Phius Co-Founder & Co-Executive Director Katrin Klingenberg recounts the historic inclusion of Phius in the Greenbuild 2024 conference.
With Greenbuild 2024 taking place just days after an historic election, the stakes were high. There is no way around it: the election was a significant setback at a critical point in time for the environmental movement as a whole and the community that came together at Greenbuild.
The confusion over where to go from here was palpable. The United States Green Building Council’s (USGBC) CEO and President Peter Templeton did acknowledge the severity of the moment in his opening address. His speech was sobering, but as any good leader would do, he quickly refocused everyone’s attention on the achievements in the built environment, nationally and globally.
The Phius community showed up strong. Thank you all for following our call at the end of last year’s PhiusCon in Houston to bring your amazing work, expertise and knowledge to Philly to share it with the Greenbuild community of practitioners. And it was well received.
The Summit day that I moderated on Tuesday had roughly 300 attendees, about half of whom were newcomers! We had excellent networking sessions over lunch, and I can only imagine and hope that new design teams met each other and were formed.
I’d like to specifically thank leading architects in the field Doug Farr, Susan King and Chris Benedict for kicking the Summit off, James Petersen who followed with a presentation on minimized mechanical systems, Al Mitchell and James Ortega who discussed the advancement of Phius building certifications, and Tom Bassett-Dilley, who presented on the best-in-class negative carbon Phius envelope design. Added to the low and ZERO energy standards of Phius on a life cycle basis, this results in negative carbon total. Absolute zero carbon is within reach. I reported the positive message of such a scalable solution during the closing summary panel. Thank you, Sarah Zaleski and thank you to my fellow Summit co-moderators.
The dedicated Phius track over the next three days was an amazing success. The room was full, all the way to the last day’s presentations. Presentations featured beautiful projects all around and an appreciative audience. A special shoutout to Christoph Stump from Trinity Financial and Nathan Helbach from Neutral (formerly The Neutral Project) for presenting two outstanding high-rise projects from the developer’s and financial perspective, reporting an additional incremental cost of just over 3%, which is great.
Another highlight was Phius incoming Board President Kimberly Llewellyn’s presentation on a 100-year building together with Galen Staengl. The office high-rise building in the cooling dominated climate in San Antonio, Texas brought tears to my eyes. It is beautiful, holistic and just right in so many ways, addressing energy, water, ecosystems, no single-use plastic waste streams, and composting, all with an eye toward the benefit to the community.
Peter Templeton gave a shout out to our historic partnership during his keynote, noting this was the first Greenbuild Conference that featured Phius and passive building successes. As a professional subgroup of the environmental efforts, we are uniquely qualified to anchor that corner and help the community to mainstream zero energy buildings quickly; Phius is the proven path to zero.
While the impacts of current politics and the future for those of us in the green space is not immediately clear, one thing is certain: excellent work is being done, as was demonstrated in the many sessions at Greenbuild. We are doing what should be done, because we need to, we want to, and because it will create a better world for us all.
