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Citing the climate crisis, the Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to ban most gas appliances in new construction, a policy that’s expected to result in new homes and businesses coming equipped with electric stoves, clothes dryers, water heaters and furnaces.
The nation’s second-largest city was late to the game, said Councilmember Nithya Raman, the policy’s lead author — but no longer.
— The Los Angeles Times
Raman’s motion echoes that of many other cities in the state as well as a recent proposal to phase out non-electric car sales by the year 2035. It also includes a provision that all newly-constructed buildings be emissions-free, a requirement it first adopted for all municipal properties in... View full entry
Google has announced the opening of its new Bay View campus in Mountain View, California, with the neighboring Charleston East project in its final phase of construction. Together, they form the latest additions to Google's headquarters. Photo: Iwan Baan, courtesy of Google The web giant... View full entry
Here’s a sobering fact: The building sector is dragging down global efforts to reduce carbon emissions. [...]
The good news is that, according to the report, up to 61% of building emissions could be cut by 2050, and we have all the solutions at our disposal today, from passive cooling technologies and denser multifamily homes to retrofits. All we need to do is implement them—or better yet, introduce regulations and policies to will them into implementation.
— Fast Company
The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that emissions from buildings doubled between 1990 and 2019 despite the widespread adaptation of environmentally-friendly construction methods and materials like recycled concrete. Increases in population and the total... View full entry
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
Two buckets. That’s all that was left at the end of the day when Nexii, a concrete alternative start-up, tore down one of its first demonstration projects. A 700-square-foot showroom and model home displaying Nexii’s building technology was constructed in 2019 near Vancouver to prove the buildability of the new material, which has far lower emissions than conventional concrete. — Fast Company
Combining their sturdy panel-based construction system with their concrete alternative, Nexiite, which produces about 35% lower carbon emissions than conventional concrete, Nexii was able to deconstruct the showroom in six days, saving almost every part of the building for future reconstruction... View full entry
The Union Square Branch opening of the long-awaited Boston Green Line Extension (GLX) marks a major milestone for the Arup-supported project. The first of two segments as part of a 4.7-mile extension of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s (MBTA) regional transit system, the... View full entry
Electrical Vehicle wireless charging technology company Electreon has announced that it is set to establish its first public wireless EV charging road system in the U.S. The Michigan Department of Transportation along with the State Department of Future Transportation and... View full entry
By 2025, commuters near the Paris suburb of Creteil should have a new way to get to work: the French capital’s first-ever public transit gondola. The new aerial tramway, which cleared its pre-construction feasibility studies this week, will be called Cable A, and will link several outlying but populous neighborhoods in Paris’ southeastern suburbs to the terminus of Metro line 8. — Bloomberg CityLab
Cable A will travel a distance of 2.8 miles with five stations along its route. It was first proposed in 2008 as a cheaper and more practical alternative to conventional transit lines, which would require extensive engineering at the site. The gondola only needs space for the pillars that... 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
A creative answer to one of the most pervasive issues in American public housing is being sought by one of the largest civic authorities in the country as the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has issued a challenge to design an affordable new all-electric heat pump for the 21st century... 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
An architect who creates just three typical buildings over their career will be responsible for carbon emissions equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 162 typical Americans, the COP26 summit in Glasgow has been told — The Architects' Journal
During a talk on “Adaptive Transformation” at the Danish Pavilion at COP26, Enlai Hooi, who works as the Head of Innovation at Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects in Copenhagen, said that professionals in the building industry carry a far greater responsibility for the world’s health than other... View full entry
With COP26 entering its final day in Glasgow, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill have used the event to unveil their vision to transform the built environment into a network for absorbing carbon. Titled 'Urban Sequoia,' the project is centered on the concept of “forests” of buildings which sequester... View full entry
Far from Glasgow and COP26, Ithaca, New York, just made an unprecedented move to tackle climate change and the city’s carbon footprint. In a unanimous vote on Wednesday night, Ithaca’s city council approved the full decarbonization of its buildings. — CNBC
This is the first US city to begin work on a 100% decarbonization plan. It secured $100 million in private financing from private equity partner Alturus to support the effort, a move that may be more effective in tackling emissions than federal and state efforts. Ithaca’s energy efficiency... View full entry
