The Gala and lecture are open to the public. AIA Jacksonville is a chapter of The American Institute of Architects (AIA) representing and serving AIA Florida members in Duval, Clay, St. Johns and Nassau counties.

Harmon, founder and principal of the Raleigh, NC-based firm Frank Harmon Architect PA and a Professor in Practice with North Carolina State University’s College of Design, served as the chairman of AIA Jacksonville’s 2010 design awards jury. Harmon’s firm has received more AIA North Carolina design awards than any other firm in the state and was recently ranked 13^th among the Top 50 Firms in the nation by Architect magazine. He is recognized nationally as a leader in modern “green” architecture.

A frequent speaker at state, regional and national design conferences, Harmon will discuss certain elements and themes that run through regional architecture – landscape, materials, construction methods, climate, roof forms and clients – and suggest how each can and should be used to create modern, sustainable architecture in the South.

“A balanced architecture rises up from the land it is built on, its hills, streams, weather and its people, their connections, ideas and stake in the future,” Harmon wrote in a recent article on North Carolina architecture for Inform magazine in Virginia.

He will use his own work to demonstrate regional modernism in the South, such as the new North Carolina Botanical Gardens Visitors Education Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, a cluster of buildings on a wooded hillside joined by deep porches and breezeways. The center is slated to be the State’s first LEED Platinum building.

For more information on AIA Jacksonville’s Design and Honor Awards Gala, including how to purchase tickets, go to www.aiajacksonville.org or email hgrimes@grimespg.com.

For more information on Frank Harmon, FAIA, visit www.frankharmon.com.

The symposium is sponsored by the UNCG Biology Department with financial support from Syngenta. The theme for the 2010 symposium is “Practical Steps Toward Sustainability.”

As a designer and educator, Frank Harmon has been a leader in “green,” or sustainable, architecture for decades – long before the concept entered the general lexicon. He has spent years educating the public through speaking engagements at conferences and conventions across the country, including Dwell Magazine’s annual “Dwell on Design” convention and several national conventions of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

He has also spent years educating his clients on the imperative for sustainable, regionally appropriate design and recently completed three thoroughly “green” projects: the NC Botanical Garden’s Visitor Education Center at UNC-Chapel Hill (slated to become the state’s first LEED Platinum building), the Walnut Creek Urban Wetlands Park Education Center in Raleigh, and the Merchants Millpond State Park Visitors Center in Gatesville, NC.

Among the current “green” projects Harmon’s firm is working on are the Oyster Research Hatchery at UNC-Wilmington, the UNC-Asheville Craft Campus, and AIA North Carolina’s Center for Architecture & Design in downtown Raleigh.

The other three speakers at the symposium are: Dr. Robert Jackson, director of Duke University’s Center on Global Change who will discuss the problems of nitrogen pollution; Dr. Patricia Gober, co-director of the National Science Foundation’s Decision Center for a Desert City, who will discuss water resource sustainability; and Dr. Susan Smalley, director of the Michigan State University C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems, who will discuss community-based food systems.

UNCG’s Environmental Symposium 2010 is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.uncg.edu/bio/index.

For more information on Frank Harmon, go to www.frankharmon.com.

Harmon, a multi-award winning architect and frequent speaker at seminars and symposia on design, will again make his case for sustainable building and development at the Center for Design Innovation in Winston-Salem, NC, when he participates in the CDI’s Idea Exchange on Tuesday, February 16, from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

CDI is a multi-campus research center for the statewide University of North Carolina. According to its website, the Idea Exchange is “a public forum for considering creative processes, digital techniques, business strategies, and other interests related to developing the knowledge economy of North Carolina’s Piedmont region.”

Frank Harmon is well known nationally for his firm’s modern, innovative, “green” and regionally appropriate architecture. From September to November 2009, he saw the completion of three high-performance, or “green,” projects in North Carolina, including the NC Botanical Gardens Visitor Education Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill that is slated to be the state’s first LEED Platinum building – the highest level of certification given by the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design green building rating system.

“It seems natural to me to design green buildings,” he said, “to catch the sun, accept the breeze and grown naturally out of the earth.”

In lectures and seminars, and as a Professor in Practice at NC State University’s College of Design, Harmon frequently asserts the necessity for modern buildings to be regionally appropriate – to address the specific context, materials, textures, colors and forms of a special region, using both traditional and non-traditional methods.

“The most sustainable – and liberating – thing we can do is acknowledge the places we are in,” he told Dwell magazine in January of 2008 when he was featured in the magazine’s “Conversations” section.

The CDI’s Idea Exchange is held in the Winston Tower, Suite 2105 (21^st floor) at 301 North Main Street in downtown Winston-Salem.

