“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspired by the work of inventor Philip Ross and his company MycoWorks, Maurer argues that one of the keys to addressing Cleveland’s housing crisis lies in an unlikely source: mushrooms. Specifically, in using mycelium – the vegetative part of a fungus – and Cleveland’s other “natural” resource, construction waste, in a process called “biocycling”, which essentially recycles old buildings into new ones using plant materials. — The Guardian

According to the CDP report, the cement industry is the second-largest industrial emitter of carbon after the steel industry. And when accounting for its use in human-made structures, it is responsible for more than a third of the world’s carbon emissions. But unlike the transportation sector, in which a new type of fuel can dramatically decrease the sector’s pollutants, cement’s problem is, well, cemented in its formulation [...] — The Outline