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New York City teens have launched an initiative, born out of a 2019 citywide climate walkout, to urge Mayor Adams to "speed up plans to retrofit school buildings to make them safer, healthier, and more climate-friendly." The student-led environmental coalition named, TREEage is "asking... View full entry
MVRDV is behind a newly commenced mixed-use housing tract called La Serre, to be located in the Paris region’s ZAC Léon Blum eco-district at Issy-les-Moulineaux. The firm’s project announcement details an 18-story development defined by its open facade with a landscaped vertical village... View full entry
Snøhetta’s AIRSIDE, a LEED Platinum-certified, mixed-use development in Hong Kong, has officially opened. Located at the site of the former Kai Tak Airport district, the approximately 1,912,424-square-foot project merges into the surrounding urban landscape by creating direct access... View full entry
When asked about why skywells have caught more attention of modern Chinese people, Wang [Zhengfeng] says that the courtyard is also designed to serve as a gathering space for families or communities, and comes with ritual meanings. "Perhaps changes in the way of life could also trigger vernacular nostalgia among people living in concrete and glass forests.”
"It won't be easy to be sustainable by learning from the past without reflecting on our current behaviours."
— BBC
Lightwells are of course, a common passive cooling method in modern Western designs, but in China, their popularity is partly driven by a budding “vernacular nostalgia” for traditional features and concepts. The government’s push towards greener building standards and a 2060 net zero carbon... View full entry
A team of students from the University of British Columbia (UBC) has built a near-zero embodied carbon building on campus using hempcrete, wood, and steel as primary materials. — Construction Canada
Called the Third Space Commons, the project was led by Third Quadrant Design, UBC’s first green building design team. The group is comprised of 60 students from the Faculty of Applied Science and the Sauder School of Business. The building is a wooden structure spanning 2,400 square feet, made... View full entry
For much of its recent history in mitigating climate change, Denver has concentrated on buildings’ operational energy — the energy needed to run basics like heating, air conditioning, lighting and hot water. That will shift in May, when Denver’s newly adopted green code takes effect, said Christy Collins, green communities specialist with the local government. — Smart Cities Dive
Denver’s new green code will make it so a building’s embodied carbon is considered. It will provide minimum requirements for the siting, design, construction, and plans for the operation of projects. Commercial projects in Denver are now required by law to choose around 10% of the green code... View full entry
Industry groups are applauding lawmakers after the passage of the Biden Administration’s recently proposed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, pointing to its more than $5 billion in provisions they say are “critical” to enacting climate change-related policies and modernizing... View full entry
While most of these buildings are constructed out of more traditional materials like cement, brick, drywall, and plywood, forward-thinking architects and members of the construction industry have increasingly been turning to natural materials as an alternative for the future. Due to its ability to sequester carbon, hemp has landed itself at the forefront of the conversation about natural building. — Topic A
Hemp’s high tensile strength, pliability, and strength-to-weight ratio are increasingly valuable in the manufacture and design of products like fiberboard and even a new concrete alternative. The recent COP26 conference in Glasgow featured the speculative 'Urban Sequoia' design from SOM... View full entry
There’s ever-growing panoply of efficiency measures — better insulation, improved heating and air-conditioning, less-polluting appliances — that could help the building sector rapidly decarbonize. By 2030, almost all new buildings could consume zero net energy — net meaning there’s some give and take from the grid to equal zero use. That’s a big deal, especially with a corollary switch to electrified forms of transportation. — Bloomberg
The list of new green technologies is long and includes innovations like low-carbon concrete, cross-laminated timber, and living wall systems that have all developed into scalable products over the past ten years. So far, big-name firms like Gensler, Lake|Flato, and KieranTimberlake have... View full entry
WRNS Studio has announced a milestone sustainability achievement for their Janet Durgin Guild & Commons, designed for the Sonoma Academy in Santa Rosa, California. The scheme has become the first project to achieve both Petal and Zero Carbon Certification by the International Living Future... View full entry
Cement is everywhere, but few notice the impact it has on the environment. A standard building material used everywhere, it is often confused with concrete. Cement is a key component in making concrete. By burning limestone at extremely high temperatures, this process turns the stone into a... View full entry
Starbucks has announced that the company plans to create 10,000 eco-friendly stores globally by 2025. The news follows other sustainability focused initiatives taken on by the coffee giant such as eliminating single-use plastic straws by 2020 and its partnership with McDonald's to create a... View full entry
The trend for “green” eco-fantasy buildings is sweeping the world of architecture, with designers now integrating gardens, terraces and all manner of vertical planting in their specifications for office blocks, apartment buildings and even skyscrapers. “Starchitects” [...] who a few years ago would have scoffed at the idea that their sleek and shiny building might incorporate something as embarrassingly domestic and “unmodern” as a garden, are now getting in on the act. — telegraph.co.uk
We have all seen many plant covered architectural renderings of firms getting in on the green building movement. While green buildings and sustainability are not new concepts, they are now a widespread trend being commercialized on a whole different scale. From the vast number of these green... View full entry
Permissive building codes, industry inertia, and market demands — like clients clamoring for floor-to-ceiling views — have widened the discrepancy between the kind of buildings cities say they want and what they actually allow. So while the industry inches towards better environmental performance, buildings in Boston and other cities still fall short of the sustainability goals that everyone claims to embrace. — The Boston Globe
Courtney Humphries of Boston Globe argues that the current trend for extensive use of glass in buildings contradicts today's strive for sustainability and "green building." When New York started tracking energy use by skyscrapers, the gleaming 7 World Trade Center — one of that city’s more... View full entry
Designed by LEVER Architecture, Framework Building aims at promoting sustainable building practices and economic opportunity for a sustainable urban-rural ecology.To receive the permit the 12-story building has completed a series of fire, acoustic and structural tests which have proven that mass... View full entry