Green ArchiTEXT

Tour of Chicago's New Aqua Tower

A tour of the Aqua Tower, the new Chicago residential high-rise, designed by Jeanne Gang, FAIA, Studio Gang Architects.

Seattle Bends Rules for "Living Buildings"

A new ordinance in Seattle will pilot-test exemptions for projects attempting to use innovative onsite water and energy strategies that currently run afoul of codes.

The ordinance will allow code exemptions for up to 12 buildings seeking certification through the Living Building Challenge (LBC). The exemptions will allow the buildings to meet LBC prerequisites that require techniques, such as onsite water treatment, that conflict with current land-use and building codes in Seattle (as well as in many other areas of the U.S.). City officials will use the review process to inform future code changes that could make the regulatory landscape friendlier to onsite water and energy strategies.

via www.buildinggreen.com

Yale Building Uses 81% Less Water, 58% Less Energy

A new building at Yale is a working laboratory for the students that frequent it. Kroon Hall, home of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, uses 81 percent less water and 58 percent less energy than comparable buildings.

The building, which achieved LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, also generates about 25 percent of its electricity needs onsite from solar.

via www.environmentalleader.com

In Portland, Going Green and Growing Vertical in a Bid for Energy Savings

Urban gardening used to seem subversive. People planted tomatoes in public parks, strung their hops to rooftops to make homebrew and reclaimed empty lots as community farms, never mind the property owner.

Yet here in one of the more thoroughly tilled cities in America, subversive has come full circle: the federal government plans to plant its own bold garden directly above a downtown plaza. As part of a $133 million renovation, the General Services Administration is planning to cultivate “vegetated fins” that will grow more than 200 feet high on the western facade of the main federal building here, a vertical garden that changes with the seasons and nurtures plants that yield energy savings.

via www.nytimes.com

30% Wind Power Feasible, New U.S. Study Finds

By Ben Block and Amanda Chiu

A new U.S. Department of Energy study concludes that up to 30 percent of the eastern and Midwestern United States could technically power itself with wind energy, the most optimistic government projection produced so far.

A 2008 analysis of wind speeds, infrastructure capacity, and government regulations estimated that the United States could generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind energy by 2030.

The new analysis, released on Wednesday, concluded that wind power could supply as much as 30 percent of the area east of the Great Plains, known as the U.S. Eastern Interconnection, by 2024 if transmission infrastructure expands significantly.

via www.worldwatch.org

World's First Sustainable Rooftop Greenhouse Integrated On An Affordable Housing Development, South Bronx, NY

The Blue Sea Development Company’s new state-of-the-art housing complex planned for the South Bronx, NY will be the first ever affordable housing development to feature a fully integrated hydroponic rooftop farm, designed by BrightFarm Systems. The six-story building will feature a 10,000 sq ft rooftop greenhouse that will operate using leftover heat from the building and water harvested from the greenhouse roof. Annually, the farm will be capable of producing the equivalent fresh vegetables needs of up to 450 people, capture 750,000 liters of stormwater, and mitigate 80 tons of CO2.

via www.pitchengine.com

The New Green Economy: What Does a Sustainable Economy Look Like?

From the “New Green Economy” conference, held recently in Washington, D.C. In the session “Growing the Green Economy or Greening the Grown Economy?” Robert Costanza, Director, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont, moderated a panel including Mindy Lubber, President, CERES, Van Jones, author of “The Green Collar Economy,” Tim Jackson, Economics Commissioner, UK Sustainable Development Commission, and David Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies, Oberlin College.

What does a sustainable economy look like?