Currently CDI’s constituent schools are the UNC School of the Arts and Winston-Salem State University, collaborating with Forsyth Technical Community College. Sessions are recorded and web-streamed for remote access. For more information, go to www.centerfordesigninnovation.org.

For more information on Frank Harmon, visit www.frankharmon.com.

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Garden and green house. Project architect: Frank Harmon Architect PA

]]> http://blog.frankharmon.com/media-recognition/community-sustainable-energy-can-durham-outshine-star-nc/feed/ 0 http://blog.frankharmon.com/media-recognition/news-14-carolina-botanical-garden-goes-green-in-big-way/ http://blog.frankharmon.com/media-recognition/news-14-carolina-botanical-garden-goes-green-in-big-way/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:27:07 +0000 kweiss http://blog.frankharmon.com/?p=574 Oct. 14, 2009 (CHAPEL HILL) – North Carolina’s Botanical Garden is going green in more ways than one.

“This garden has always been about conservation and sustainability and it was a natural outgrowth of our mission,” said Peter White, garden director. “We try to show people how to live best with the environment.”

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October 13, 2009 (CHAPEL HILL, NC) – Frank Harmon Architect PA of Raleigh, NC, has completed the North Carolina Botanical Garden’s new and thoroughly “green” 29,656-square-foot  Education Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Governor Beverly Perdue attended the dedication ceremony and praised the project for being slated as the first LEED Platinum certified building in the state.

A multi-award-winning “green” architect, Frank Harmon, FAIA, designed the center as a cluster of eco-friendly buildings, connected by breezeways and covered porches, that nestles into a wooded hillside.

The “Flow of Ideas Exhibit” and Information Hall comprises the center section, along with a gift shop, library, and an area for plant sales. The Reeves Auditorium is located the western section, and the eastern wing houses classrooms and offices.

The cluster composition – or “family of buildings,” as Harmon likes to call it – serves as a gateway to the Botanical Garden and allows visitors to flow through the exterior space to the gardens behind the center and on to the trails and adjacent creek.

A new parking lot with porous paving provides access from Old Mason Farm Road to the Center. New gardens, to be developed over the next two years, will create expanded outdoor spaces.

All systems and materials in the Education Center were designed to minimize environmental impact and support human health. Green technologies include photovoltaic panels, above- and below-ground rainwater cisterns, bio-retention ponds, geothermal heating and cooling, natural day-lighting, and low-flow plumbing. Construction materials were obtained from within a 500-mile radius, including lumber milled from the site. Recycled components include steel beams made out of scrap metal from automobiles.

Embracing all the principles of sustainable design, the NC Botanical Garden Visitor’s Education Center is slated to receive LEED-Platinum certification.

“This is a gentle building with a green heart, embracing its North Carolina hillside and forming a doorway for future generations,” Harmon said.

Director Peter White has called the Center a “generously proportioned, green, and welcoming facility [that] will have a transformative impact on the way the Garden is experienced.”

Harmon noted that all stakeholders in the project — staff, visitors, faculty, Foundation and neighbors – actively participated in the design concept.

“We facilitated 20 design workshops, drawing on the energy and knowledge of all constituents to create the building and landscape design,” he said.

David Swanson served as the landscape architect for the project. Isaac Panzarella PE of Consider Design created the mechanical and green systems design. Carl Simmons PE served as civil engineering and Charles Murphy PE served as structural design. The project manager was Matt Griffith, AIA, of Frank Harmon Architecture PA.

The grand opening and dedication took place October 12 to coincide with University Day, which celebrates the laying of the cornerstone of the first building at UNC-Chapel Hill.

For more information on the North Carolina Botanical Garden and its new Education Center, go to www.ncbg.unc.edu.

For more information on Frank Harmon Architect PA, visit www.frankharmon.com.

When Henry David Thoreau set out to build his cabin at Walden Pond one snowy morning in March 1845, he created a new chapter in American thought – about the value of self-reliance, honest self-reflection, and the courage to live modestly: to live simply in means, but grandly in thought.

Less well-known is the fact that Thoreau built his cabin out of pine trees he cut on the site and covered it with boards he salvaged from a nearby shanty. By building a cabin for $28, he crafted a message about simplicity. By using the materials he found around him, he was being sustainable….

We are here today to celebrate an addition to Lance Hall, which was originally built just 6 years after Thoreau retreated to the shore of Walden Pond.

While he lived at Walden Pond, Thoreau wrote that “every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold.” As a child growing up in North Carolina, my favorite activities were outdoors, under the trees. Most of what I know as an architect I first learned playing along the banks of a stream in Greensboro.

