Do you ever wonder what happens here at the Armory when no one’s looking and the season hasn’t started?

Sometimes we have parties, fundraisers and scavenger hunts and sometimes we do really wild things like invite our friends at  Cascadia Green Building Council to get jiggy with lectures on thermal mass energy storage technologies and super cool radiant conditioning systems.

Case in point: Wednesday’s Portland Transformational lecture featuring Patrick Bellew of the UK/USA firm atelier ten—an international leader in high-performance design and integrated, sustainable design wizardry. The say it loud and say it proud: “We’re not just interested in the pipes and the wires, we’re interested in the whole building: how the systems are integrated, how people interact with it and how it performs over time. Issues of sustainability are an intrinsic part of the process: our design solutions are environmentally friendly and economically viable.”

This is the real meat of sustainable design.

If you’re one of the few (hundred), the proud, and the mighty lucky enough to attend this (sold-out) event at 5 pm on Sept. 24 here at the Gerding Theater, you’ll get an innovative earful as Bellew, who cuts a rather dashing, Albert Finney-esque figure, waxes on Integration is an Art. A founding director of atelier ten, Bellew, a Chartered Building Services Engineer, has been highly successful in integrating innovative technologies with noteworthy architecture (garnering him high acknowledged by the Royal Institute of British Architects, who have made him an Honorary Fellow, one of only three in his field).

If we’re lucky he’ll give us a glimpse into some of his firm’s stellar work—like the Baltic Flour Mills transmogrification into the Centre of Contemporary Arts for the North in Gateshead; Wohnen 2000, the landmark, ultra low-energy housing development in Hannover, Germany; or the stealthy energy work they did with Transsolar on the renovation of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Crown Hall, home to the Architecture School at IIT–which significantly improved comfort and reduced energy consumption by fifty percent (while leaving the Miesian austere modernist architectural detail intact).

Cascadia scored with this rhapsody in Bellew.