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Anyone can talk a big game. It seems that in the name of public relations, lots of business leaders are talking up green initiatives, corporate responsibility and the importance of a welcoming in-office environment. It all sounds good, but does it ever really play out in day-to-day operations?
I’ve always thought that corporate culture goes far beyond philosophy. It’s about application and tangible execution when possible. That was top of mind as we made plans for our new campus. We tried to make every detail speak to who we are as a company. The conference table, a focal point of our largest gathering place, was no exception.
Throughout my career, I’ve sat at many a conference table. It seems most are rectangular, a shape requiring someone to sit at the head, “in charge.” A round table would support a “team” atmosphere, but is inefficient for the number of chairs accommodated to its size. This led us to choose a square design—it’s efficient and puts us all on equal footing.
With that decided, I commissioned my friend Tom Church and his wife Susan to design and construct the piece. I requested our table be made from Red Bald Cypress we salvaged from swampland on a project in Florida. The Churches came from Tennessee to collect the wood.
Tom was kind enough to call a few weeks later to let me know he’d come up with a layout for us to discuss. Over the years, I have learned that one should never tell the artist how to paint the painting. I knew Tom had a unique eye for design, a gift of craftsmanship and patience of task. I gave him free reign on the finished product and signed off without seeing a single drawing.
The result was beyond my expectations. The real beauty of the table lies in the way it was put together. The Red Bald Cypress is exceptional, and the craftsmanship equally superb. It was obvious that Tom and Susan devoted a great deal of time to the detail of the design, from the seemingly flawless surface to the curvature of the edges to the solidity of the support. All is in arts and crafts style, hand-assembled with pegs.
While the table is attractive to the eye, the message lies in its components. I found huge significance in Tom’s decision to incorporate two cracked boards. Rather than discard the flawed wood, he reinforced it with burl walnut so that those two boards could be used in the table along with the others. Every time I see the table I am reminded that none of us is perfect and we require a little mending from time to time. With the support of others, we form a solid team.
What are you doing to bolster your team? If you’re talking the talk, are you walking the walk? I encourage you to live your corporate philosophy. We continue to see the benefits. Mementos around the office—like our table—are reminders not only of who we are, but what we can be.
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Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
Last week, I attended the Cahaba River Society’s (CRS) annual meeting. I’ve been a board member for about a year now. The Society protects our beautiful river and facilitates public conversations about environmental well-being.
While the CRS still focuses much of its energy on the River and its basin, it is also evolving into something much greater and more important from my perspective, and that is the business of “water education.” Without quality water, there’s not much life. The health and abundance of our water supply has immeasurable impact on our environment, both now and for future generations. It seems vital that we teach the public how to protect this resource.
Unfortunately, environmental campaigns are often politically charged and met with equal parts support, resistance and apathy. As the organization grows and matures, I’ve seen the CRS learn better ways of being collaborative in efforts to deal with those who might disagree. They are listening, being transparent and stating operations clearly. I have always found that if two sides are opposed, as long as there is a sliver of agreement, some kind of compromise can be reached. This has rung true for the CRS as they deal with local businesses and the public.
This meeting focused on educating about the environmental impact of storm water. Both as a conscious citizen and as a builder, I found these lessons valuable and thought I’d share takeaways here:
• How we build our communities and deal with storm water today will determine the kind of rivers we have forever.
• If proper designs are not put in place, the increased runoff from development will degrade water quality, increase flooding, collapse riverbanks, impoverish the river’s diverse life, and make our drinking water more expensive and scarce.
• A natural forest absorbs rain like a sponge, replenishing groundwater and keeping our rivers clean and flowing, even in droughts. Maybe we begin to think about fewer hard surfaces and single points of discharge.
• Designers might consider concepts of low impact development and green infrastructure – rain gardens, permeable paving, green roofs, cisterns – practices that use rain as a resource, infiltrating and reusing it.
• Low-impact development tries to keep as much water as possible on site so that it can be infiltrated to replenish groundwater or harvested and reused in a manner that reduces the use of treated municipal water.
