence from the collective unconscious of America. To architects’ inevitable protest that Barbie is seriously un-cool, that the whole getup is irredeemably cheesy, a familiar admonition can be heard: don’t be such snobs! With the AIA noting that women constitute only 17 percent of their membership, even as nearly 50 percent of architecture students are women, maybe some audacious re-design is called for. Just hand me that pink laptop and I’ll get on it.

- Jessica Lane, LEED AP
Designer

Global Ecology - How to Get the Best of All Worlds in Sustainable Design

2011-02-16T15:03:00.000-08:00

In January of 2007, we were honored to have our Department of Global Ecology project grace the cover of one of the first issues of GreenSource, a leading publication on green building in the U.S. Located on the Stanford University campus, Global Ecology – a department of The Carnegie Institution for Science – researches interactions among ecosystems, land, atmosphere and ocean which shape the earth system.

The editors at GreenSource, like us at EHDD, would like to get beyond all the hype and self-promotion surrounding green buildings, and look at real results. So they have begun a series called “Case Study Revisit” taking another look at how our project, and others, are actually performing. This feedback loop to architects and designers of real-world performance is essential, yet all too uncommon. Kudos to GreenSource for this initiative.

So, how is Global Ecology performing? First let’s take a look at the energy use, since reducing carbon emissions was a top priority for the scientists who are researching climate change. Working with our mechanical engineers, the Integral Group, we monitored energy use over the course of a year. The measured results show a total building energy use of 141 kBTU/sf/yr. This is plotted on the chart below relative to the 26 labs in our climate zone in the Labs21 database (as of 2009). Forty-four percent (44%) of this energy was for heating (mostly heating make-up air for lab ventilation). The remaining energy use is electricity – 44% of which runs the lab’s super-computer cluster where scientists run their climate models. If that were excluded, the building would use 106 kBTU/sf/yr.

Graphic illustrates measured energy use through 2009. (Click to enlarge)

The low energy use is due in part to the Night Sky cooling system, which at night sprays a thin film of water on the roof, which then radiates to the cold deep space sky. This chilled water is stored in a tank and used the following day to cool the building, using 90% less energy than conventional compressor based cooling. The client reports that the energy radiated to the night sky is remarkably close to what their climate modeling calculations predict. It has been running since 2004 and has proven to be reliable and robust after the initial tuning and commissioning was completed.

The Cool Tower has generated a lot of interest, but is often misunderstood. It serves the indoor/outdoor lobby, not the entire building. It was intended to provide passive cooling to the lobby area when the bi-fold doors are open. The client has tested out various configurations, and found it provides the most comfort when one door is open and two remain closed, channeling the cooling through the seating area rather than dispersing it. The cool tower was originally generated in a workshop with our mechanical engineers; we were looking for a vertical element on the front façade to help people find the new department which was hidden behind other labs, with only a narrow slot to see through. It has served that purpose well, and become part of the identity of the Department. There were initially some challenges with the mist not being fine enough and evaporating before it reached the bottom of the shaft. The scientists worked to optimize the droplet size to maximize cooling and avoid water droplets spilling out on the floor at the base.

Not everything went exactly as planned. It took a while to get the daylight dimming controls to work properly, which we finally figured out was incorrect wiring, and easily fixed. The high velocity hand driers were louder than we expected, so the bathroom windows are usually kept closed to avoid sound transmission into other spaces through open windows. The waterless urinals have been a maintenance challenge, in this case for a highly motivated client with good maintenance practices.

But if you ask the people working in the building how they like it, they give it high marks. An online survey of the building’s occupants by the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at University of California, Berkeley, scored in the 99th percentile of all the buildings in their survey, and the project was awarded the CBE’s first Livable Building Award in 2007. The full survey results are here, and summarized in the chart below. The air quality and thermal comfort ratings are exceptional, which we believe are due to the combination of radiant heating and cooling, along with operable windows in the offices and ample low velocity ventilation in the labs. The rating for acoustics was the lowest scoring category, reflecting a common challenge in open office environments, in spite of both carpet on the floors and a full acoustical perforated metal deck at the ceiling. (More information on the project can be found at AIA COTE Top Ten Case Study.)

