John saw collaboration with other University of MN research entities and public and private organizations–as critical to CSBR's mission. He developed the center to serve as both a partner and a resource for the State of Minnesota, design professions, the building industry, and the general public.

John outlined his view on the importance and role of architectural research centers in a paper for Architectural Research Centers Consortium in 2009.

...an urgent, major transformation needs to happen in the design of the built environment to respond to impending climate change and other environmental degradation. This paper will explain the potential role of architectural research centers in this transformation and provide examples from the Center for Sustainable Building Research (CSBR) at the University of Minnesota. A research center can become a regional hub to coordinate and disseminate critical information.

…CSBR is leading the establishment of Architecture 2030 standards in Minnesota, assisting local governments in writing green building policy, providing design assistance to local governments, developing tools to assist design decision-making, providing technical assistance to the affordable housing community in Minnesota, and establishing a regional case study database that includes actual performance information.

CSBR is creating a publicly-accessible, credible knowledge base of new approaches, technologies and actual performance outcomes. Research centers such as CSBR can be a critical component of the necessary feedback loop often lacking in the building industry. A research center can also fill major gaps in providing in-depth professional education as well as be a catalyst for demonstration projects and public education.

~John Carmody from The Role of Architectural Research Centers in Addressing Climate Change. ARCC 2009 - Leadership in Architectural Research, between academia and the profession, San Antonio, TX, 15-18 April 2009

Network of Funders and Impact

John also argued for the importance of diverse funding sources for research centers, noting in CSBR’s Five Year Review from 2010 that funding had been received from a wide range of sources including:

• Federal: Department of Energy, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

• State and local government: University of Minnesota, IREE, and MNSCU; Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Minnesota Housing, Minnesota Departments of Administration, Commerce, Transportation, and Natural Resources; Hennepin, Dakota and other metro counties; the Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

• Foundation and Corporate: McKnight Foundation, Wilder Foundation, Target Corporation, 3M Corporation, Xcel Energy, Green Communities Program, US Green Building Council, Green Building Initiative, Yonsei University Center for Sustainable Housing, Athena Institute

Minnesota Followed the Trend

In 1995, a seemingly simple question from a Hennepin County commissioner led to the development of a sustainable design guide. The question was: “How sustainable are our buildings?”

In pursuit of an answer, Richard Strong, a project manager at the county, set off to the USGBC conference in Big Sky, Montana. There, a small group of like-minded Minnesotans began discussing the idea of guidelines. With funding from the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance and Hennepin County Waste Management, an effort took root. The core team grew to include an array of professionals including architects, landscape architects, and university researchers.

For John, it was once again a matter of being in the right place at the right time. His experience in creating design guidelines, honed by years at the Underground Space Center, found an outlet in the emerging field of sustainable guidelines.

Minnesota Sustainable Design Guide (MSDG) is a design tool that can be used to overlay environmental issues on the design, construction, and operation of both new and renovated facilities. It can be used to set sustainable design priorities and goals; develop appropriate sustainable design strategies for a particular project; and to determine performance measures to guide the design and decision-making process. It can also be used as a management tool to organize and structure environmental concerns during design, construction, and operations phases.
~Hennepin County description of the Minnesota Sustainable Design Guide (1999)

Although the key environmental topics have changed little over time (energy, water, IEQ, etc.), the approach has shifted from prescriptive lists encouraging efficiency—to performance-based targets aimed at zeroing out a project's impacts. Minnesota has kept pace with a continued focus on regional priorities.

In their own words

Two interviews, the first published in Interiors & Sources, (April 2004) and a second in Architecture MN magazine (July/August 2016) reveal first-hand how John and his partners in the B3 team came together. In the interviews, they discuss how they set a comprehensive vision for sustainable building in State of Minnesota-funded projects—goals that are both achievable and open to updating.

The team and the vision

Janet Streff, State Energy Office, Minnesota Department of Commerce

We put out an RFP from the departments of Administration and Commerce, and the proposal we chose

was the team from the Weidt Group, LHB, and the Center for Sustainable Building Research (CSBR). This Minnesota team was the only one to have the vision of creating design guidelines for new buildings to be followed by benchmarking to ensure that new data was continually fed into a building’s performance equation. B3 includes the benchmarking tool as well as the design guidelines. In 2009, the Legislature required the addition of a net-zero energy standard to the design guidelines—SB 2030.
~Architecture MN (July/August 2016)

David Edjadi, AIA, Principal, The Weidt Group

The legislation from which B3 (Building, Benchmark and Beyond) evolved had two parts. One was to develop benchmarking for existing buildings so that the state could ultimately invest its money in the buildings that would benefit most from energy and environmental improvements. The other part set guidelines for new buildings with the idea that those guidelines would eventually feed data into the benchmarking so that we would have a long-term closing of the loop in terms of whether certain strategies were beneficial or not.
~Interiors & Sources (April 2004)