Orr: “It won’t look like what we’ve done in the past. Bill McKibben is coming out with a new book in April called “Eaarth” because he says humans have actually changed the climate to such an extent that it’s literally a different planet. The U.S. is now a debtor nation $10 trillion in debt. We are in a radically changed world. On the positive side, we now have green buildings; solar-powered buildings are proven to be doable. There’s biomimicry, which can lead to innovations in products. We have theoretical basis for a green economy. We’ve had a revolution in design capabilities. There can be growth in more honest ways now.

via dirt.asla.org

Nearly 3 years after twister, Kansas hospital to rise from rubble

IMAGE: Health Facilities Group

In just a few weeks, one of Greensburg’s most recognizable community landmarks will reopen.

But the Kiowa County Memorial Hospital won’t be in the same location and it will look nothing like the 1950s-era hospital that was destroyed in the May 4, 2007, tornado.

However, it will have much of the same staff and the same values, more deeply instilled through the tragedy of the tornado and the ups and downs of rebuilding.

Like many of Greensburg’s "landmark” buildings, the hospital has been built to LEED Platinum standards, the highest-rated certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

via newsok.com

Vermont School Builds Net-Zero Field House

If ever there was a compelling reason for a school to build sustainably, it's the one faced by Vermont's Putney School not long ago. Namely, warmer winters resulting from global climate change had reduced the cold-weather sports opportunities the private boarding school traditionally relied on, leaving it with a sudden need for gym space for the first time. Its solution? A net-zero field house that's on track to be one of only five platinum LEED-certified school buildings in the nation.

By definition, net-zero energy buildings generate as much energy as they consume over the course of a year, and that's at the heart of the Putney School's 16,800-square-foot athletics building, which opened its doors last fall. Designed by Maclay Architects, the super-insulated, super-energy-efficient building uses the sun for its heating and electricity needs. Specifically, 16 sun-tracking photovoltaic solar panels power the building, feeding excess energy during sunny months back into the grid and earning the school 6 cents per kilowatt-hour as they do. In the winter, the building draws energy out again, but in an average year, it's expected to do better than break even on its energy use. Other green features of the USD 6 million field house, include low-water fixtures and composting toilets, a white reflective roof and local materials such as site-harvested wood.

via www.springwise.com

Biomimicry Guild’s Dayna Baumeister says designing a future world without oil is possible

We’re all responsible for the world we live in and we can all contribute to re-designing it to eliminate oil dependency and create a sustainable future. This was the message delegates heard from Dayna Baumeister at the Jan. 21 World Without Oil symposium, a new addition to the Toronto Interior Design Show.

For the bulk of Earth’s history, life has existed without a dependency on oil, and it is possible and critical that we rethink and redesign and recreate our current production system to achieve that state again, said Baumeister, co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild.

She held up biomimicry — defined in its simplest terms as the “conscious emulation of nature’s genius” — as a vital tool in achieving this objective.

via www.axiomnews.ca

Preserving Green: Making History with a LEED Platinum Landmark in NOLA

Preserving Green, a project led by New Orleans' Preservation Resource Center (PRCNO), will transform an architecturally significant house in the Holy Cross historic district of New Orleans into a LEED Platinum community center that will be free and open to the public throughout the year. Preserving Green is the first project that has support of both the U.S. Green Building Council and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Along with the USGBC and the National Trust, other sponsors include Historic Green New Orleans and The Kresge Foundation. The community center located at 5200 Dauphine Street will serve as a critical "home" and meeting place for the local neighborhood association.

via www.prcno.org

IMAGE: Historic Green

Deconstruction of 5200 Dauphine, a historic shotgun/camelback, during Historic Green, March 2009. Reconstruction and reframing of the house will begin during this year's Historic Green, March 9 to 19, 2010.

Green Roofs Over Tokyo

Standing on one of the streets of Tokyo, visitors will be amazed by the soaring gleaming skyscrapers.

But if you were airborne, you will get a completely different view – many of these highrises are topped with plots of soothing greenery. Tokyo has been sprouting green roofs, alongside green walls, since the launch of its 10-year project for Green Tokyo in 2006.

via thestar.com.my

If I Were God of the Climate

Standing over a tabletop computer screen depicting a dark and stormy sky, I become the Climate God, tasked with reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and saving humanity from dangerous climate changes. At my will I wield my climate-crushing powers by choosing a “solution card” and throwing it on the screen, thereby enacting policies and making the world a brighter place.

