An Inconvenient Truth

A couple of months ago, we asked the USGBC for a bunch of data related to LEED projects.  Ask and thou shalt recieve, er something like that.  We received a giant, green boat load of data, stretching back all the way to 2000 and covering all LEED Rating Systems up through the end of 2008.

By any measure, the explosion of LEED and the USGBC’s popularity has been unprecedented in the AEC industry.  Let’s dive into that data a little bit, figure out where the growth will be in the coming years and see what has made LEED so popular.

LEED Rating Systems

To give some background, LEED has numerous rating systems that each apply to a different building or project type.  To date, the most popular has been the New Construction (NC) Rating System.  Since LEED NC is the oldest rating system, this would make sense.   LEED NC currently accounts for 58% of all certified or registered projects.  Coming in at a distant second are Core and Shell (CS) and Existing Building (EB) with 12% each.  Commercial Interiors rounds out the top 3 spots with 11%.  The other rating systems (also the newest ones) are in at 3% or less, but as we will see later, they are gaining ground.  Click here for a live Google chart where you can explore the data a bit more.

Registered and Certified Projects

Registered is one thing, but Certified is another.  Certified means you have a plaque on the wall, you have been through the whole process, peer reviewed, etc.  The graphs below show that while registered projects are up, and I mean way up, certified projects are slow to move along.  This criticism is nothing new, as this article from 2005 points out.  I don’t have data on whether any of the registered projects were out right rejected, but to date, the average LEED Certified NC project takes 1,015 days, from the date of registration to the date of certification.  That is 2.75 years.

YOY Growth for EB and NC

The other interesting thing I found is the growth of year over year growth of NC vs EB.  EB is the fastest growing rating system.  This coincides with what we have been hearing from numerous sources:  existing buildings will become the hot item over the next couple of years due to the current vacancy rates.  Many developers do not want to build new, when the costs are relatively high to build, rather than purchase existing.  (Cushman Wakefield report, CBRE Report, JLL Report)

A Convenient Ad Campaign

I noticed something interesting when I plotted all of this data.  There is a spike in the trends after 2006.  I believe that while green building and sustainable design would have continued on its slow course to the mainstream, it was Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” (wikipedia link) that set the trend ablaze with the general public.

An Inconvenient Truth came out mid 2006.  It broke all kinds of box office records for documentaries, won an Academy Award, was well received at numerous influential film festivals and the companion book became a New York Times best seller.  Al Gore is now a Nobel Peace Prize laureate due in large part because of his work with the climate.

I have often thought that the only thing that engineers would need to get the recognition they are seeking is to have a dramatic television series written about our daily lives in the office

Anyway, that is exactly what the green movement and the USGBC got with An Inconvenient Truth.  It was a jump start to the tune of a multi million dollar global ad campaign that went more mainstream than the green building movement could have ever hoped for or probably have done on its own.  Gone are the days of design professionals having to trying to convince owners to pursue sustainable solutions.  Owners are asking for it.  All thanks to Al Gore.

The ecofont (second from top) compared to Bitstream Vera (top)

I have come across this story from multiple sources now.  Here is the link to the story on NPR, and the link to download the ecofont http://www.ecofont.eu/ecofont_en.html. The ecofont is made by a company called Spranq.

From the ecofont website:

…how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink. Free to download, free to use.

Of course, I immediately downloaded it to try it out.  I love techie stuff like this.  I liked the idea of reducing consumption from another angle.  The font is an innovative way of spurring more conversation about alternative methods of reducing consumption of a potentially hazardous product, toner and ink. Spranq states that they base the 20% reduction on the Bitstream Vera font.

I wanted to see how our BJG fonts used in letters and manuals (Swiss 721 Light Extended BT for the majority of text and Vera Humana for titles and such) stacked up against the new ecofont.

So, I set out on a little experiment.  I took a letter I had written and changed the fonts to the new ecofont.  I printed them both out.  There was a noticeable difference between our standard font and the ecofont.  The ecofont website implies that they would use the font for daily use and not for final draft materials and I agree.  The ecofont comes out looking a little on the grey side.

My test suite of fonts

Next, I got a little more scientific.  I opened up Google SketchUp to get the exact (or close enough) area of a couple of different fonts.  I used the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” (a panagram for you trivia buffs) as my baseline.  I scaled all the sentences so that the letter “T” in the each sentence was 1′-0″ high.  I figured this was a good estimation of getting the fonts the same size.

I then exploded the fonts used SketchUp to calculate the areas of the letters in the sentence for each font.   The table below shows the results.

Setting up the fonts

True to their claim, the ecofont uses exactly 20% less area than the Bitstream Vera font.  However, the Vera Humana font uses 10% less than the ecofont and the Swiss font uses 3% more.  Before I started out, I assumed that the Swiss font would have used less, but numbers don’t lie!.  Interestingly enough, plain old Times New Roman uses the same area as the ecofont.  And of course, the big, bold, Arial Black uses 128% more area than the ecofont.

Again, I really like the idea of the font.  It is innovative, different and spurs conversation about alternative ways to reduce our consumption of hazardous products.  I am amazed that it received coverage on NPR.  Green is on the forefront of everyone’s mind these days.

Analemma Over the Porch of Maidens

I do not want to imply that I will be starting a daily word post.  I just wanted a catchy title.

I tried to come up with my own definition but the concept is a little heavy.  So I will let NASA do it:

If you took a picture of the Sun at the same time each day, would it remain in the same position? The answer is no, and the shape traced out by the Sun over the course of a year is called an analemma. The Sun’s apparent shift is caused by the Earth’s motion around the Sun when combined with the tilt of the Earth’s rotation axis. The Sun will appear at its highest point of the analemma during summer and at its lowest during winter. Today, the Winter Solstice day in Earth’s northern hemisphere, the Sun is at the bottom of the analemma.

This quote is from http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap081221.html. See also http://www.uwm.edu/~kahl/Images/Weather/Other/analemma.html for a neat photo.

Sun Path Diagram courtesy of AECbytes

What does this have to do with architecture or design?  Well, in my readings of Sun, Wind and Light, I came across the concept of sun dials (used to evaluate effects of existing site conditions, impacts of building massing, etc.), sun path diagrams (which show the path of the sun in the sky dome as projected on a horizontal surface (Libbey-Owens-Ford, 1974) and solar radiation (amount of energy put off by the sun; used in determining occupant comfort and potential for solar heating in buildings).  The picture to the left is generated by Ecotect (from an AECbytes tutorial on Ecotect) and shows the sun’s position throughout the entire year.

This analemma is inside that picture.  Can you see the figure “8″ in there?  However, there are a number of analemmas in the Ecotect picture because the picture shows not just one specific time (i.e. 8:30am) but displays all sunlit hours of the day.

The sun’s position throughout the year plays a role in designing sustainable and comfortable facilities.  Architects design windows and fenestration taking into account these kinds of things to maximize occupant comfort by insuring not to much heat gets in the building and minimize energy bills by using the sun when possible.  It is just amazing!

For further reading:

• http://www.analemma.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma
• http://www.geoastro.de/analemma/index.htm (roll your own sundial!)