Thus it came as a shock to me as a young architect to learn that everything I designed would cause the earth to be stripped or mined. I remember being paralyzed for nearly a year while I was designing my first house on the shore of the James River. How could I destroy that soft forest floor for my client’s floorplan? Finally, I realized that the only way I could work as an architect was to promise to make the site better than I found it. Sometimes that has meant not to build at all.

It seemed natural to me to design buildings to catch the sun, accept the breeze, and grow naturally out of the earth. I was thinking sustainablity, but at the time we didn’t call it that. I simply thought it was good architecture. Let me give you an example:

Ten years ago, Jim and Janice Taylor asked me to design a summer house for them on a remote island in the Bahamas. At the time, there was no electrical power on the site and no drinking water. I designed a house that was like an umbrella, with a generous, spreading roof that provided shelter from the sun and collected rainwater for drinking.

There was, of course, no air conditioning. But the shape and orientation of the house allow it to capture prevailing breezes and enjoy natural ventilation. The house is quite simple and quite liberating. Staying there, you experience the sun and sky, ocean and wind with an intensity unknown before.

Needless to say, the house is sustainable. It has to be. And through it, I began to understand the logic of Thoreau’s cabin: Reduce our daily needs to the essentials and live life to the fullest. Begin the world again, to some extent.

Children are not the only ones to discover the world anew. Decades ago, but especially since 2001 and Katrina, it has become apparent that our addiction to oil, our appetite for land, and our carelessness with water were not only polluting the environment, but making our lives unhealthy. Our lungs, immune systems, and skin, for example, are affected not only by how we live, but how we drive and how we built.

According to the Energy Department, residential and commercial buildings account for 40 percent of total energy consumption in this country, versus just 28 percent for the entire transportation sector, including automobiles. Thirty percent of all the forests are cut to make architecture, and 25 percent of all our fresh water is used in buildings.

Clearly, if we want to make a future in which human health and environmental health are one, a sustaining architecture is a good place to start.

Two years ago, you asked me to make a start: to design an addition to Lance Hall – “small rooms with big ideas,” you said. The site was a small outdoor room that held the graves of generations and an ancient elm tree. You asked for classrooms, an elevator, bathrooms – all next to a perfect temple. Talk about a challenging site – to do all this on a swatch of land about the size of a tennis court! I promised to leave the site better than I found it, and to make it “green.”

“Of course, your green building also has to be approved by the B.A.R,”  your building committee told me.

Being from North Carolina, I thought a B.A.R. was a place where you went to drink. But as you know, the B.A. R. is the Charleston Board of Architectural Review, the Supreme Court of architectural review boards.

So while I was designing the modern, green addition to Lance Hall, I kept thinking about the elephant in the living room no one talked about – the B.A.R. How would we make a modern, sustainable Sunday School in historic Charleston, a city more tortured than most by the conflict between past and present.

Well, what we did was to design the most “green” Sunday School we could, with respect for its place –  not only its place in Charleston but in the 21^st century. The new addition to Lance Hall has a green roof, which keeps the building cool and collects rainwater. We use cisterns to store the rainwater for irrigating the new courtyard, where children will play in the shade of live oak trees. To conserve energy, the new Lance Hall has a geothermal heat source, using the earth’s constant temperature to heat and cool the rooms. Those rooms will be lit by daylight and filled with fresh air, with windows offering views over the Circular Church. The morning sun will fill the Sunday School rooms. Wherever possible, we used local materials, as Thoreau did. The floors are recycled heart pine. The structure itself is made of Southern yellow pine and recycled steel.

We have tried to use materials reverently.

In the 21^st century, unfortunately, we take wood, steel and glass for granted, no matter the effect of cutting or mining them. In historic Charleston, however, you can see in the way people wove a sweetgrass basket, built a steeple, or made a Windsor chair expressed joy in work, and a spiritual quality in how something was made. Materials, no matter how common, are precious. I hope that in the porches of Lance Hall, the way steel columns grasp wooden floor beams, and the way the smoothness of heart pine contrasts with the strength of stucco walls, express our joy in the making of it.

The addition to Lance Hall will have all these wonderful, efficient, green systems, but you won’t have to know that to like it. Just as playing beside a stream can be the greatest learning experience because it is unconscious, so the addition to Lance Hall will teach by experience. Children and visitors will learn about sustainability simply by being here. The new Lance Hall will automatically inspire those who experience it, and exist as your gift to future generations.

