Yesterday, on Earth Day, Seattle's latest green building celebrated its grand opening: The Bullitt Center, a super-efficient office space at 1501 East Madison Street, was designed to become the world’s largest functioning, commercial Living Building, using an estimated 83 percent less energy than a typical Seattle office building and achieving Net Zero Energy and Net Zero Water. — bustler.net

The top ten examples of sustainable architecture and green design solutions have been selected by the American Institute of Architects and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) today. The COTE Top Ten Green Projects program, now in its 17th year, celebrates projects that are the result of a thoroughly integrated approach to architecture, natural systems, and technology. — bustler.net

KREOD, a portable wooden structure revealed in London last September, has recently been recognized with a Surface Design Award for Temporary Structure. — bustler.net

The winners of the tur(i)ntogreen international design competition were recently announced in Turin, Italy. Organized by the Research and Documentation Center in Technology, Architecture and City in Developing Countries at the Politecnico di Torino, the competition had invited university students [...] to develop new multidisciplinary solutions for a sustainable and inclusive city reflecting on new forms of urban management and regeneration through agro - housing and urban - farming models. — bustler.net

A few days ago, we published one of the finalist entries of the international design ideas competition, Transiting Cities - Low Carbon Futures. The competition was open [...] to develop innovative visions for Latrobe City, in eastern Victoria, Australia to make the transition from a singular economy dominated by the power industry (coal mining and electricity generation) into a diversified economy and prosperous low carbon regional city. — bustler.net

A brand new green building project is set to become one of the world’s most sustainable commercial office builds not for the new and innovative technology it has implemented but for the unique approach to green building the developers have taken. — DesignBuild Source

Last fall, the international research project and design ideas competition, "Transiting Cities - Low Carbon Futures," had invited designers and academic institutions from various fields to envision new, innovative and alternative cities of the near future by defining opportunities for transition into low carbon, prosperous, and vibrant communities.

One of the finalist entries [...] is the concept "Networked Ecologies: Rethinking Remediation" by Arizona-based team Studio One. — bustler.net

Researchers at the Stanford School of Engineering have succeeded in developing the world’s first peel-and-stick thin-film solar cells.

The idea will allow the cells to be applied to almost any surface, with successful tests having been conducted on paper, plastic and window glass. This opens up significant opportunities for alternative applications for solar technology, previously limited by traditional solar cells, which must be mounted on stiff, often heavy, fixed panels. — DesignBuild Source

The building, known as 1 Angel Square, has been designed to deliver a 50 per cent reduction in energy consumption compared to The Co-operative’s current Manchester complex and an 80 per cent reduction in carbon. This will lead to operating costs being lowered by up to 30 per cent. — DesignBuild Source

Holistic sustainability is a notion too often forgotten in a global industry heavily focused delivering on green ideals. While the notion of green building is an umbrella under which all things related to environmentally responsible construction and design efforts are categorized, the green sector actually falls under the broad-reaching holistic sustainability model. — DesignBuild Source Canada

Winners of the 2013 international SEED Award for Excellence in Public Interest Design were announced yesterday. SEED Awards recognize excellence in social, economic, and environmental design, and represent the collaborations needed to create truly sustainable projects and change in the world. Six projects were selected out of sixty-five submitted from 21 countries worldwide. — bustler.net

Conditions of scarcity demand new ways of thinking, an expansion of the role of the architect and designer outwards in order to function more broadly and imaginatively as spatial agents. In contrast to the regimes of austerity ... the territory of processes and networks opened up by scarcity is far more conducive to creative intervention. It is here that scarcity — which can seem at first a bleak prospect — can become the inspiration and context for constructive and transformative action. — Places Journal

Vancouver hosted a fascinating hybrid of public spatial art and waste material upcycling in its downtown area this summer: Pop Rocks, a temporary installation that covered a full city block. The project is fabricated entirely from post-consumer and post-industrial waste from the metropolitan Vancouver region. — bustler.net