• It’s important to get involved with municipalities and storm water partners to nurture a working relationship for a unified voice to the policy changes needed to protect us all. Would you consider using this knowledge to better the environment? More importantly, would you please share what you’ve learned with others? Simplistic as it may sound, together we can make a difference.
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Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
We’ve all heard the saying, “everything old is new again.” At our place, we’ve challenged ourselves to find inventive ways to repurpose materials that might have otherwise left behind. As a result, our ceilings, parts of our deck and even our conference table are crafted from wood that would have otherwise been left at our Florida projects.
Never have I seen a truer personal example than in Sam Mockbee, a pioneer in pragmatic design whose biography I recently received. He made turning old things into something unique and usable his life’s passionate work.
Sam or “Sambo” as he was known to his friends, understood the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” concept long before it became a slogan for sustainability and doing things right. He created the Rural Studio Program at the Auburn University School of Architecture, where students repurpose ordinary and recycled materials into houses and useful buildings for the residents of Hale County, Alabama. His creations take care of basic needs and in the process provide rays of hope.
Sam would tell his students that the places they create have got to be warm, dry and noble. He spent the last 10 years of his life building those spaces for many and that legacy continues. Using salvaged materials like lumber, bricks, discarded tires and hay bales, the Rural Studio produces inexpensive structures in a style that Mockbee described as “contemporary modernism grounded in southern culture.” As noted in this Metropolitan Magazine article, the process gives students hands-on experience in designing and building something real, extending their education beyond paper architecture.
Our Stewart Perry headquarters have always reminded me of Sam Mockbee’s work and about half way through the building process I found out why. I learned that Tommy Goodman, who designed our place and is now a professor or architecture at Mississippi State University, was Sambo’s business partner. The influence of the Rural Studio is woven all through our campus. We removed coal tailings from the lake and used them to repave parking area for a neighborhood church. Our hardwood floors are refurbished from a tobacco plant in Virginia. I feel our folks are always thinking of ways they can lower our environmental impact.
Are there opportunities to do similar things around your office, home or construction site?
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Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
I recently attended a U.S. Green Building Council presentation where architect and professor emeritus Norbert Lechner, a noted Fulbright senior specialist and energy expert, presented his thoughts on the field of efficient building energy design and sustainability, a topic often considered the foundation of green philosophy.
I learned that reduced energy goals are in many cases easily obtainable with the simplest approaches to building orientation and design. At present, buildings consume approximately 50% of all total energy used, and this percentage is even higher according to some. At this rate of consumption, it will be impossible for the world to keep up with energy demand unless buildings are designed to be more energy efficient.
Professor Lechner named the following building design elements conducive to achieving maximum energy efficiency (listed in order of greatest energy savings).
1. Building orientation (can reduce energy consumption by up to 50%)
2. 
Building color (and add another 20% of energy savings)
3. Window placement
4. Window size
5. Shading
6. Passive solar heating
7. Day lighting
8. Active solar
9. Photovoltaics (PV) – the future
What was amazing to me is that the lowest hanging fruit—the stuff that’s practically lying on the ground waiting to be picked up—is building orientation. Situating your building at the optimal place and angle can reduce conventional building energy resources by up to 50%. That means that by simply considering building orientation as a design factor we can reduce our total energy demand from all resources by up to 25%.
There’s even a movement to create zero energy buildings . But first, we all need to be thinking about how to get everyone on the same page and how our combined efforts can help make it possible for the next generation to save energy responsibly.
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Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
As I’ve mentioned in previous entries, green building is a growing focus for Stewart Perry’s business. While our appreciation for the land works its way into every project we take on, our own corporate campus and our recent work constructing the Ruffner Mountain Nature Center have had green interests at the very heart of the project.
That’s why when the KPS Group, our architect partner on the Ruffner project, approached us about joining sponsorship forces with them at this week’s Green Building Focus Conference and Expo, I jumped to participate. Hosting an event of this caliber was a huge honor for Birmingham and made a statement about the city’s commitment to sustainable building. It was a privilege to provide cocktails to make everyone feel more welcome at the opening night party.