We are often asked if people are willing to sacrifice to live and work in our sustainable or netzero energy buildings. Surprising to some people, but not to us, we are finding that our most energy efficient buildings are often the ones with the highest occupant satisfaction scores—a compelling case that integrated sustainable design can deliver the best of all worlds.

- Scott Shell, FAIA LEED® AP

Principal and Director of Sustainability

Photo credit: Peter Aaron/ESTO

EHDD's response to the "World Architecture Survey"

2010-08-17T12:24:00.001-07:00

Vanity Fair recently polled leading critics, deans of architecture schools, and architects with two questions: what are the five most important buildings, bridges, or monuments constructed since 1980, and what is the greatest work of architecture thus far in the 21^st century? The results highlight a glossy cannon of international starchitects and their iconic works yet no green buildings made the cut, spawning a flurry of response from the green building community. To add further fuel to the fire, architectural correspondent Matt Tyrnauer quipped in an interview with NPR that green buildings are just not sexy – at least not yet. Determined to counter this assumption, Lance Hosey from Architect Magazine surveyed green building professionals to build a ‘G-List’ of the best green buildings. The projects that made the list represent a broad range of interpretations as to what makes a ‘green’ building and many fall into the same trap that the Vanity Fair list does, focusing on aesthetics over performance.

The surveys and the torrent of discussion they generated demonstrate a deep divide within the architectural community in terms of what sustainability should mean for design. Can high design also be environmentally responsible? Can a green building represent the best of both architecture and sustainability? I would argue yes; however, to do so, architects must stop seeing sustainability issues as separate from design. Environmental responsibility must be integrated within the design process so that there is no longer a division between what qualifies as a ‘green’ building or as great architecture: it is simply one and the same. Buildings are silent partners in the future sustainability of the planet but architects have the unique opportunity to affect real change and to lead the charge for a more beautiful and environmentally sustaining future. We are creative problem solvers by nature; shouldn’t this be the most exciting design challenge of our profession?

To paraphrase Dr. Ray Cole, “buildings themselves are not sustainable; however, buildings can be designed to support sustainable patterns of living.” At EHDD, we are beginning to think beyond the building, recognizing that the process of designing beautiful and inspiring green buildings can be a catalyst for organizational change. The recently completed Learning Resources Center at Marin Country Day School does just that. The project has all the features and more of a high achieving LEED Platinum school: rainwater harvesting for cooling and toilet flushing; photovoltaics that produce 100% of the facility’s net annual energy needs; effective daylighting and lighting controls; native landscaping and stream restoration; and locally sourced materials with high recycled content. But it is more than the sum of these parts. The students, teachers, and parents all love the new buildings. The excitement generated by the project has galvanized the community in support of the school’s sustainability goals and these have been integrated into the curriculum as well as the campus master plan. Faculty report that they teach differently in their new daylit classrooms: the openness and transparency of the spaces encourages collaboration and engagement that wasn’t possible in their old rooms. Students are more relaxed and attentive as well. One student quipped that ‘other schools have hallways; we have trees for hallways.’ In essence, the architecture at MCDS inspires and right now we are in desperate need of inspiration; not from “sexy” energy hogs of buildings but from projects that celebrate architecture as well as sustainability and performance. Where’s the list for that?

For more discussions, see the following links:

Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune

Matt Tynauer, Vanity Fair

Matt Pressman, Vanity Fair

Christopher Hawthorne LA Times

- Janika McFeeley, Designer

China: Better Life, Better City and Better Schools

2010-07-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

I am reporting on my two-week trip – part pro bono service, part celebration, part business development. The primary purpose of my trip was to attend to the opening of the Zhang Jia Yuan Elementary School in Qian Yang Country and the graduation of 500 of my friend and mentor Roz Koo’s “Spring Bud” girls. The timing of these events coincided nicely with Expo 2010, so my trip also had an international flavor.

In 2008, after an earthquake destroyed hundreds of schools in Sichuan and Shaanxi Provinces, I contacted Roz to find out if her “Spring Bud” girls had been affected. She had been in Shaanxi Province during the earthquake, as the school she was in rattled and rolled. While none of her girls’ schools were affected she was profoundly moved by the devastation and was sorting out what to do; so I offered to help.