Choosing the Wind Energy card, I place it in the stormy sky, and a ray of blue light shoots from the card into the small bright spot in the corner labeled “Energy Supply.” The ray of light passes through three barriers that diminish its strength: Electric grids still can’t handle lots of wind power; energy policy still favors more carbon-intensive electricity; and the public still isn’t sold on the idea. With the mere click of a button, I resolve these barriers and watch as global greenhouse gas emissions drop from 36,284 to 34,686 Gigatons of CO2 equivalent (Gt CO2e).

via blogs.worldwatch.org

Price fixing: Why it is important to put a price on nature

The insight that nature provides services to mankind is not a new one. In 360BC Plato remarked on the helpful role that forests play in preserving fertile soil; in their absence, he noted, the land was turned into desert, like the bones of a wasted body. The idea that the value provided by such “ecosystem services” can be represented by ecologists in a way that economists can get to grips with, though, is rather newer. A number of the thinkers who have made it a hot topic in the past decade gathered at a meeting on biodiversity and ecosystem services held by the Royal Society, in London, on January 13th and 14th. They looked at the progress and prospects of their attempts to argue for the preservation of nature by better capturing the value of the things – such as pollination, air quality and carbon storage – that it seemingly does for free.

via www.economist.com

Bruce Mau on a future without oil

Q & A: Bruce Mau

The Massive Change designer on a future with less dependence on oil, losing weight, and why corporate social responsibility is a bad idea...

Bruce Mau, who started out as a graphic designer in the 1980s, uses design principles to develop strategies for a range of major clients—from big businesses (Coca-Cola, MTV) to governments (Guatemala). The 50-year-old, who moved from Toronto to Chicago two years ago, cemented his global reputation as a big thinker in 2004 with Massive Change: The Future of Global Design, an exhibition of the latest innovations in everything from health and warfare to transportation and manufacturing (a follow-up is planned for 2011). Mau, whose theories are the subject of Warren Berger’s new book, Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World, will be speaking at a symposium associated with Toronto’s Interior Design Show this week about a world less dependant on oil.

Q: So what does Bruce Mau’s world without oil look like?

A: It’s not a world without oil, but a world with an ecology of energy sources, where oil is used when it is the absolute right tool.

via www2.macleans.ca

Tomorrow's Projects: The Future of Education

Interview with Sharron Van der Meulen, Interior Designer and Principal, ZGF Architects LLP...as interviewed by Paul Makovsky, Editorial Director, Metropolis Magazine.

Paul: How has education design evolved in the last five or ten years?

Sharron: Students are learning in a different environment today. A focus on collaboration, technology and sustainability are all key to modern education design. While independent study spaces are still important, the priority is on creating more spaces for students to interact with one another in small and large groups, as well as with professors. At Duke University, we designed a central atrium that also functions as a work/study area and social gathering space. Students can pull up a chair and plug in their computers, or meet in small conference rooms off the atrium space for impromptu discussion and study. Five years ago, spaces like this were primarily used for circulation and socialization. Today, our design efforts focus on extending learning outside of the classroom by incorporating features such as wireless internet and comfortable furniture, and create a place to sit, study and interact in groups. These areas become, in essence, a "learning living room" for the student.

via tomorrowsproject.hunterdouglascontract.com

Forget eco-towns - real green house-building is already happening

By Eifion Rees

Cambridge University's expansion plans could change the face of sustainable building in the UK. In 2012, construction begins on the greenest development of its size and scope in the UK

As far as trailblazing green building initiatives go, the development known as North West Cambridge (its official name as well as location) looks rather uninspiring at the moment, merely fields bounded by busy roads on the outskirts of an East Anglian university town. There aren't many clues to suggest that, when construction begins here in 2012, it will change the face of sustainable building in the UK.

via The Ecologist

Austin's ZeroHouse is designed to be the greenest of them all

It looks like it could take off. And the two Austin architects developing a prototype for an off-the-grid house designed to save as much energy as it consumes hope their project does just that, figuratively speaking.