We took the stage with KPS to discuss our work at Ruffner and they even let me have a few minutes to share the highlights of our LEED certified corporate campus. Many thanks to all who attended. We look forward to welcoming you back next year.
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Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
A small but growing portion of our business is what I would call “green building.” After the construction of our new LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) silver certified office building last year, we have been exploring several other projects in the Birmingham area as a way to diversify our business, encourage environmental sustainability and ultimately make ourselves more marketable. Many new government and public buildings are already built to LEED specifications and, with the current political atmosphere, I see public works on the rise in the coming years. The number of private LEED projects is growing as well, and the US Green Building Council is the governing body behind accreditation of both types of projects.
The Ruffner Mountain Nature Coalition was founded in 1977 as a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a nature center a few miles east of downtown Birmingham. Since then, their Nature Center has grown to more than 1,000 acres of untouched forest. Preserve rangers lead free hikes and tours for groups and individuals who want to learn.
For the past three decades they have operated out of a small block building. Seeing the potential to reach more people, they decided to upgrade their facilities. After several years of fundraising, Ruffner partnered with the KPS group to design a state-of-the-art LEED certified visitor’s center and education pavilion. The design used sustainable architecture, rainwater collection systems and lots of recycled and reused building materials.
Stewart Perry came into play as a LEED certified building contractor. We broke ground in August of 2008 and finished in July of 2009. The new visitor center has meeting and conference rooms, a woodland animal exhibit hall, small shop and an information center, but most of all, it shows a respect for the land it’s built on.
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Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
For the past three years I have watched many municipalities around the Southeast consistently run low with their water resources during the summer months. New dams can be built, but populations will continue to grow, which should make conserving this resource an extremely important goal for everyone.
When we built our new barn adjoining our office building in Birmingham, we decided to collect rain run-off from the roof as a way to conserve water. We built two stone pedestals on either end of the roof and then put a 2500-gallon water container on top of each. We wrapped old barn wood around the tanks for insulation and to make it look nice, and covered them with pieces of reused barn tin. We built an open gutter system that drains all the rain off of the roof into the water silos. With a normal annual rainfall, each one of these containers will fill up about 15 times a year. The rainwater is used to water the garden and support the plants and grass without having to dip into city water.
Rainwater is cheaper for us, better for the plants, and helps the environment. There is no reason we all shouldn’t look to this resource. Also, keeping the grass and plants healthy and watered means they can more effectively filter the regular runoff from our parking lot, which was constructed without curbs so as to have no single point of storm water discharge into out water garden.
Water is a valuable commodity, and the more we can do to conserve water, the better off we will all be. What can you do to cut down on water use?
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Merrill Stewart is Founder and President of the Stewart Perry Company, a commercial building contractor based in Birmingham, Ala. Contact him via email.
Mixed-used development has gained much ground in many of our suburban communities. I think that people are starting to see the light about how living closer to town and closer to the places we shop and work makes a lot of sense. While mixed-use is not the lion’s share of new developments, it is something to keep a look out for when exploring new avenues to expand your business.
In 2007, we became a part of just such a project in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Charlotte Mall, built in the 1960s, was the first mall in the city and a destination for all of central North Carolina. Sadly, many years of service took their toll on the building and eventually it fell into disrepair. This Charlotte institution, primly located adjacent to the central business district, sat dormant for many years.
As a team member with other contractors working in unison we helped create “Charlotte Metropolitan” in the same space as the original Charlotte Mall, between Myers Park a residential community and the John Belk Freeway adjacent to the CBD of Charlotte. The result was a mixed-use project with residential, office, and retail space. In the process of redeveloping this Charlotte landmark, walking trails were constructed along neighboring Sugar Creek, tearing up concrete parking decks and turning them into community green spaces.
Charlotte Metropolitan was a particularly fulfilling project because we were able to help revitalize a dormant piece of land and turn it back into a thriving business, commercial, and living center. We were also able to demonstrate our passion for smarter greener development. By having people live where they work and work where they shop, you end up having fewer cars on the road, burning less fuel, and putting less pollution into the environment. We like to think that the people are happier too. Without a daily commute they have more time to do the things they love.
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