Greenbuild Boston Shows Green Tech
The Boston convention center is the home of GreenBuild this year. GreenBuild is the SolidWorks World for architects and builders who need to use sustainable practices and materials when they design and construct buildings. A product design guy like me is a little out of place in an event like this, but I got in for free, and it is HUGE with tons of informative stuff, so I went.
To give you an idea of scale, SolidWorks World San Diego was 4,700 people. GreenBuild is 30,000. SolidWorks seems to blame poor attendance in 2002 on the location – Boston. But I’m here to tell you that Boston, even Boston in cold weather is not responsible for scaring away people. Boston is a great city. It’s content that draws crowds. The image to the left here shows about 1/3rd of the equivalent of the partner pavilion. It took 3 hours to walk through all of the booths, without chatting much.
Kim got to hear Desmond Tutu speak in the keynote session. She will spend the rest of today and tomorrow in breakout sessions.
As far as stuff to look at goes, there was a lot of things using renewable materials for floors, asphalt alternatives, concrete building techniques, alternative and smart materials, water reclamation, waterless urinals, solar power, evaporative cooling, and just about any commercial building technique you can think of.
A few product design exhibits were there. Herman Miller had a new chair design, and a cabinet with interesting all-in-one drawer pulls.
It’s not clear how all of this fits in the “green” scheme. It looks like anything that can claim some sort of efficiency improvement qualifies as green. It turns out that “green” tends to mean mainly money. Some of the trinkets available seemed to be simply cashing in on the hype rather than offering any actual improvements. Recycled materials are often more expensive than virgin materials. That’s not very green, in my opinion.
Anyway, this was a very interesting event, and a chance for a bit of cross-pollenization between architecture and product design.