You have to give back what you take ...

Rainer Schrom and Stephen Grasso, Partners in Architecture

04/29/2009

Name: Rainer Schrom and Stephen Grasso
Business: Partners in Architecture
Position: Principals
NESEA member since: 2002
Website: http://www.pfarch.net/


Business description:  We are a small and young, but experienced full service architectural firm in Stamford, Connecticut, offering services to residential and commercial clients.

How do you define sustainability?
Acting in a manner that least adversely impacts the environment and does not deplete the fixed reserves of a system. You have to give back what you take somewhere along the line.

What project are you most proud of?
We're working on a project now for UNICEF designing master plans for up to 80 schools in western Africa.  We use local resources, including bamboo for structural materials, and have to design for areas with neither electricity nor flowing water.

What energy advice do you have for the new president?
Do what the rest of the industrialized world has done: Tax the hell out of petroleum fuels and use that money to build sustainable energy sources.  Fuel is too cheap -- at four dollars a gallon it was still cheap. Fuel taxes should be used to repair the damage they cause.

What promising technology would you like to know more about?
We'd like to see advances in insulating glass. As architects it would help us a lot if we had glass available that was affordable and had the same insulation value as a good wall.

What's the public's biggest misunderstanding regarding sustainable energy systems?
That buying some product or technology is the solution to adopting a sustainable lifestyle. The best thing we can do is simply to stop using energy in a ridiculous fashion. Reduce, re-use, recycle, in that order of importance.

What prompted you to join NESEA?
A passion for the environment. It's a very good organization and we're interested in broadening our knowledge - everybody's knowledge -- and helping the cause of bringing America closer to the energy independence that it needs.

What's the most irritating example of "greenwashing" you can think of?
The whole notion of "clean coal" gets our blood boiling.

Parting shot ...
LEED certification is a great launch pad for green building, but they'd best have a plan for phasing it out. Think about it: If green is the passion and everybody wants green and sustainable materials, and everybody does every building LEED-certified, we would have a mountain of paperwork in Washington that would choke a landfill. The goal should be to integrate LEED as part of standard municipal, state and federal building codes.