Jury Selected for BrickStainable Design Competition

Words: Alan Richardson, Vivian Loftness, Martin Vachon, Bill Browning, Anna DysonVivian Loftness of Carnegie Mellon, Martin Vachon of AXIM Concrete Technologies, Bill Browning of Terrapin Bright Green, and Anna Dyson of Center for Architecture Science and Ecology will judge the entries in this year’s BrickStainable Design Competition.

“We again are fortunate to have individuals of their caliber determining the winners for this competition,” said Potomac Valley Brick president and BrickStainable visionary Alan Richardson.

Vivian Loftness is an internationally renowned researcher, author and educator with over 30 years of focus on environmental design and sustainability, advanced building systems and systems integration, climate and regionalism in architecture, as well as design for performance in the workplace of the future. She has served on seven National Academy of Science panels and has given Congressional testimonies on sustainable design.

In his position at AXIM in the United States, a subsidiary of ESSROC-Italcementi Group, Martin Vachon promotes the use of Self Consolidating Concrete (SCC) in the U.S. and is a pioneer in this field. Vachon has been involved in several R&D projects, including concrete maturity, surface quality characteristics of architectural concrete, electrical conductivity and hydration kinetics of cement, tribology and pumpability of concrete.

Bill Browning is one of the green building and real estate industry’s foremost thinkers and advocates for sustainable design solutions. He has lent his to expertise Fortune 500 companies, universities, non-profit organizations, the U.S. military, and foreign governments. Browning is the founder of Green Development Services at Rocky Mountain Institute and a founding member of the USGBC’s Board of Directors where he still serves on the Governance Board.

Anna Helen Dyson is the director of the Center of Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE), an entity spanning several institutional collaborators, and co-hosted by Skidmore Owings and Merrill and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is currently directing interdisciplinary research to develop building systems that integrate applications of emerging technology from diverse research fields.

Three of the four jurors participated in BrickStainable last year as well. Loftness and Vachon are returning jurors and Browning was last year’s Award Ceremony Keynote. Anna Dyson brings new perspective to the competition.

“If this year's entries equal or surpass last year's, we will have a lot of thought provoking ideas and hopefully keep brick and masonry construction on the minds of the design community, the environmental community and those interested in energy efficiency,” added Richardson.

The BrickStainable Design Competition is held in pursuit of design solutions that exploit the unique properties of brick masonry construction as well as seek new ideas in the development of this age old building material. It is divided into two categories.

The Integrated Building Design Competition assignment’s building will be set in an urban location. It seeks integrative design solutions that exploit the thermal qualities of brick masonry construction to create a passively heated and cooled building with a target of net zero energy. The Technical Design Competition calls for entrants to design a single element of a building that provides a sustainable solution to real-world environmental challenges.

Jurors will look for evidence of the project’s performance and encourage the use of BIM, energy, solar and day light modeling software.

Potomac Valley Brick will award a $10,000 grand prize and $7,500 grand prize in the Integrated Building Design and Technical Design categories, respectively. Up to three honorable mention winners in each category will be awarded $2,000 per team. All winners will be flown to Washington, DC for the awards celebration on March 31, 2011 at the National Building Museum.

Registration is open through November 15th and competition entries are due December 15th. More information about the jurors, competition requirements and FAQs, past award winners and award ceremony photos are available at www.BrickStainable.com.
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