7group announces that Todd Reed has been appointed to the U.S. Green Building Council’s Environmental Quality Technical Advisory Group’s (EQ TAG) Working Group on daylight. LEED working groups consist of subject matter experts from across the country in specialty areas. This working group will improve daylighting and view credit by implementing better language, standards, and calculations for the next version of LEED in 2012. The EQ TAG is responsible for advising and making recommendations on technical issued to LEED committees, working groups, and the LEED Steering Committee. The EQ TAG is also responsible for developing, reviewing, and assessing the consistency and technical rigor of the credits and prerequisites to be incorporated into LEED.

Todd’s experience in daylighting analysis began at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he was a research assistant in the daylighting and energy lab at the College of Architecture. His primary focus throughout his undergraduate and graduate work was energy conservation through the implementation of daylighting in buildings. Todd, who has been with 7group since 2005, has worked on over 20 projects involving in-depth daylight analysis for energy conservation and to meet the daylight requirements of LEED.

For more information on daylighting analysis click to our Daylighting page.

Kutztown, PA – John Boecker, 7group partner, has been named an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Green Professionals.

The Institute of Green Professionals (IGP) is an independent, professional, education, credentialing, research and philanthropic “social enterprise” organization for sustainable development professionals and academics.

IGP’s Corporate Partners endorse and support the core IGP brand values of sustainable development professionalism, research, education and philanthropy.

Multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary its scope, the Institute of Green Professionals is the only global organization of its type that brings together individuals and organizations from all spheres of sustainable development. The focus of IGP includes specialties in architecture, accounting, appraisal, engineering, land-use planning, landscape architecture, real property valuation, law, and includes corporate participants in CSR capacities.

The Mission Statement of IGP captures the words and intent of both Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson and economist Brian Milani.

Professor Wilson said:

A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but through pursuit of the consilience among them.

The term “consilience” was used in Professor Wilson’s 1998 book of the same name, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, and means “the joining together of knowledge and information across disciplines to create a unified framework of understanding.”

Brian Milani applied this concept to participants in the transition to a Green economy when he said:

The environmental movement in particular should put more emphasis on establishing an educational network that both formalizes its educational tasks and systematizes connections with the rest of the community.

More information: http://www.instituteofgreenprofessionals.org

Kutztown, PA – Performance By Design is the title of a new video that will focus on high performance building through the integrative design process. A five-minute preview was offered to audiences at RMI 2009, held recently in San Francisco. The video is a project of the Rocky Mountain Institute and is being produced by Group Positive, the 7group member company focused on communications, and run by 7group partner Tom Keiter.

The intended purpose of the new video is to introduce and underscore the process of integrative design as fundamental to achieving high performance buildings without a cost premium. It is intended for audiences including the design community, engineers, and building owners. The video looks at six building projects to introduce the process and underscore a series of underlying qualities that contribute to success: a process that is goal driven, requires continuous collaboration, is an iterative process, is based on whole systems understanding, provides education for all stakeholders, and is engaged at conception and follows through occupancy.

Amory Lovins, chief scientist at Rocky Mountain Institute defines the process in the video, “By integrative design I mean that you optimize the whole building as a system rather than the components in isolation.”

The six projects include the Desert Living Center in Las Vegas (LEED Platinum), the Chicago Botanic Gardens (registered LEED Gold), the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (LEED Platinum), the Empire State Building energy retrofit, the Willow School in Gladstone, NJ (LEED Gold and Platinum), and the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, PA (pursuing the Living Building Challenge and LEED Platinum).

Victor Olgyay, a principal with Rocky Mountain Institute, “If you want to get a high quality building you need to really understand how all the pieces fit together. Integrated design allows you to do that in a way that’s comprehensive and optimizes all of those pieces.”

View the short promo at: www.sevengroup.com/videos/

The film is dedicated to the memory and vision of Greg Franta, FAIA (1950-2009) Senior Vice President, Built Environment of the Rocky Mountain Institute and was made possible by generous funding from the Ayrshire Foundation and the 71 donors to RMI’s Greg Franta Leadership Fund.