Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
The U.S. building stock is responsible for around 40 percent of energyconsumption, with housing nearly a quarter of that use. In 2014, Harvard GSD established the Harvard Center for Green Buildings & Cities to tackle the high energy and environmental costs of the industry. Yesterday, in... View full entry
With the increase in festival events and attendance, one company strives to fix the waste problem these highly attended festivals make. Based in Christchurch, Dorset, Above All C6(n) is a sustainable technology company that is using recycled plastic water bottles to create sustainable alternatives... View full entry
“With its wide array of sustainable measures, ranging from the choice of materials, to the many passive designs to economize energy and ensure great daylight, to the way the school is able to share spaces with the surrounding community, the new campus of FIS offers lessons in sustainable architecture for pupils and local builders. - Claude Godefroy, Design Director and partner at Henning Larson Hong Kong
Hong Kong's seven million residents and bustling urban city is filled with looming concrete buildings and dense streets. However, the new campus of the French International School shines amongst the congested cityscape. Image © Philippe RuaultFinding green space is difficult in such an urban... View full entry
On Wednesday during NYC Climate Week, Lego announced they’d be re-releasing the LEGO Creator Expert Vestas Wind Turbine, developed in collaboration with wind company Vestas...This set stands 3 feet tall and contains 826 pieces, including one piece—a spruce tree—that is the first of Lego’s sustainable plant-based plastic pieces. The set also features adjustable and motorized turbine blades and a movable nacelle with aircraft warning lights. — Popular Mechanics
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
Follow the intricate supply chains of architecture and you’ll find not just product manufacturers but also environmental polluters. Keep going and you’ll find as well the elusive networks of political influence that are underwritten by the billion-dollar construction industry. — Places Journal
In "What You Don't See," Brent Sturlaugson examines the supply chains of architecture to make the case that designers must expand their frameworks of action and responsibility for thinking about sustainability. Unraveling the networks of materials, energy, power, and money that must be... View full entry
The world’s biggest offshore windfarm has officially opened in the Irish Sea, amid warnings that Brexit could increase costs for future projects.
Walney Extension, off the Cumbrian coast, spans an area the size of 20,000 football pitches and has a capacity of 659 megawatts, enough to power the equivalent of 590,000 homes.
The project is a sign of how dramatically wind technology has progressed in the past five years since the previous biggest, the London Array, was finished.
— The Guardian
The Walney Extension is made up of 87 turbines and has a total capacity of 659 MW, enough to power almost 600,000 homes in the UK. This makes it now the largest operational offshore wind farm, however with wind farm supersizing along the British coastline it may not hold the record for long. ... View full entry
The recently completed Bolueta high rise by VArquitectos is now the tallest reaching Passive House building in the world. Located in Bilbao, Spain, the project includes an adjacent 9-story building with 63 apartments dedicated for social housing. Bolueta by VArquitectos, located in Bilbao... View full entry
Bouygues Construction subsidiary Bouygues Bâtiment Ile-de-France has secured a contract worth €146m from Emerige to renovate 17 Boulevard Morland in the 4th arrondissement of Paris.
‘Morland Mixité Capitale’ is one of the first projects launched under the ‘Reinventing Paris’ programme.
Designed by David Chipperfield Architects and CALQ Architecture, the 44,000m² floor space complex will consist of a 161-room hotel, a youth hostel, shops, a nursery, a cultural amenity and 199 homes.
— World Construction Network
Once the crane arm locates and hooks onto a concrete block, a motor starts, powered by the excess electricity on the grid, and lifts the block off the ground. [Designed to withstand wind, the crane arm] can smoothly lift the block, and then place it on top of another stack of blocks—higher up off the ground. The system is “fully charged” when the crane has created a tower of concrete blocks around it. — Quartz
A tower of the concrete blocks — weighing 35 metric tons each — can store a maximum of 20 megawatt-hours (MWh), which Energy Vault says is enough to power 2,000 Swiss homes for an entire day. According to Quartz, the Swiss startup is planning to build their first commercial plants starting... View full entry
Depending on who you ask, brutalist buildings like the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., are little more than misshapen mounds of concrete. But architecture professor Mark Pasnik says the structures were built with a much deeper meaning in mind.
"People think of them as communistic or as alienating," says Pasnik, who came to brutalism's defense in a recent Boston Globe op-ed.
— wbur.org
Architecture professor Mark Pasnik makes the argument for preservation of brutalist buildings in an opinion piece for the Boston Globe. Pasnik's piece was in response to Trumps recent outcry to tear down the FBI headquarters. He explains the style's history of material honesty, along with reasons... View full entry
Cut peat blocks were already being used for building houses thousands of years ago. Now, scientists at the University of Tartu have developed a material which could make it possible to print energy-efficient houses out of milled peat and oil shale ash using a 3D printer. — Research in Estonia
"As peat and oil shale ash are not very expensive, house builders would be especially happy about the price of the material. According to Liiv, scientists calculated that the cost for the construction of a house shell printed from this material with a floor surface of 100–150 square meters could... View full entry
Representing more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and using up 40% of the planet's total resources, the housing sector is going to have to play a key role in effective climate policy. By building green, we can lessen the impact our buildings have on contributing to climate change... View full entry
Changing the mindset behind short-term wooden constructions is MIT. A group of researchers at the university are leading an initiative to investigate new mass timber designs- wood-based buildings designed to be more efficient and cheaper than, yet just as durable as, concrete and steel buildings. The team proposes building mass timber longhouses - large wooden engineered houses built from massive pieces of timber. — interestingengineering.com
Mass Timber Design, MIT's architecture workshop exploring sustainable building design at the intersection of architecture and technology, has developed a Longhouse prototype. Mass timber, a wood-based building design and construction technology, has continued to be explored for its... View full entry
Their cell generated a current stronger than any previously recorded from such a device, and worked as efficiently in dim light as in bright light.
This innovation could be a step toward wider adoption of solar power in places like British Columbia and parts of northern Europe where overcast skies are common. With further development, these solar cells—called “biogenic” because they are made of living organisms—could become as efficient as the synthetic cells used in conventional solar panels.
— University of British Columbia
While this isn't the first effort to build biogenic, bacteria-powered solar cells, scientists at the University of British Columbia claim to have discovered a novel, highly cost-effective, and much more sustainable way to use the photosynthesis capabilities of certain bacteria to convert light... View full entry
