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At the Design Institute West: 3 Things I'm Glad I HeardMay 9, 2008 It's getting on 3 p.m. here at the San Francisco Public Library, and the "Going Green" Design Institute is way better than I expected. A morning panel focused on sustainable design and the community, with Susan Hildreth (California State Librarian) moderating. There were many insights, but Pheonix City Librarian Toni Garvey (an LJ Librarian of the Year) was right on. She talked about intelligent lighting--"we cut half our lights, and it didn't impact security...."--and got right at how to spur change. "Why did we start recycling?" she asked. "Because they talked about it at school, and our kids came home and made us do it!" Kids are interested in the need to be green, she said, "We should use our opportunity to interact with our kids and teens on this."During lunch, Jared Blumenfeld, the director of the San Francisco Dept. of the Environment, spoke to the city's role in green design. Among his inspired thoughts was one that reinforced something Garvey had hinted at in the first panel ("Libraries are already green and always have been. We buy something and thousands of people use it!") when he said "We need to show people how green libraries are already." But he took it another step and declared that libraries can be, and indeed already are at the center of the answer to the problem of climate change. ""For me, the tagline is, Libraries are the solution," he said, referring to the solutions provided by the green buildings themselves and the solutions people find in them when they find the information they need. He later riffed further: "We're libraries, we've helped social reformers from the suffragettes to the civil rights movement, and the environment is our next step." The afternoon panel on going LEED or not is just ending now, and among the insights popping in my notes is Dennis Humphries' (Humphries Poli Architects) contemplation of the "sea change" in how building design happens now. On sustainable design, he noted, "The bottom line is that we have to do it because we have to do it!" Noting that projects have been historically counted in cost per square foot, he added, "It's the BTUs per square foot that we need to be aware of in the future." Posted by Rebecca Miller on May 9, 2008 | Comments (0)
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