And what about the elephant in the living room – the B.A.R.? I presented the green design concept to the B.A.R. with Whitney Power’s invaluable coaching, Bert Keller’s spiritual support, Susan Davis’ advice, and some trepidation. To my great relief, they approved this sleek, modern, sustainable building outright!

“We’ve been waiting for a building like this for years,” they said.

Reinvent the world, I thought.

That brings me to my last point, which is about balance. What our experience with the BAR shows is the possibility that the past and present might learn to coexist and complement each other. The ancient Greeks thought that perfection in art meant balance; that in a painting or a building, you would add nothing nor take anything away without destroying it: balance.

Since the Greeks, we have come to equate balance with beauty, and that alludes to a state we call happiness. I hope that the addition to Lance Hall has balance and happiness!

The task we face –  to build sustainably and to deal with climate change — is immense. I was reminded of that last night, driving to Charleston past miles of suburban sprawl and parking lots, unable to see the sky because of light pollution. What we have done at the Circular Congregational Church is a small start. But I am reminded of the immense change brought about by Thoreau’s cabin — 10 ft. by 15 ft.

Treehugger.com is an international media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability issues into mainstream discourse. Contributor Blythe Copeland offers the following about Duke’s program:

“Students at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences choose from undergraduate, graduate, or doctoral degrees in concentrations that include environmental studies and policy, earth and ocean sciences, and environmental law. The University also maintains a hands-on Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, NC, where courses on biology, science and nature writing, and marine policy take place in the Gold LEED-certified conservation center. Doctoral candidates have three research areas to pick from: marine science and conservation, which includes marine ecology and coastal geology; earth and ocean sciences, comprising climate change and solid earth processes; and environmental studies and policy, which focuses on ecosystem science and aquatic and atmospheric sciences.”

Located on Piver’s Island at the head of the Beaufort Inlet, the Ocean Conservation Center provides state-of-the-art teaching facilities for Duke’s Marine Lab, while identifying and demonstrating innovative, environmentally sound design and construction technology. Completed in 2006 as Duke’s only Gold LEED-certified building, the Center features photovoltaic cells, geothermal heating and cooling, and recycled and local materials wherever possible. The building was featured as a case study in Environmental Design + Construction magazine in June of this year.

Treehugger’s complete list of Best College Environmental Programs in the U.S. can be seen at www.treehugger.com/files/2009/08/10-of-the-best-college-environmental-programs-in-the-us.php. For more information on Duke’s program, go to www.nicholas.duke.edu/marinelab/facilities/repass.

For more information on Frank Harmon Architecture PA, visit www.frankharmon.com.

The professional journal’s annual ranking of the top U.S. firms is intended to promote “a more well-rounded definition of success,” according to senior editor Amanda Kolson Hurley. “The criteria for inclusion comprise a trifecta of critical goals for every practice: profitability, sustainability, and design quality.”

Harmon’s small firm, headquartered in a revamped warehouse in downtown Raleigh, is no stranger to design awards and professional rankings. In 2005, Residential Architect selected Frank Harmon Architect PA as the “Top Firm of the Year.”  In 2008, an award-winning “green” vacation home in the Bahamas Harmon designed was included in a Wall Street Journal list of “the most influential and inspiring houses built during the past decade.” That same project was featured in a special exhibit on green architecture in the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

Harmon’s firm has received more North Carolina design awards than any other firm in the state and recently won three national accolades: two Custom Home Magazine’s 2009 Design Awards for residences in Raleigh, NC, and Charleston, SC, and an American Institute of Architect’s 2009 Housing Award for the Charleston home.

As one of Architect Magazine’s top 50, Frank Harmon Architect PA is in the company of such large and luminary firms as Rafael Vinoly Architects; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; Perkins+Will; William McDonough + Partners; and Gwathmey Siegel & Associates.

“Most ranking of firms is by dollar volume,” observed Frank Harmon, who is also an adjunct professor of architecture at the North Carolina State University College of Design. “The Architect ranking, by contrast, includes design and sustainability, two things we love best.”

Harmon’s firm ranks 26^th. The only other North Carolina firm to make the list is Little Diversified Architectural Consultants in Charlotte at 43^rd.

Frank Harmon is recognized nationally as a leader in innovative, modern, and regionally inspired “green” architecture, and every project that emanates from his firm embraces the principles of sustainability. The Raleigh architect’s work has been featured in numerous magazines, journals, and books on the subject and he is a regular speaker at design conferences and conventions across the country.

Architect Magazine is one of HanleyWood LLC’s publications that focus exclusively on North America’s residential and commercial construction industry. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the online version of the journal is also available at www.architectmagazine.com.

For more information on Frank Harmon Architect PA, visit www.frankharmon.com.