Life Imitates Art
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
- Oscar Wilde, 1889
Granola Gal
Some yield from my garden in a particularly good year.
I have spent the last 20 years of my adulthood being drawn to the subject of sustainability. What started as curiosity about gardening and where my food came from grew to lots of different lifestyle choices, including vegetarianism (and now vegan diet), supporting community supported agriculture (go Spring Wind Farm!), paying the real cost of food at co-op grocery stores, reducing my consumption and waste, and trying to operate my home as efficiently as possible.
At work as a marketing professional, I connected the most with my clients whose missions were guided by principles of sustainability. They included leaders in outdoor education (Wilderness Inquiry and Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center), organizations committed to social justice (Laura Baker Services Association and Keystone Community Services), and higher education institutions with a commitments to bright futures for the planet and society (Carleton College, St. Olaf College, St. Mary’s University of Minnesota, Minnesota State Colleges & Universities, and Northwestern Health Sciences University).
Hillcrest Village 2021 Film
Elizabeth Turner is the coolest.
When my friend and former classmate Elizabeth Turner told me about Hillcrest Village in 2021, I jumped at the chance to tell this story. It ticked all of the boxes for me: it addresses social justice by offering an array of transitional housing options, and it is taking action on climate change with its net-zero design. Elizabeth, a kick-ass sustainability architect, had consulted on the planning for the neighborhood, and it was about to start construction.
The Challenge
At that time, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) was putting on a contest called the AIA Film Challenge, which aimed to tell stories of architects partnering with communities and civic leaders to design a healthy, sustainable, just world that improves peoples’ lives. Elizabeth and I agreed that Hillcrest was a shining example of this and I got to work.
Teachable Moments
The 2021 film was very short (a requirement of the AIA Film Challenge) but gave a welcome glimpse into the in-depth planning process necessary to be able to break ground. Though the final cut was short, it was informed by hours of interviews I conducted with the project team. In the process of creating this short, I learned a ton of lessons.
Net Zero
The idea of balancing (zeroing out) the amount of greenhouse gases (sometimes generalized as “carbon”) that are emitted from operating the building. In the case of Hillcrest Village, it accomplishes this through generating renewable energy via a solar array and leveraging Passive House design principles.
Passive House
A way of designing a building (not just a house!) to make it super energy efficient. Some of the principles include an ultra thick layer of continuous insulation wrapping the property, well insulated windows and doors, and mechanical systems that heat, cool, and circulate air using much less energy than standard buildings.
Building Envelope
Just what it sounds like, the “wrapper” around a building. This is important to the design of Hillcrest because of the ultra thick layer of insulation mentioned above.
Energy Burden
The idea that people with lower quality homes (often older, leaking air between the interior and exterior, perhaps not well maintained), must pay a higher percentage of their income to heat and cool the space for it to be livable. For many low income families, already tight budgets can be strained further by the higher energy costs of operating inefficient homes.
Crisis Mindset
This was something I had experienced personally in relation to housing. When a person is experiencing homelessness and they have a temporary housing solution that has a determined end date, that person’s behaviors will not be much different than while experiencing homelessness. Although it may seem that the crisis is averted with the temporary housing, the looming end date continues the crisis thought patterns. These types of patterns include getting through the day to day in fight or flight mode, and clouds one’s ability to plan for the future without an advocate. I witnessed this when my mother experienced homelessness — she found temporary housing at a hotel, but her limited budget of social security income wouldn’t be able to pay for that housing for the full month. We were therefore still in crisis mode when she was technically housed.
The Outcome
You can see the outcome for yourself by watching the below. Overall, I was happy with the storytelling — we successfully communicated the “why” of Hillcrest Village. The community was in need of a better transitional housing option, they knew they needed to build something new, and they asked the smart “what if” question: could we make this sustainable? Through their careful study, the answer was yes, and they had a great strategy for how to make it happen.
Revisiting Hillcrest
Years Later
Though I was happy with the overall outcome of this project, there was one glaring issue: in 2021, it wasn’t built yet! Buildings take time, and while it’s fun to talk in theory about one, it’s much more impactful to actually see it. In the summer of 2023, I wrote a Minnesota States Art Board grant asking for funds to revisit the film and make a longer version. Now that the property was built, we could see it in action.
A Change In Career: Life Imitates Art
While I was waiting to hear about the funding for revisiting Hillcrest in a new documentary, I found myself shifting my career. Martha Larson, who is featured in an interview on the first Hillcrest documentary, had long been a friend of mine in my art life (you can hear her musicianship in my shorts The Eyes Have It and Improvisations). On top of being an amazing cellist, she is a brilliant sustainable energy engineer, having worked at Carleton College for over a decade on revolutionizing their campus energy system. She left Carleton to consult on this process for other higher education institutions, and I joined her team at RMF Engineering in October 2023.
