It’s an evocative name, bringing to mind as it does Kermit and his famous anthem. What could be greener, after all, than a frog? Not much, as it turns out. MGB spoke with Mark Miller of the Flexible Response to Ongoing Growth project to find out more about their cutting-edge building practices.
What's the story behind the name Project FROG?
Project FROG -- Flexible Response to Ongoing Growth-- is the result of a multi-year research project which looked at the success and failure of the use of more than 320,000 temporary trailers as permanent educational environments across the US. We recognized that there were significant negative impacts on student and teacher health, productivity and identity associated with the vast majority of trailer classrooms. We found that the trailers were failing miserably, and set out to build a better solution. FROGs core product principles are based upon combining the key attributes of environments that are conducive to healthy learning - such as abundant natural light, improved sight-lines, thermal comfort and optimal acoustics - into a stylish, responsive, environmentally sustainable solution that schools can actually afford.
Define "cradle to cradle resource efficiency."
The term "Cradle to Cradle" as it pertains to the built environment relates to a strict approach to materials usage popularized through the thought provoking work of Michael Braungart and William McDonough, FAIA, through which materials are selected for their ability to have no harmful impacts on the natural environment through continuous usage cycles.
Project FROG not only strives to achieve this efficiency but we use it as a source of creativity in our product designs and technology. Ultimately we believe that there will be a strong commercial basis for this approach and thus we develop hardware and software products with these principles at their core.
Project FROG advertises not just better, cleaner and greener building, but also lowers cost. How do you manage this, when a lot of the conventional wisdom still suggests that green is more expensive?
We achieve this by fundamentally rethinking the process of creating and providing a building solution. We use a product design approach to create efficiencies in the fabrication and installation process. Our smart buildings cost less than half to operate; thus, the long-term benefits and cost savings associated with sustainable buildings are exponential. We have invested considerably to analyze the market, user needs and environmental conditions and then engineer larger quantities of high performance products to bring the value of economy-of-scale to our customers. FROG components are pre-engineered, tested to precision and fabricated in a controlled environment so that they can be shipped and quickly constructed on site. Our process enables us to vastly improve construction time, resource consumption and quality, which equates to less expensive project overheads and thus more resources to the solutions that will remain. Project FROG creates a better product at a better price.
What is FROG Zero, "the classroom of the future? Does it have potential applicability to other kinds of commercial construction?
FROG Zero is designed to be a model for schools in the future, yet is available today. It's our newest, greenest, most technologically advanced FROG building, featuring zero-emissions and the capability to achieve zero-net energy, which means that it can generate as much - if not more - energy than it consumes (as measured in a year). FROG Zero has been optimized for schools; however, our technology enables us to configure buildings to suit a number of commercial applications including government, retail and healthcare. FROG Zero offers: 0 net energy use, 0 site waste, 0 grid connections required, 0 nonrenewable materials, 0 thermal discomfort.
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