This year, 500 of them graduated from a key senior high schools, and we attended elaborate ceremonies that celebrated their achievements. While we were there, the scores of the National University Entrance Exams were published – so far, the results were positive for the girls.

Back to 2008, Roz decided to rebuild a school in the remote regions of Shaanxi Province – outside BaoJi in Qian Yang. She contributed $226,000.00 toward the project’s US$500,000.00 cost, while the local Education Department contributed the rest.

EHDD donated design services. With Tipping Mar and Stantec, we worked to fulfill Roz’s vision for a school that was not only seismically safe but also sustainable. Our local architect, Dien Tseng, provided translation to our local partners – the Shaanxi Provincial Women’s Federation and the Northwest and Bao Ji Design Institutes. We designed the school in six weeks; it was built in six months; and the children will attend beginning in September.

We spent a VERY long day traveling to Qian Yang, where we celebrated with hundreds of people from the villages that will feed into the school. The school, I am very pleased to say is a unique, yet appropriate design, which I hope provides a model or prototype for green schools throughout rural China.

The Expo 2010 theme is “Better Life, Better City”. The lines were long during the 100+ degree days, so we chose the night tour. With the British Pavilion as our destination, we passed through Finland, Serbia and the Netherlands for contrast. Seeing how a country captures its national identity and message in a single place offered many lessons for our own exhibit work. Technology, tactility, and artistic use of materials linger as memories.
There has been a focus on development in western China, and Xian – an important historic, Imperial City and the original starting point of the Silk Road – as the gateway to this region. It has seen a growth of two million people in two years.

Simultaneously, the government is investing in the rural regions outside the major metropolises, and particularly in the re-building of schools and villages destroyed by the earthquakes. From what I ascertained, some of the villages had been rebuilt post-earthquake, in the courtyard style, but with a central plaza that provided place for the community to gather. Having left the immense developments outside Xian, the capital City of Shaanxi province, I was struck by how simply, cleverly and sustainably, the farming towns were harnessing the power of nature and creating appropriate communal spaces. So a better city can also mean a better “country”.
- Jennifer Devlin, AIA LEED® AP

Principal

NREL's Zero Energy Lab

2010-07-06T13:08:00.001-07:00

The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory campus in Golden, Colorado has just finished construction and will be the largest Zero Energy office building in the nation. NREL is committed to monitoring the building’s performance and to use it as a model for future projects. Stantec was a consultant to the project. Learn more about it here:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/for-a-premier-lab-a-zero-energy-showcase/

- Janika McFeeley, Designer

Finding the Next Principals

2010-06-30T18:16:00.000-07:00

A question that I am often asked is how did EHDD do its succession, and what are the steps. Truth be known is that it was a very slow and fitful process. We in fact tried it three times before the arrived at the principals we have today.

The first time we tried to expand the leadership was in the early 90’s when we promoted 4 people who had been with the firm for a long time. They were all men, and they were people who were great at running projects, good designers, and senior persons. What happened next, was that after a couple of years, it was obvious that these were not the right people. Why, you might ask? The reason was that while they were good project managers, they could not market or get jobs. It became quickly obvious to the other principals, that you have to be able to market , if you are going to be a principal in a firm. In other words, you have to be a rainmaker, or you are not of enough value to be a principal.

The next attempt occurred in the late 90’s when we faced a dire financial crisis, and we made another selection of new principals. This time the selection was better, but still flawed . One of the ways that it was flawed was that we made the selection when we were at a critical time financially, so that the pressure on everyone was extreme. This time we had added another condition which was that each new principal had to contribute money from their own pocket to become a principal. Some people opted out, as they did not want to invest their own hard earned dollars into the firm. But the existing principals had spent their lives and sometimes put everything they owned on the line to keep the firm going. They felt that if the firm was to succeed, a personal investment was necessary to get the kind of commitment to keep the firm going.

This attempt than morphed into the selection of the principals we have today. There was another condition which was also necessary to become a principle besides the financial one. The existing principals had to vote unanimously for a new principal to be selected. This is still the rule today, and the personal financial commitment is still the rule also.

I would say, in conclusion, that EHDD us run by totally committed people who believe 100% in the firm's values, and legacy and are willing to back that up with whatever it takes, in all the aspects of running an architectural office, and will do almost anything to keep the office vital, healthy , and a place that lives up to its values, and ethical ideas.

