Developers Face Green Overload in Designing Cities

CHICAGO-Sustainable building has become more complex in the past few years than ever expected, said Paul Shahriari, director of sustainable strategy for SmartBIM, a Norcross, GA-based firm that was formed last year by Reed Construction Data and Source-2. Shahriari was a speaker Tuesday during the second and final day of the CoreNet Global Summit here at Navy Pier.

Shahriari said when he started in building design, there was only one sustainable standard, the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. “I was one of the first to be certified, it was LEED 1.0,” Shahriari said. “Now there’s all these specialized rating systems, even I hire an expert. It seems now there’s possibly too many specialized programs, whether you’re LEED Schools or whatever, that they fight amongst each other about who’s better. It’s like who’s the better superhero, when in reality they should be all together as a sort of LEED justice league fighting for sustainability.”

Combined with the above, there’s about 400 different certified “green” labels for products, he said. “A developer today just has too many choices in going green, it’s getting harder and harder to make the right decisions,” Shahriari said.

He pointed out one example he dealt with when helping design the massive Palm Islands project in the UAE for Nakheel Properties, a division of the government-run Dubai World company. As a consultant, he suggested that Nakheel use a newer glazing system on the windows of certain buildings, which would save the users $23.4 million over 25 years. “They ended up using the process with every building, for a total $14 billion in projected savings, just because they looked into this one sustainable aspect,” Shahriari said.

He said sustainability of a new building is just a small part of green development today. More work is being done on older buildings to retrofit for sustainability, and the choices come through in the various products now available. “You’re trying to buy the right ingredients, which if done right can provide a 10% to 35% return on investment,” Shahriari said.

The consultant spoke on a panel about how new technologies are driving location and development, and was joined by Keith Perske with eBusiness Strategies, Gina Miller with Post+Beam and Andy Shapiro with Biggins Lacy Shapiro & Co. The panelists stressed innovation, and doing sustainable and smart projects to inject life into cities, even at the possibility of failure.

“Look at the Dyson vacuum cleaner--the inventor tried 5,000 versions of the product before he got it right, and now it’s the best on the market. We need to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit in designing our cities,” Shahriari said.