Oregon BEST Researcher and PSU Professor Sergio Palleroni

At 15,000 feet high in the Himalayas (under the patronage of the Dalai Lama), Oregon BEST researcher Sergio Palleroni is helping design what is slated to be the greenest passive energy school in the world. At below sea level in New Orleans, he’s helping residents recycle building materials into furniture as well as new green homes constructed to survive future storm surges. In the urban jungle of Taipai, Taiwan, he’s turning an eight-lane boulevard into a “bio-swale,” an ecological urban corridor that reduces the heat-island effect in a city made mostly of concrete. In Texas, he’s innovated a way to add affordable green homes to already occupied city lots, providing badly needed housing and helping slow suburban sprawl.

Palleroni’s fingerprints are on green building projects in all corners of the earth, but as of September 2008, he calls Oregon home.

Now an architecture professor and fellow at Portland State University’s Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices, Palleroni has returned to the place he calls, “one of the most beautiful natural landscapes on earth.” Although he was born in Argentina where he grew up on a dairy farm, he earned his undergraduate degree in architecture at the University of Oregon, before continuing at MIT. So he’s no stranger to Oregon, and the state—and Oregon BEST—is fortunate to have him back.

The soft-spoken Palleroni is passionate about helping the world adopt new green building technologies quickly. In a country like the U.S., where buildings gobble up more than 40 percent of all the energy used, time is of the essence. It’s critical, he says, to look at the big picture—upstream and downstream—in order to streamline adoption of green building concepts and ensure they are integrated across many sectors.

“Adopting new technologies crosses so many disciplines and sectors and is so dependent not only on engineering and architecture, but also on economics and financial institutions, regulatory agencies and legal codes...how do you get all these entities on board and integrated?” he asks. “For a long time, we’ve been thinking of buildings as passive technological fixes, boxes of isolation, cocoons. But now we’re moving back to a connection with nature. And we’re learning that the more actively people from different disciplines are involved, the more intelligent the buildings become.”

While universities, with their faculty and students working across disciplines in close proximity to each other, are great places to explore ways to streamline integration of green building technologies, Palleroni believes it’s key to also take projects into the real world.

“It is out in the field where you catch the interest of people, who are then willing to reach out and try new things and collaborate,” he says. He has found that by working alongside building contractors, city inspectors, farmers, and bankers, he is able to show and describe the benefits—from long-term economics to short-term energy savings—first hand.

He finds Oregon to be a perfect place to push integration of green building technologies because people are involved at a grassroots level, knowledge is widely distributed, and there is an appreciation of the natural landscape.

“The neat thing about Oregon is that everyone is very collaborative, people know each other and it’s so grassroots,” he says, noting the growing collaboration between engineering and architecture at PSU. “That’s what makes Oregon so great. You have the perfect target audience to create the model society of what a green world might look like.” What positions Oregon for a green future and makes it a model community, Palleroni says, is that people here know the most significant change we can make is helping people think more environmentally. “If we can get people to act as civic environmentalists, then the world has a chance, a future,” he says.

Oregon BEST’s focus on fueling cross-disciplinary collaboration between university researchers and industry partners is helping Oregon maintain a leadership position in fast-tracking adoption of new green building technologies and materials.

Palleroni knows it’s important for his students to glean experience working outside Oregon, to gain a global perspective and to learn about architecture, water usage, and energy consumption from other cultures.

He is co-founder of the BaSiC Initiative, which builds sustainable communities using ecological design. The program has completed dozens of projects in a range of locations, many of them rural and isolated. Palleroni and his students work in places where people often lack decent housing, community facilities, and the ability to help themselves. One of Palleroni’s books, Studio at Large: Architecture in Service of Global Communities, chronicles some of projects the BaSiC Initiative has designed and built.

“We try to go to places where the impact is greatest, which is often at the edges, where we see if we can solve local problems by applying research,” he says. “Sometimes these are the best places to try new theories because regulations are less limiting. And it puts students in a place to gain a global perspective.”

Palleroni and his students engage with local residents on each project, helping solve problems using design and materials that keep things both simple and sustainable.

The Druk White Lotus School sits high in the Indian Himalaya among one of the last remaining mountain societies where a traditional Tibetan Buddhist way of life still thrives. This school, which has won several international design awards, combines traditional Ladakhi architecture with a focus on sustainability—incorporating ventilated trombe walls, solar driven latrines, as well as unique thermal insulation and energy harvesting solutions on a remote and challenging site.

Last summer, Palleroni’s students spent weeks in the region collaborating in the construction of much-needed additions such as tensile shade canopies, a willow pergola, a rammed-earth greenhouse learning center, and an instructive irrigation-demonstration water fountain. These projects were an introduction to a longer term project to design and build a cultural center at the school, which will play the crucial role of disseminating knowledge to the larger community of Ladakh. Watch a PBS video about the project or read the students’ blog.

On Native American reservations in the U.S., Palleroni and his students are helping break the cycle of poverty by inspiring residents to use local materials to construct straw bale homes that will last longer and be more energy efficient than the existing, under-insulated manufactured housing. “That is now an official HUD project,” he says proudly.

In Taipai, Taiwan, Palleroni is helping reduce the heat-island effect in the city by creating a large “bio-swale” swath that serves as an ecological urban corridor.

In Austin, Texas, where modest-priced housing is in short supply, he launched a project called Alley Flats, where 850-sq.ft. houses are built on large lots that already have one house. Much of the green building materials used in the Alley Flats homes came from Oregon.

Palleroni believes a lot of U.S. housing has been driven by designs and prototypes that are supposed to apply nationwide, regardless of the local environment. Instead, housing needs to focus on local conditions and economies, he says. “We've been creating these self-regulating boxes, which essentially isolate us from our environment and our communities. We really need to dispel that paradigm and move totally in the other direction.”

Before WWII, an average of 4.5 people lived in 1,000-sq.-ft. houses, while today, 2.5 people share houses averaging 2,500 square feet.

Palleroni would like to see the current economic and environmental crisis be a call for people to step outside their homes and look at the environment where they live. “I'd like people to see their home as being 50 percent of the solution, with the surrounding landscape and gardens as the other half of the solution. Then we'll be tapping into the potential of the site and the landscape to solve part of the problem.”

Palleroni has wasted no time launching local projects and research endeavors since arriving in Oregon. In collaboration with PSU mechanical engineering professors David Sailor and Graig Spolek and PSU urban studies and planning professor Loren Lutzenhiser, Palleroni helped launch the Oregon BEST Green Building Research Lab, which houses high tech test equipment available to Oregon’s green building industry.

He’s started a project with Portland Public Schools to assess the state of many of the district’s 89 buildings by installing sensors to collect data on energy efficiency, air quality, and more. “The goal is to better understand existing conditions so that the district can begin to zero in on where the possibilities are for greening the aging schools and designing new ones,” Palleroni says.

He and his Oregon BEST green building colleagues are writing an NSF proposal to see if they can document whether gray water and water runoff can sustain and increase the performance of green roofs and green walls. “If this works, we’ll have an argument by which we can re-engineer how pluming will be changed,” he says.

Clearly, Palleroni is not afraid of shaking up the status quo when it comes to all aspects of green building, anywhere in the world. And even in the face of grim environmental and economic news, he’s hopeful about the future.

“I work with the world’s poorest people as my collaborators, and I see that solutions can emerge even in places there are no resources and political isolation—places where people have been traditionally alienated and taken out of the political process. Despite all these things, people are arriving at solutions to transform their lives and make them part of the sustainable future of the world. If we can do it for the very poor, we certainly can do it with all of our education and resources that we have in this country.”