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If you doubt that green buildings are a very big deal, talk to Michael Deane.
Deane is chief sustainability officer at Turner Construction, one of the biggest construction companies in the U.S. Turner has completed almost 200 LEED-certified projects valued at $10.5 billion and the company has another 230 LEED-registered projects valued $16.5 billion in progress. The New York-based firm employs more than 1,200 LEED-accredited professionals, more than any other organization.
"The only excuse for not building a LEED building is ignorance," Deane told me when we met last week in Washington.
A Turner project, a health services building at Yale University, is pictured above.
LEED, of course, is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and it may be the single biggest success story in the world of green business. With very little help from Washington (but considerable support from cities and states), the voluntary LEED standards for buildings have been embraced by architects, construction firms and their customers since they were introduced by the U.S. Green Building Council back in 2000. Many customers now insist on LEED. "It is totally a demand-driven phenomenon," Deane said.
Deane took an unusual route into the construction industry. A native New Yorker, he went to college at the University of Colorado, thought about becoming an architect and ended up winning a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet school. He became a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company and performed on Broadway before hanging up his ballet shoes. "I hit 35. I saw where the career was going. I saw where my body was going. It was time to grow up," he said.
He went back to school, earning a master's in historic preservation from Columbia, and worked for a time for the city of New York and its public libraries. He joined a construction firm called Bovis, and moved to Turner in 2004 after hearing that the company saw the green building trend as a growth opportunity.
“Turner's decision to get involved in green buildings was a business decision, based on market research," he told me. "It wasn't because our CEO was a treehugger."
An inefficient green
An inefficient green buildings is a marketing play. To state a building that uses the same (or more energy, as has repeatedly been the case w/ USGBC) is green – even if it has recycled materials, utilized no-VOC products, and has bike & ZEV parking - is a joke.
Why isn’t LEED actually leading in the energy efficiency part? Instead, the requirements for obtaining energy points have been watered down over the years. You now get more points for a less efficient building than you did in V2.0!