John Carmody, Director, Center for Sustainable Building Research, UMN

From the beginning, the State had said it wants accountability. We don’t just want to say, we’ve got a leed silver building. We want to be able to say that it cost us that it saved us this much on a lifecycle basis and that it had this kind of impact on the people in the building and on their productivity. If we look at how broadly the legislation was written it’s essentially asking for a comprehensive life cycle assessment of a building and a method to track that overtime.
~Interiors & Sources (April 2004)

On a regional approach

John Carmody

The Minnesota Sustainable Building Guidelines simply mandate most of the sustainable practices and encourage the rest. This simplifies the process in some ways. We try to work with different goals and overlay them in a way that in fact, creates a set of standards and processes the state agencies can follow.
~Interiors & Sources (April 2004)

Rick Carter, FAIA Integrative Design Team Leader, LHB

Prescriptive codes say, Thou shalt put in this kind of glass’ and ‘Thou shalt put in this kind of insulation.’… B3 says, Here’s the energy consumption of your building per square foot for this building type, and here’s what it should be.’ … If the B3 program were instituted as a statewide building code today, we’d have a pretty good chance of getting to our goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
~Architecture MN (July/August 2016)

Richard Graves, AIA, Director Center for Sustainable Building Research, UMN

A study … looked at making B3 (Building, Benchmarks, and Beyond) code for all buildings. It found that the cost of implementation is far outweighed by the dollars and societal benefits gained.
~Architecture MN (July/August 2016)

Why it works here

Tom McDougall, Assoc. AIA, Past President, The Weidt Group

We’ve gone through Independent governors, Republican governors, and DFL governors during the course of the B3 program, and they have all maintained its funding and support. I think there is an environmental ethic here in this state that allows us to have this long-term consistency of environmental vision.
~Architecture MN (July/August 2016)

Richard Graves

It also has a lot to do with the great architecture community we have here in Minnesota. …we get something wrong, they don’t just say, “That’s not right.” They come to our offices and say, “What if we did it this way?” They’re smart enough to be collaborators and propose solutions.
~Architecture MN (July/August 2016)

Tom McDougall

It’s amazing how far we’ve come. We couldn’t have done it had it been just a three or four-year program. The long-term commitment from the State and legislators to maintain funding has made a real difference.
~Architecture MN (July/August 2016)

The B3 Guidelines are the backbone of the program. From pre-design through operations, they guide project owners and teams. A key mechanism in the program is the collection of information used to track a range of outcomes. The data gathered is used to populate the case study database, develop educational programming and to inform the next generation of the program.

John Carmody created the guidelines, making sure the latest research in green building informed the effort. We still have this role today, focused on sustainable, resilient design and construction. Part of what attracted me to come to Minnesota to head the CSBR was the B3 program.
~Richard Graves, AIA –Architecture MN (July/August 2016)

The B3 / SB 2030 Energy Standard program mirrors the intent of Architecture 2030. It has stepped goals to reach net-zero carbon buildings by 2030. The 168 completed SB 2030 State of Minnesota projects are estimated to have saved 5,140 million kBtus of energy, resulting in a reduction of 735,000 tons of CO2e and a savings of $94.9 million to date.

To date, 88% of all building projects enrolled in the SB 2030 program have documented designs that met or exceeded the SB 2030 Energy Standard. By comparison, less than 4.3% of projects committed to Architecture 2030 have documented models.

The B3 Benchmarking has been a cornerstone of the project since its inception. Currently, the B3 Benchmarking program contains over 7,500 public buildings with over 300 million square feet in its database representing 22 State agencies, 410 cities, 55 counties, 60 higher education campuses, and 214 school districts. The B3 Benchmarking system has identified over $23 million in potential energy savings in over 1,500 identified buildings representing about 30 million square feet of building floor area.

The B3 Sustainable Post Occupancy Evaluations have been conducted for 63 state-funded projects to date. They provide a wealth of information and feedback on the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) components of the B3 Guidelines. The metrics allow individual buildings to be compared to benchmarks and other buildings; and to provide useful data for program evaluation and feedback.

The B3 / SB 2030 Energy Efficient Operations Manual (B3 EEOM) is founded on the notion that a building is operating efficiently only if each significant energy-consuming device or system uses the minimal amount of energy as needed to perform its intended function. The B3 EEOM approach accepts that the avoidance of all excess energy waste through preventative maintenance is not practical. The focus is instead on devising and scheduling the performance of inexpensive diagnostic tasks that ensure that significant energy-wasting malfunctions will be detected soon after it occurs.