I found myself taking a much deeper dive into the ideas that Hillcrest Village was using in its design. And, a few months in, I found out the grant to revisit Hillcrest Village was awarded, and this thing I’d now dedicated my professional life to would now overlap with my personal artistic work.
Nerding Out on the Engineering
Side of Sustainability at Work
At RMF, I focus my work on communications to support decarbonization engineering projects for campuses. In short, I help engineers who develop amazing ideas on how to reduce carbon for campus energy systems explain those ideas. Engineering can be highly technical and sustainability projects have more than facilities managers at the helm of decisions.
I had the pleasure of learning engineering principles in my work that I can now break down for others. Some important ideas include:
Moving Heat Around
The word “thermodynamics” sounds much too smart for me to be using in a sentence. There is a lot to know about this field, but one idea that comes in handy is the idea that systems can trade heat instead of starting from scratch, and that is more energy efficient. A key aha moment for me was realizing that in refrigeration and cooling, we don’t “add” cold to a space to make it cool (like inside your refrigerator or your house on a hot summer day). We remove the heat. That’s why you can put bread dough on top of your refrigerator for a nice rise — the compressor is extracting the heat out of there to make your food not spoil, and dispersing it on those coils on the back. Once I understood that, a whole new world opened up for me!
Heat Pumps Are Cool
An air source heat pump outside of Hillcrest Village.
Now, with new technologies, instead of literally tossing heat out, we can repurpose it to where it is needed. These things called heat pumps can work with air or water to pull the heat out of that substance for both heating and cooling. Think of it as a refrigerator that can work backwards as well to heat. These efficient pieces of equipment can make a lot of things a heat source, like outside air, a body of water, an aquifer, sanitary sewage, and more. Heat pumps make systems like geo-exchange possible, which I would love to nerd out on, but will save for a later date.
Coefficient of Performance (COP)
This is a way of measuring how efficient a piece of equipment is. It’s a ratio of the amount of energy you put into something compared to the amount of energy you get out. For example, in heating, a gas furnace has a COP of about 0.85 — for every one unit of energy you put into operating that furnace, you get 0.85 units of heat out of it to make your home more comfortable. New technologies like an air source heat pump have a COP of around 3.0, meaning that for every unit of energy you put in (electricity in this case), you get 3 units of heating and cooling.
The Electric Grid in Minnesota
Xcel Energy is working towards net zero emissions by 2050. This is not an easy task and is the subject of lots of debate, but in order to meet this timeline, Xcel needs to reduce the amount of fossil fuels it burns to create electricity for its customers over time. Xcel currently uses coal to create electricity on our grid. When I learned that, I raised my eyebrows, thinking we were beyond the days of Dick Van Dyke chimney sweeps and dirty energy. But, it’s super common to still use coal, especially as a backup fuel in times of intense cold like we experience here in Minnesota.
A cool graphic from the NY Times showing the sources of our electricity over time.
What I am Learning While Working on This Updated Documentary
With this new information from my day job, I’m able to understand more fully how special Hillcrest Village is. I will be able to explain the mechanical systems that make it possible for it to be net zero. I can go more in depth than I was able to back in 2021.
Solar and Its Relationship to the Grid
While I always knew that solar panels were good, I can now understand why it is a great idea to have panels on your property to provide the renewables necessary to power your home (and why it’s still necessary to partner with the utility on that for uninterrupted service).
Passive House Design Models
I’ve also gotten to dive deeper into the principles of Passive House design, and how an energy model informs the design. Designers use cool software to develop a 3D model of the building that shows all kinds of important details that effect the heating and cooling of the space. It can show the impact of double pane vs. triple pane windows. It can show the impact of positioning the building slightly differently on the site to catch (or avoid) the sun. It can even give you an estimate of your utility bill given all of the mechanical systems you decide to install.
Don’t Cross the Streams
With life imitating art in this grant funded project, I have to be extra intentional about not “crossing the streams” between my work life and art life. Of course, one will inform the other, but I can’t spend my time at my day job on the exact same things I am doing in my night job as an artist. That would essentially be double paying myself for the same work and would be unethical. However, the “aha” moments and ideas I learn at each can definitely be exchanged.
As I work towards the final cut that I will be sharing with the world in just a few months, I am growing more and more excited to share this work with both my professional and artistic communities.
Wendy Placko is a fiscal year 2024 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
