The Steel City Goes Green

In 1998, some of the most famous architects in the world rolled up their sleeves to create models in a design competition for a new convention center in Pittsburgh. The request for proposals demanded more than parking lots and a new hotel. High up on the list was also a precept of design and construction that caused many of the architects, who hailed from cosmopolitan centers such as Miami and Manhattan, to drop their drawing pencils and recheck their maps.

The city of Pittsburgh, that Rustbelt mediumopolis forged from industrial fire and brimstone, the place with a sooty history of belching smokestacks and don’t-eat-the-fish rivers, was insisting on building green. The $252 million David L. Lawrence Convention Center, one of the largest public projects ever undertaken in the city, would have to meet the highest standards for human health and the natural environment.

By several accounts, there was some snickering among the contenders, where the impressions of Pittsburgh were half a century behind the curve. After a painstaking, decades-long clean-up of its air, water, and industrial brownfields, Pittsburgh has become one of the top five cities in the world in green building, with 17 LEED Certified structures. (Portland, Oregon, has 18 and Seattle has 20, but both cities are larger than Pittsburgh in population.) Now, with an impressive green skyline in place, large institutions and the people connected to them are being transformed.

“Talking to reporters from around the world, I’m always getting surprised reactions to Pittsburghers having all these connections and passions for the next big thing in sustainable development,” says Rebecca Flora, executive director of the Green Building Alliance, a non-profit that promotes green building and related projects in Pittsburgh. “What I tell them is that it makes perfect sense when you consider a relatively recent history that has us living in a terribly polluted environment, then summoning the community will to clean it up, and then going on to the next step of being a leader in green building.”

Since the late 1940s, a series of development renaissances has allowed Pittsburgh to address the worst of its pollution. In 1941, Mayor David Lawrence formed a bold partnership with financier Richard King Mellon to create a public-corporate campaign to clean up air and water. The highlights were a series of ordinances that required homes and businesses to switch from coal furnaces to cleaner heating fuels. In the 1950s, Lawrence and the group of industrial leaders known as the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, moved on to an office tower development boom that was tied to creating the city’s signature park and renovation of other green spaces. Community groups applied for federal and state funding to create hiking and biking trails along the rivers near downtown. PNC Financial Services built the 647,000-square-foot LEED Certified PNC Firstside Center in 2000. The country’s first green dorm room, the New House—in which ten percent of each room’s air is replaced with fresh air every hour— was built on Carnegie Mellon’s campus in 2003.

And yet, in Pittsburgh, the compelling story is not just about infrastructure. It’s about how even a modest investment in green buildings and similar sustainable development projects can inspire people to embrace sustainability as a way of life. Now, in two areas—rivers-based education and health care—people are beginning to see the effects of Pittsburgh’s green transformation.

Sailing Green

“Ee-uuuu! I got a rotifer that’s eating,” yells Nathan Ballentine, watching the digestive process of a river critter under his microscope. “Cool!” Welcome to the bottom of the food chain and the sounds of environmental science.Some of his sixth-grade classmates from Colfax Upper Elementary School in the Pittsburgh suburb of Springdale leave their microscopes to jostle for a peek at Nathan’s zooplankton—an organism that feeds on algae and serves as food for tiny fish. They affirm Nathan’s assessment with enthusiastic variations of “That’s really cool!”

These students are not in school. Their science lab is the Ohio River and their classroom is the aptly named Discovery, a boat in a small fleet on which young people can learn about rivers while cruising on them. RiverQuest, a program that has for the past decade made biology come alive for some 55,000 students, has a new focus: a $4 million green boat.

The Explorer, which arrived last January from its construction dock in Freeport, Florida, is a state-of-the-art, 90-by-25-foot, 150-passenger boat with five classrooms on board, an advanced propulsion system, and a ground-breaking diesel-electric hybrid engine. The boat itself meets LEED standards outlined by the U.S. Green Building Council, giving Pittsburgh another first in the green building world. The boat carries enormous batteries that charge while it’s at a dock. Its windows are energy-efficient and its cabinets are made from recycled materials. It runs on biodiesel, using a propulsion system that needs about half as much energy as other boats its size and emits far fewer pollutants.

RiverQuest’s director, Karl Thomas, is working to form cross-country and international partnerships to enhance the green boat’s teaching opportunities. One effort involves discussions with oceanographer Jean-Michel Cousteau and his Ocean Futures Society.

The First Green Hospital?  Almost

A few years ago, Pittsburghers thought their new children’s hospital, now scheduled to open in 2009, would be the first green hospital in the country. This spring, the Center for Health and Healing at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Oregon, beat them to the punch. But the Pittsburgh facility is still generating buzz. Last year the Green Guide, a consumer guide to green living, identified the $575 million facility as one of the nation’s top ten green hospitals, out of a field of nearly 1,300 pursuing environmental certifications. Sustainability practices for the new hospital include systems to lower utility costs; maximum use of daylight and views; recycled building materials; and all-electronic patient records that result in less solid waste going into landfills. Hospital officials expect the energy cost savings reaped from the green design to reach 30 percent.

Perhaps more importantly, there is also a commitment to a “green philosophy” in the practice of medicine. The hospital has been recognized as a national leader in pediatric environmental issues, including the built environment; asthma and the environment; neurocognitive issues involving heavy metals exposure; environmental exposures and cancer. Children’s is also researching whether green health care practices actually improve outcomes for patients, with benchmarking data being collected in the older hospital.

It all points to a new wave of urban green construction, and in a sustainable metropolis, the building is just the beginning.