Top Ten Reasons to Attend the BrickStainable Awards Ceremony!

10.

Get an upclose look at inspiring designs and advancements in sustainable design!

9.

Best networking opportunity of 2011 with the A/E/C community!

8.

Keynote speaker, Cambridge University Professor Alan Short will travel from the UK to speak at the program!

7.

Meet the winning teams from across the globe!

6.

Talk to the esteemed panel of jurors!

5.

Mingle with the BrickStainable visionaries Alan Richardson, Peter Doo & Rob Busler!

4.

Enjoy the National Building Museum (one of the most magnificent masonry structures in the world – 15 million bricks – 124 years old)!

3.

Fantastic cocktail reception, delicious dinner & drinks!

2.

Meet our incredible partners who helped us make BrickStainable possible!

1.

Spend an evening in Washington, DC and enjoy all the city has to offer!

Due to the nature of this event, limited tickets will be sold. We hope you will join us!
Click here for ticket info.

Winners Announced!

The jury deliberation was truly an exciting day for the entire BrickStainable team. We met at the National Building Museum in the Pension Commissioner’s Suite to review entries in the Integrated Building Design and Technical Design categories.

The 2nd Annual BrickStainable Design Competition captured the attention of a total of 356 registrants! That number represented 62 different countries. When registration closed in December of 2010, we had 60 submissions from 21 countries.

Vivian Loftness, Bill Browning, Anna Dyson and Martin Vachon decided on seven winners this year. We will honor all of our winners at the Awards Ceremony on March 31, 2011.

We welcome all followers of the competition to preview the winning entries on our website.

We also invite you to join us for the grand evening at the National Building Museum on March 31st where you will have the opportunity to meet and celebrate with our winners!

CONGRATULATIONS WINNERS!

Students Can Find Sustainability in Materials Science

Juror, Vivian Loftness’s work at Carnegie Mellon University, prepares the next generation of architects. Today’s architecture students are learning to think about design, function and building performance differently than past students. Vivian pointed out that people don’t jump right to materials science when thinking about sustainability, but there are many environmental benefits of brick.

There’s an attitude in society that light construction (using glass or other lightweight materials) is more sustainable than heavy construction (using concrete or brick). She notes that architecture students should consider heavy construction when deciding how to mitigate high temperatures or day-to-night temperature swings.

Vivian believes that architecture schools need to illustrate the value of brick in a carbon-neutral society and provide opportunities on a consistent basis for students to design with masonry. Time will tell if architecture students pick up on that concept and create beautiful, long lasting brick structures. “Brick is expressive. It is a product that is not only exciting because of the aesthetic and amazing detail opportunities, but also because of how this material can perform,” said Loftness.

Photo: The structural spiral brick staircase at the top of Baker Hall at Carnegie Mellon.

USGBC-MD Leadership in Green Building Award Won by BrickStainable!

Our team was ecstatic when we heard BrickStainable was the recipient of a leadership award given by the USGBC-MD Chapter.

Potomac Valley Brick (PVB) was truly honored to accept this Market Transformation Leadership Award at the 6th Annual Wintergreen Awards Celebration for Excellence in Green Building. Many of the members of the Competition design team were present to accept the award, including PVB’s president, Alan Richardson, competition consultant, Peter Doo, AIA, LEED AP, and PVB’s very own Green Team.

Everyone celebrated the evening at Baltimore’s Thames Street Wharf (not too far from the BrickStainable project site). Nearly 500 people from the architecture, engineering and construction industries attended the Awards Celebration, which was headlined by keynote speaker, Scott Plank, Executive Vice President of Under Armour. (See Scott in this posts photo, third from the left!)

PVB’s president was quoted saying, “It’s an honor to be recognized alongside so many of our peers in this industry. We hope BrickStainable continues to spark innovative solutions for sustainable design in both in the U.S. and international architecture communities.”

Connection with the Natural World

Bill Browning, Founder of Terrapin Bright Green, was the keynote speaker at the 1st Annual BrickStainable Design Competition, and is a juror for the 2nd Competition.

Bill is one of the green building and real estate industry’s foremost thinkers and strategists. His areas of research and expertise include: biophilic design, the physiological and psychological benefits of building with nature and living systems; biomimicry, how nature evokes these benefits and inspires design; and, deep ecological history and metrics of various locations.

Browning’s most recent interest includes the Mannahatta project. This study focuses on the reconstruction and remapping of how Manhattan looked in 1609. Bill is interested in the carbon balance, original topography, and natural ecosystems prior to development.

It is truly fascinating to check out Manhattan on Google Earth and use the historical time tool to see the development of this New York City borough over just the past few decades.

- To see it for yourself, visit http://welikia.org/explore/mannahatta-map/

How Smart is Your Façade?

When they’re not judging the dozens of innovative BrickStainable entries, our jurors are doing really cool work of their own. Anna Dyson, juror and director of CASE, is investigating “intelligent facades.” These facades would be responsive to the environment with an optical “active” surface that would facilitate the absorption and redistribution of energy to the building’s interior energy systems. Currently, buildings account for 35% of U.S. energy consumption and 40% of U.S. carbon production, so making buildings energy creators instead of energy consumers, would make a huge impact on energy usage. And it’s even possible that masonry facades could be coated to achieve this goal. We’re looking forward to see where Dyson’s research goes in the next two years.

Cleaner Buildings = Cleaner Air

The innovations in technology never cease to amaze us! One of the BrickStainable sponsors, Essroc Italcementi Group, has a product called TX Active that decomposes air pollutants as they react with the surface of a building. A natural chemical reaction, photo catalysis, results in self-cleaning and de-polluting. Talk about tremendous design benefits for the environment!

Martin Vachon, a returning juror to the BrickStainable Design Competition is a consultant to the producer making best use of the product in application. Martin has been involved with the research and reporting system efficiency.

After a decade of research at Essroc’s Bergamo, Italy plant TX Active came to market. There are numerous applications for this technology including vertical, horizontal, structural, and more.

To learn more about TX active, please visit their website or view their product data sheets.

Photo Credit: Dives in Misericordia Church (Rome, Italy), Richard Meier & Partners Architects. This was the first application of the photocatalytic principle, TX Active.