World Sustainable Building Conference in Helsinki

I recently had the opportunity to attend SB11 in Helsinki from October 18-21, 2011. SB11 is the World Sustainable Building Conference and its goals are to share leading knowledge and find new solutions that can enhance sustainable ways of living and working within built environments. The conference was well attended with more than 1000 attendees from all over the world with 310 oral presentations and 200 posters. Since there were so many interesting presentations occurring at the same time, my only problem was deciding which ones to attend.

The first keynote session was organized by Richard Lorch and consisted of a group of four short presentations following the key theme of “Time.” The presenters were asked to look back 40 years, consider the present, and look ahead 40 years. Eighty years, an average human lifespan, was a reasonable yardstick to measure changes. Raymond Cole, Alfred Ngowi, Baizhan Li, and Bill Bordass presented their views that were less about the building and more about systems and communities, the importance of people, the importance of reducing GHG emissions, and the experiences in different continents. 

A second key note group presentation included Michael Grätzel presenting a molecular photovoltaic device based on the sensitization of nanostructured oxide films by a dye or a semiconductor quantum dot.

Another presentation organized by G. Foliente emphasized the importance of quality of life and included Christophe Lalande, Human Settlements Officer, UN-HABITAT, and Cameron Sinclair, Co-Founder and CEO of Architecture for Humanity. The relationship between climate change and human development is more important every day and is especially affecting the world’s poorest countries. This is an issue that I think we don’t address as much as we should in the United States because in our drive to increase performance and use the latest gadgets, we tend to forget simple ideas that could benefit many that don’t have much. 

I chaired session DC-T2 on appropriate sustainable technologies and it was interesting to see the difficulties in introducing low-tech sustainable technologies in different environments. Another session discussed Net Zero Energy buildings and Nearly Zero Energy Building (NZEB) that have very high performance using very little energy, covered to a significant extent by energy from renewable sources produced on site or nearby. The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) requires that all new buildings in EU must be NZEB by 2020. It was also neat to see different rating systems from Japan, Europe, China, and Hong Kong and how there seemed to be a tendency to emphasize the importance of the neighborhood and larger urban scales. In our practice, we should now think not only about higher performing buildings, but also about higher performing neighborhoods. This could be implemented in master plans, for example.

I had the opportunity to present the Frontier Project in one of the parallel events, called the Sustainable Building Challenge. In this challenge, which has been part of the conference since 1998, several buildings from around the world are selected to be presented in a one day session where project performance is emphasized and described using appropriate metrics such as energy use intensity, water use, embodied energy, and recycled content. Twenty-four projects were selected to present in this very competitive and selective process, HMC’s Frontier Project being one of those selected. To be selected, we had to demonstrate performance through numbers, which is something that we are implementing in our practice. Our performance was good, for example the Frontier Project emits about 64 kg GHG/m² *yr, but other projects do much better with numbers close to 10 kg GHG/m² *yr. Part of the process to collect the data revealed problems with the performance, such as a photovoltaic system that is working way below capacity demonstrating once again the importance of continuous building monitoring and post occupancy evaluations. Many countries took entire teams, so having one of our projects—the only one from the United States—included with some very high performing projects from the rest of the world is a great achievement for HMC. I hope that in SB14 we can present even more of our projects.

If you are interested in seeing the projects, all of the projects in SB Challenge 11 are located here. 

And if you want to go directly to the Frontier Project, click here. 

You can browse our performance numbers if you click the link in our project that says KPI (Key performance Indicators). You can also see a narrated presentation on the project. In addition to the booklet, a small publication that was presented at the conference was produced and Frontier Project will also be included in the Italian architectural monthly called Ponte (a magazine on design, management and building technologies).

There were live webcasts of the sessions in the main hall, and it was also possible to send comments and questions using SMS-based technology. The video links to the main conferences are available at the conference website. You can see many of the presentations online here.

Helsinki architecture I experienced during my trip: Academic Bookstore by Alvar Aalto

Again, so many interesting sessions at SB11 that reminded me of the importance of considering buildings as parts of systems and how we should think not only about better buildings, but also about better neighborhoods. Social events and a banquet that was way out of my budget rounded out my trip to Helsinki.

Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art by Stephen Holl