Colin Rohlfing, the sustainable design leader in HOK’s Chicago office, participated on the HOK team that recently spent a year in a virtual charrette to design a net zero carbon emissions office building prototype: Net Zero Court in St. Louis.

Here, Colin talks about the reasons it’s important to reduce the carbon emissions of our buildings and what the team led by HOK and The Weidt Group accomplished:

“We learned in the process that a zero emissions building can be surprisingly affordable. We worked with detailed energy models and cost estimates to determine that a 200,000-square-foot office building, just through good passive design and efficient systems selection, can save up to 76 percent of its energy without a large …

On-the-ground at World Expo 2010 Shanghai, HOK Global Director of Climate Action Stan Wrzeski is gearing up for the Monday workshop he will lead: Global Voice, Local Choices: Creating Low-Carbon Communities, in collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Here is an onsite report:

It’s my third day here, and my body is just starting to adjust to the time zone and high summer humidity. You wouldn’t think so, but the long lines of people entering the Shanghai Expo grounds are actually cooled by a water spray beneath the metal canopy. I suggested to Paul Woolford and Kelly …

This is a little advertising that IBM does at the end of some of the sponsored TED talks, but it’s absolutely inspring on a number of different levels.

1. The Big Idea: I’ll start of with the quote in the beginning. “US traffic accounts for 45% of the worlds air pollution.” That in itself is staggering, but not surprising. The big idea behind IBM’s technology is that they have developed a way to charge (toll-booth free & convenient for the driver) a “congestion charge” for Stockholm, Sweden. This is to ensure that those who drive are paying for the convenience (and pollution) that they account for. It’s like sub-metering energy or water consumption. Once people realize that others aren’t …

About the same time the United Nations Climate Change Conference was taking place in Copenhagen in December, Stan Wrzeski, LEED AP, joined HOK’s Sustainability Consulting group as director of carbon and climate action. Intrigued by Stan’s title and equally unique resume, I gave him a call in HOK’s San Francisco office, where he’s based, to ask “Five Questions.”

1. You are the director of carbon and climate action at HOK, and your bio says you will be “identifying and pursuing carbon market opportunities.” What does this mean?

SW: I think it means HOK is drawing a much bigger circle around what we do. The word “carbon” …

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers published a report yesterday outlining how advances in geo-engineering can buy global governments some  much-needed time to stop CO2 emissions spiralling any further while they make their decision on the best way to mitigate

This may be a ‘sicky-plaster’ approach, but with doubt mounting over any firm commitments being made by the UN in Copenhagen (not to mention implementation of mitigations in newly industrializing countries) , we need to halt emissions where they are now.

The geo-engineer authors of this report outline three options for halting carbon emissions, all of which we have the technology to implement in the near future. All three options relate to landscape …