This building in neighboring Summit County is setting the bar for green building in Northeast Ohio.  As the Sand Run Metropark's latest addition, the Park Ranger and Natural Resource Management building will potentially be the first "Platinum" LEED-certified building in Ohio.

 http://www.summitmetroparks.org/InsideMetroParks/GreenTeam.aspx

The Nature Center at Shaker Lakes is building a straw-bale and cob “stewardship center”, and is looking for volunteers who want some hands-on training in natural construction.

Susan Clellen, a builder and designer of environmentally sustainable buildings, is the project leader. She’ll demonstrate mixing cob, applying natural earth plaster and other green building techniques, then turn over the building to you. The raw ingredients—straw, sand and clay—are all available locally.

The Nature Center is blogging about the building process. They explain:

Cob and straw-bale dates back to the ancient communities of Mesopotamia and is found in contemporary buildings in Europe, Africa and the U.S.

Saturday and Sunday workshops are available from 8 a.m.-noon and 1-5 p.m. Dress to get dirty. To sign up for a shift go here or contact Jan Zorman, 216-321-5935, ext. 229.

Location(s)

Diane Heard, Senior Associate with IFC International, will provide information about FirstEnergy's Home Performance With Energy Star Program, part of a national effort from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).  IFC International administers the Home Performance with Energy Star Program for FirstEnergy.  The program includes home evaluations using state-of-the-art equipment that result in recommendations of comprehensive improvements to improve a home's energy efficiency.

A Q&A session will follow the presentation.  For more information, contact Dave Ambrose at 330-647-3666 or ambrose@infohio.org.

Location(s)

The U.S. Green Building Council–St. Louis Regional Chapter will host this fifth annual conference on green building and sustainability, which is geared toward greening towns, businesses, college campuses and buildings in the Midwest. Attendees will be exposed to the latest in green building techniques and discuss how the public and private sectors can work together to promote sustainable design and construction strategies.

Register here. Fee.

More than a year after preservationists, designers, architects and environmental advocates banded together and presented a case to adaptively reuse the Breuer Tower, K&D Group, the developers who bought the tower and the Ameritrust site from the county, have inked a deal for a boutique hotel to occupy 14 floors of the tower.

This move promises to elevate Cleveland to the center of an important national debate about Modern architecture. This month, Metropolis features the fight over renovating JPMorgan Chase headquarters, a modernist classic in New York. They write:

The dispute between environmentalists and preservationists is whether these twentieth-century artifacts should be seen as building blocks of embedded energy, salvaged only to the extent practical, or if the integrity of the design is worth consideration.

K&D and its architects at Westlake Reed Leskosky (which worked with Breuer on his tower design) are poised to show the world how a city in the midst of rebuilding its image places value on design and existing resources.

Crain’s Cleveland Business has a special section this week on green building activity in Cleveland, featuring some high-profile projects pursuing LEED-certification. Some of the highlights include Flats East Bank pursuing green roofs, Forest City’s LEED-registered renovation of the Higbee Building, and major developments including the Ameritrust site and Pesht in the Warehouse District verbally committing to LEED.

The green building movement is being driven by tenants: Case in point, Ernst & Young global chairman and chief executive Jim Turley said meeting green requirements was part of the evaluation that led to them signing on to Flats East Bank.

Cleveland’s top developers committing to LEED is a good start. What we need now is to set a more aggressive goal – such as all green buildings will achieve at least LEED-Silver – in order for Cleveland to compete with Chicago, Pittsburgh, and even Grand Rapids.

On top of the energy saved from reusing an existing building, architects mbi | k2m are seeing multiple benefits from their green renovation of an older building in Ohio City. Cleveland Green Building Coalition is helping them tell their story in a series of workshops that explore the LEED-certification process. Read more.

The Cleveland Green Building Coalition (CGBC) is helping the architecture firm mbi | k2m with a series of workshop discussions and demonstrations as they renovate an existing, two-story building and adjacent parking lot at 3121 Bridge Avenue.

mbi | k2m is spending $1 million to buy and renovate the Ohio City building for its local office, and received an $800,000 commercial redevelopment loan from Cuyahoga County.

The firm will provide open access to the office building as they develop a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified building. The workshop will allow participants to interact with mbi | k2m’s design staff as well as key individuals from the project’s contractor, Nyman Construction Company, and the MEP engineering firm, TES Engineering. Topics will include green design, deconstruction, engineering, and construction monitoring.

At its third session in May, project engineers from Thermal Environmental Systems, Inc. (TES) presented their approach to greening the mechanical and HVAC systems in an existing building.

Essential to a building’s energy performance is involving the engineers from the beginning.

“Early on, we talked about, how efficient can the building run?” said TES engineer John Wirtz. “We weren’t just estimating equipment cost. We were part of the schematic design. We then had a set of plans and we could talk to subcontractors about how that affects cost and (LEED) credits.”

The Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina clearly sees the value of bikes and local infrastructure, taking steps to add more cycling access on area bridges. Earlier, the South Carolina state transportation officials added bike access to a federally funded bridge, a step ODOT refused to consider. The federally funded bridge has proven to be so popular, they have even hosted wedding groups. Building on the success, the Mayor announced more plans for bikes on bridges.

Here's the information:

Win for Charleston, SC: Old Bridge to Be Retrofitted: According to the Charleston Moves E-News, "Mayor Joseph Riley has announced the city's plan to add a cantilevered 10-ft wide bicycle and pedestrian lane to the southernmost of the two Ashley River bridges." The bridge is the primary conduit for travel between the downtown Charleston and West Ashley, but has been a roadblock to cyclists and pedestrians. Charleston Moves has actively championed access for cyclists and pedestrians to this important bridge. They report that the City of Charleston is now seeking funding for construction.

http://www.charleston.net/news/2008/may/14/create_better_bridge_links40740/

Kevin Cronin
ClevelandBikes : When ClevelandBikes, Cleveland Benefits!
www.clevelandbikes.org

• Grist.org features Cleveland today in its new series on cities that have an active sustainability network.
• One of Britain's biggest builders, Barratt Developments, unveiled today what it said was the UK's first zero-carbon house built by a volume house builder.
• Riding a bike in the Euclid Corridor bike lane this week (during Cleveland Bicycle Week) made us wonder if a more visible demarcation, like the ‘green lanes’ in New York City (pictured) could be the next generation of bike lanes in Cleveland?