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Arup has designed and engineered the Netherlands’ tallest timber-hybrid residential building. Completed this year, HAUT is part of the country’s commitment to becoming climate-neutral by 2050, in which the use of timber as a building material has been identified as one of the most... View full entry
Seattle-based firm The Miller Hull Partnership has designed an important new laboratory building for the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) that will have a light impact on the lush natural landscape that surrounds it. Developed to offset the anticipated growth of UCSC’s research... View full entry
The AIA has announced the winners of the 2022 Upjohn Research Initiative, an annual grant which awards funding to research projects advancing sustainability in architecture. The 2022 edition sees up to $30,000 awarded to five research projects, with topics ranging from biodegradable... View full entry
When Mayor Eric Adams named a commissioner last week to oversee New York’s parks department, he spoke of how important the city’s green spaces were for recreation and contemplation, especially during the pandemic. But he also acknowledged having no particular agenda or master plan for the more than 30,000 acres of parkland under his control. — The New York Times
In response, all five of New York’s borough presidents have come together calling for Mayor Adams to plant a million new trees by 2030, reviving former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Million Trees NYC initiative. In addition, they also asked Adams to honor his campaign pledge to allocate 1 percent... View full entry
The White House has announced the establishment of a task force to enhance the sustainability credentials of federally-funded buildings. The Buy Clean Task Force will promote the use of construction materials with lower embodied carbon emissions and pollutants across their lifecycle, including at... View full entry
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), an organization responsible for investing $10 billion in clean energy projects on behalf of the Australian government, is seeking to substantially cut construction-related emissions with a new $214 million program to encourage the use of mass timber in... View full entry
The World Economic Forum has published a briefing paper setting out its recommendations for sustainable building development. Titled Accelerating the Decarbonization of Buildings: The Net-Zero Carbon Cities Building Value Framework,” the document sets to establish a series of practical steps at... View full entry
Las Vegas has become the latest city to embark on constructing a digital twin, following the unveiling of a digital model at the city’s Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. Developed by Chicago-based Cityzenith and Las Vegas-based Terbine, the model encompasses a 2.7-square-mile portion... View full entry
Energiesprong (which translates to “energy jump”), a nonprofit that the Dutch government helped launch a decade ago, is coordinating a system of mass retrofits. “We thought, okay, let’s make home retrofits into a scalable solution,” says Christian Richter, who works in the organization’s market development team in Germany. — Fast Company
The Netherlands has pursued an aggressive agenda which has meant a spate of net-zero residential conversions. Now groups are looking for ways to apply lessons from the program outside the country in the hopes of matching increased demands with advancements that have produced certain types of... View full entry
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) called for an end to the use of natural gas in new buildings in a policy blueprint released Wednesday ahead of her State of the State address. — The Hill
The governor's plan will require that there be zero on-site greenhouse gas emissions from new construction by 2027. It would also require energy benchmarking, a process that requires large buildings of similar sizes or occupancy levels to compare their energy consumption. Hochul’s blueprint... View full entry
Why don't we re-use what we've already extracted, rather than gouging the planet for ever more raw materials? This thought has spurred a growing band of architects and building firms to look at how to re-use the huge range of materials already hiding within our built environment, from concrete and wood to the metallic bounty within electronic waste — BBC
Architecturally-rich cities are both a fount of reusable materials and a way of circumventing the awful cycle of environmental and human destruction caused by mining for the raw substances needed to help mitigate the effects of the built environment on climate change. Recent projects like the... View full entry
President Biden on Wednesday set in motion a plan to make the federal government carbon neutral, ordering federal agencies to buy electric vehicles, to power facilities with wind, solar and nuclear energy, and to use sustainable building materials. — The New York Times
Biden called for the transformation of 300,000 government buildings, 600,000 cars and trucks, and the use of its annual $650 billion budget for goods and services to meet his goal for a carbon-neutral federal government by 2050. Detailed by The New York Times, his timetable for the... View full entry
The City Council is poised to ban the use of gas in new buildings, requiring most to use electricity-powered heat and hot water. Lawmakers reached a deal late Wednesday on a bill requiring new buildings shorter than seven stories to go electric on Jan. 1, 2024, and taller ones after July 1, 2027. Projects that get their construction documents approved before those dates will be exempt. — The Real Deal
Buildings of less than seven stories and at least half of its units subject to an affordable housing regulatory agreement are exempt if construction documents are approved before December 31, 2025. New buildings that are taller with the same agreement will have two more years. The measure allows... View full entry
Researchers at the University of Plymouth in the UK have published a study which found that overlaying living walls on existing buildings can improve thermal performance by 31%. The findings arose from a live experiment on a campus building, where researchers added a living wall system to an... View full entry
Sasaki has launched a free tool to help designers to assess a proposal’s carbon emissions from early in the design process. The Carbon Conscience App, which builds on a year-long internal research project within the firm, seeks to differentiate itself from rival applications which require... View full entry
