My Personal Thanks For Green Building Showcase 2016!

By Grey Lee

Wow – it's been a week and I'm still glowing from Green Building Showcase 2016. It was our most successful fundraiser ever, thank you to the many who attended and the generous sponsors who stepped up to get in front of our community and demonstrate their leadership. 

Thank you to Boston Properties, National Grid, Eversource, View, Arup, Turner, Elkus Manfredi, and AHA Consulting Engineers for signing up to be our major sponsors. We look forward to continuing to help you connect to our professional community to achieve more green buildings!

Throughout the evening, I was constantly bumping into the leaders of our community, and the up-and-coming leaders who were great to see. We had some great speakers. If you weren't impressed by Bryan Koop, well I don't know what to do with you. He is demonstrating that hard-nosed commercial real estate development can embrace and profit from taking on these green building projects. Practitioners in design and engineering constantly hear from owners that green buildings are too expensive, that it's not justifiable to go for certification, that it's not going to fit in the schedule. It's too bad. They are missing out. Clearly, smart operating developers, a team like the one at Boston Properties, have figured it out. They are building LEED certified buildings throughout the Boston regional market and attaining premium rents and attracting awesome tenants. We commend their work. 

It was great to hear from Austin Blackmon at the City of Boston and to have him see the vibrant community of green building professionals who are ready to support the City's initiatives such as Climate Ready Boston and to continue to execute awesome projects. We are especially ready to see more LEED O+M projects – existing buildings embracing the processes of improvement and benefiting from the rigors or the LEED process. Look at what companies like AHA have done under the leadership of Bob Andrews – almost 30M s.f. of LEED certified space in existing buildings (well, this is throughout the country, but some big ones in Boston for sure). The institutional and government commitments for improved performance in the building sector – for energy efficiency, GHG reductions, improved air quality, and other goals – are going to be implemented by the people who were at the Showcase. It is an exciting crew to be around.

As I walked past the showboards on display, I overheard many conversations that were about building science, but also the great sounds of laughter, and cheerful friendly banter. So many people were catching up with colleagues who they had worked with some time ago together on a project. It was like a family reunion.

Thank you to all the special guests including our other sponsors, including Menck, HDR, The Green Engineer, Gerding Elden, Finegold Alexander, Suffolk, Watergrip Media, Ellenzweig, BR+A, Aircuity, and Erlab. 

I was proud to have been part of the team who organized and built out the Showcase to help strengthen our position as a community delivering solutions to the real estate sector and our government and institutional partners who share our mission. I was thrilled to communicate to those agents how ready we are to step up and transform the built environment for net positive outcomes for our community.

Thank you to all who were able to participate, congratulations to the award winners, and I hope to see more of our community at upcoming events with USGBC MA. Let's continue working on more green buildings!

Don't forget to come out to Healthy Materials Summit 2016, October 26th at Google's Cambridge HQ!