I hope this sheds a little light on how a principal is selected and appointed…

- Chuck Davis, Founding Principal

EHDD Tours the San Francisco Dump

2010-06-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

A small group of folks from the office attended a fantastic tour of the San Francisco dump in late May. We toured the recycling and transfer stations as well as the artist in residence studio and learned a ton about what it takes to deal with the city's trash.

Emily, Phoebe, and Lynne looking great in neon

Janika checks out the plastic bales

Trash on its way to the landfill in the East Bay. So many seagulls and so much garbage!

A small group of folks from the office attended a fantastic tour of the San Francisco dump in late May. We toured the recycling and transfer stations as well as the artist in residence studio and learned a ton about what it takes to deal with the city's trash.

• San Francisco is almost at its 2010 goal of 75% waste diversion. The composting program has been a huge part of this success.

• Don't put plastic bags in the blue bins! The huge conveyor belts that move trash past the sorters jam daily due to plastic bags in the recycling stream and cause costly delays.

For more information, check out sunsetscavenger.com

- Janika McFeeley, Designer

The Architecture of Relationships

2010-06-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

EHDD Architecture officially launched its online initiative in June. Spearheaded by technical staff – Jessica Rothschild, an architect and senior associate, and Emily Bello, a designer – the project was naturally brainstormed, storyboarded and master-planned in record time, in keeping with EHDD’s reputation for on time and on schedule project delivery. Tongue-in-cheek commentary on “process” aside, the goal is to tell the EHDD story through various online tools – the website, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and this blog to start. As founding partner Chuck Davis commented, “It’s time we join the 21st century!”

So what is the EHDD story?

It is about an award-winning portfolio spanning nearly 65 years. It begins with a largely residential practice founded in 1945 by the late Joseph Esherick, whose name remains synonymous with Sea Ranch – one of the most successful examples of living lightly on the land. It continues in the late 1950s with higher education projects, as the firm began its long relationship with the University of California. EHDD worked most recently at the Merced campus on the AIA SF award-winning Science + Engineering Building, and works currently at the Berkeley campus on Lawrence Hall of Science. In the early 1980s, EHDD completed work on the ground-breaking Monterey Bay Aquarium which remains a much-admired project in the area of not only AZM (aquariums, zoos and museums) design but also waterfront development. Today, Mr. Esherick’s deep commitment to a sustainable environment continues through the firm’s leading-edge work in the area of net-zero building. Nine projects – including Marin Country Day School, Chartwell School, Exploratorium and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation headquarters, to name a few – are either completed, in construction or in design.

But the EHDD story is about more than just projects. It is, more importantly, about people; in particular, its employees. A new generation led by president Duncan Ballash has taken over the reins at the firm. But its philosophy remains the same -collaboration, environmental responsibility, innovation and inquisitiveness and a belief in the primary of the user. Moreover, Duncan and the rest of the management team – principals Jennifer Devlin, Marc L’Italien, Scott Shell and Chuck Davis – have created a culture which values professional development, mentorship and personal growth.

Significantly, the firm strives to enable quality of life for its employees. As associate principal Glennis Briggs observes, “We’ve always had a deep interest in sustainability and quality of life for the user. But these days, there is less assumption that as designers and architects, we will be working 24-7.” She would know – she has been with the firm for 26 years, longer than anyone except Chuck Davis and retired founding partners George Homsey and Peter Dodge. Glennis started at was then Esherick, Homsey, Dodge and Davis, back in the days when the office was more loosely organized that it is now. She remembers interviewing one day with one person, then starting work the next. But even relative “newcomers” drawn by the diversity of the firm’s work appreciate EHDD’s culture and collaborative environment. Ken Powelson who joined the firm in 2001 says, “There is not a lot of ego here.”Ultimately the best story-tellers for EHDD are its clients and its buildings users. From Yelp-endorsed San Mateo Public Library and client-approved Marin Country Day School to repeat client University of California –for whom the firm has worked on more than 40 projects at all 10 campuses – EHDD has a long list of happy clients. That, more than any award, speaks to the power of relationship building. Much like experiencing architecture, nothing can replace an in-person encounter, but EHDD has now added to its touch points.

- Lisa Boquiren, Allied AIA
Director of Marketing