a) being lied to, or
b) reality, which entails the nasty politiking between stakeholders and usergroup mouthpieces that typically strangle the “collobrative” process.

Much more meaningful rather, to vote on ACTUAL designs that clearly demonstrates a unique, exciting, well-defined and more tangible vision than just “uh, we’ll listen to the students”

This odd mention of “cash flow” makes it seem like Cannon Design is positioning themselves to be the lowest bid, which is not surprising since the whole thing may very well come down to on-time-on-budget for a lot of people. Bleh.

Can’t stress Jeff’s point enough:
“Keep asking the firms questions until they actually differeniate.”

And the selection of an architect becomes a little easier – some architects are a lot more genuine in their approach to environmental concerns. It doesn’t take too much to figure out who they are. Who walks the walk here?

I was surprised to see that most of the architecture teams are teamed up with huge national and some even multi-national architecture companies (IBI,Stantec,H+B,Perkins+Will,Cannon). Maybe thats not as big an issue but the more local guys might be more sensitive to what is actually going on at UBC and you can be assured that the design won’t be farmed out to Toronto or Europe or something and therefore out of the students hands. Thats my 2-cents.

Sorry to stick my nose in this, but I’m a little anxious that we are not going to meet our sustainability objectives for SUB. I also haven’t gotten a good sense from these summaries of what differentiates the firms in terms of their approach to greening the project.

This project has a large budget and I would suspect that it can afford to become energy self-sufficient/create more energy than it uses. This might not be a technically accurate/realistic analogy, but if you gave me the choice between a project that was smaller but did not compromise its sustainability performance, otoh, and a project that had more programming space but sacrificed sustainability aspirations on otoh- i think students should be choosing sustainability over programming, and if that’s controversial, i think 2 options should go to referendum and that students should have a direct input into that choice.

Most of these firms are fine and have done work at UBC before. UBC has relatively progressive (compared to real municipalities) mandates for LEED certifications. It’s not surprising then, that they all have experience working with LEED projects. Instead of resumes and “we’ll listen to students,” I’d like to hear them sell bolder sustainability visions and explain why they feel students should demonstrate leadership in this area. I’ve only seen the summaries posted here, so perhaps its a little unfair, but I feel like our aspirations are getting a little vanilla. A regular project won’t do anything unique to engage student interest and will likley be seen as irresponsible in 10 years time/whenever we have more ability to model climate sensitivity.

From a visioning perspective, there’s no reason why this project couldn’t do more to mitigate its impact on the surrounding environment then the CIRS project (a Busby project, its worth noting), which asserts itself as North America’s greenest building. That project had a hard time getting off the ground and had to change sites- all for lack of money. This project has plenty of money, it just needs the right student vision and choices to guide it.

Rather than feel we are doing our jobs by choosing a firm that has an inventory of past LEED projects, students should ask what leadership this building takes, and why certain carbon costs are justified. Take a zero budgeting approach- make the firms justify every ton of emissions from the start of the project on. Make sure we’re doing a full life cycle analysis- make sure the firms are accountable to an audit of the buildings energy performance 5, 10 years out. Include the demolition/new use of our old building in our analysis. See if you can make them accountable to building performance in the contract language. Keep asking the firms questions until they actually differeniate.

SUB will be built, or under construction, in 2014, which happens to be the release date of the next IPCC report. Within the the life span of this building (in the next 50 years), we will live in a world that does not allow emissions of co2. Make real choices here.

Could we please use this space to start that conversation?

Thanks for reading my rant. I hope people tell me why I’m wrong.

Jeff Friedrich
former AMS President and hack

Cheers,

David