Evanston architect Nathan Kipnis tries to make his designs green and energy efficient, sometimes even when clients do not ask for it.
“There was a time when once in a while I would try and just design something green into their project and not even tell them,” said Kipnis, who won the Green Award from Chicago Magazine this month for his green designs and efforts to bring a wind farm to Evanston. “If they don’t work, it’s not like it’s a bad thing, some harmless stuff.”
Kipnis slipped in some green designs when working on the building for the Evanston Paper Company, 2600 Gross Point Road, and the company only became aware of it after Kipnis was featured in the media for his energy-efficient designs.
“The owners of the company go, ‘Oh man, you should have done something like that,’ and I go, ‘I did, I did some really cool insulation in there and I didn’t bother telling you,’,” he said with a chuckle. “We’ve done some other ones when we’ve done some interesting daylighting and natural ventilation things that were just kind of experiments that I didn’t really make too big a deal about.”
Kipnis, who started designing energy-efficient homes in Chicago more than 10 years ago, said he would never have considered himself an environmentalist as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado Boulder. However, he now weighs an employee’s understanding of green design principles when hiring, and became interested in green designs when he read about solar homes in magazines as a child and witnessed the 1973 Oil Crisis.
“It was really an interesting situation when they cut the oil production and the U.S. really had a big problem. And I was just little kid, and I saw gas lines and I just couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I never even thought of that before.”
Unlike many other architects at the time, Kipnis committed himself to green designs soon after he started working, and that caught the attention of Kimberly Gray when she was renovating her home around 10 years ago.
“What was distinctive about Nate as an architect is that he integrated elements of green design into his work at a very early point before many people were doing it,” said Gray, a Northwestern professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “We invited him to give a seminar in civil and environmental engineering, and then he gave a lecture at the Summer Institute that I taught called ‘The Green City.'”
Kipnis has also spoken to Engineers for a Sustainable World at NU and provided engineering support for the Northwestern Tiny House Project, an initiative to build an independent home consisting of less than 130 square feet.
While no specific part of the house is inspired by Kipnis, co-project manager William Fan still remembered being inspired by a lecture Kipnis gave two years ago about his energy efficient designs.
“Some of that just struck a chord inside me,” said Fan, a McCormick senior.
For Kipnis, the group’s starting energy efficient and green initiatives at NU are ahead of the curve.
“There’s no other way to do it. The other ways to do it are not sustainable,” he said. “Either you plan for this and do it right, or you’re going to have it just bite you in the butt and you’re going to have to deal with it anyway.”
That is why Kipnis decided to commit his small firm to large green initiatives such as the wind farm project in Evanston. As part of the city’s Wind Farm Committee, Kipnis and his fellow members will consider two responses to a Request for Information submitted to the city by wind energy firms and debate political and economic issues such as how to lease the place in Lake Michigan from the state.
“The wind farm is a gigantic topic, between the cost of it and the complexity of it, but I go back to how simple it is. It’s a simple idea. It’s just tricky to do.”