Trademarked as the ZeroHouse, Scott Specht and Louise Harpman's compact modular structure shouts "futuristic," from the composting unit beneath it to the solar panels on the roof. It looks as if it could be housing for space pioneers, but Specht and Harpman have their sights set on planet Earth for its first occupant.

The ZeroHouse design is on the cutting edge of the green building movement: so-called net-zero houses that generate as much energy as they use over the course of a year and handle all or most of their own water and wastewater needs. They are built with renewable materials and advanced energy- and water-conservation features.

via www.statesman.com

A New Vision for Dallas

If all goes as planned, a self-sustaining, mixed-use project conceived by a team of Portugese architects will be constructed on a city block in Texas.

In December, Portugal-based Atelier Data and MOOV were named the winners of Re:Vision Dallas, an international competition put on by the Central Dallas Community Development Corporation (CDCDC), an affordable housing organization, and Urban Re:Vision, a national nonprofit group dedicated to responsible city planning.

Launched in January 2009, the competition brief asked entrants to design a complex with residential, retail, and commercial space that would be built on a 2.5-acre site across the street from Dallas City Hall. The scheme needed to offer a new “urban framework” and address issues such as energy, waste, transportation, sustainable construction, and the health of local economies.

via archrecord.construction.com

Bob Berkebile: On Responsible Design, LIving Buildings and Restorative Communities

The latest issue of Cascadia's terrific Trim Tab magazine features an interview with Bob Berkebile of BNIM. See "Bob Berkebile: A true pioneer in the sustainability movement".

Hoberman’s "Transformable Design" Gaining Momentum

By Joann Gonchar, AIA

“Transformable design” is the term that Chuck Hoberman uses to describe the focus of his multidisciplinary practice, Hoberman Associates. The 19-year-old New York City-based firm fuses sculpture, engineering, and product design to create objects with the ability to change size and shape. It is perhaps best known for the Hoberman Sphere, which relies on a series of scissor-like joints to collapse from an open polyhedron to a tightly packed sphere. It has been fabricated in many sizes, all the way from a palm-sized toy to a giant sculpture found at the Liberty Science Museum in Jersey City. But Hoberman’s oeuvre also includes retractable domes, medical instruments, and a stage for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

The firm is also applying its expertise with kinetic objects to buildings in order to create automated and responsive enclosures that can provide shading or ventilation. Facades are ripe for such adaptive components, according to Hoberman. “The envelope plays the single largest role in building performance,” he says. “Not only in relationship to energy consumption, but also with regard to occupant comfort.”

via archrecord.construction.com

HOK, Biomimicry Guild expand use of architectural design based on nature worldwide

By Michelle Strutzenberger

Through the alliance between HOK, one of the world’s largest architectural firms, and the Montana-based Biomimicry Guild, the use of architectural design based on nature is expanding to nearly every continent.

Just this week HOK is looking into solidifying a project which will make use of the biomimicry approach with a client in Brazil. Other biomimetic-based projects are already underway in India, Saudi Arabia, China and the U.S.

HOK and the Biomimicry Guild have been working together for more than a year, and according to HOK director of sustainable design Mary Ann Lazarus, this global expansion is one of the most exciting aspects of the alliance to date.

“I’m always looking for how can we strategically position biomimcry across HOK at different places . . . so I like that we’re starting to see this relationship in every continent,” she says.

“We’re actually going global with bringing biomimicry to our clients.”

via www.axiomnews.ca

Bruce Mau's Massive Change: A Design Manifesto

From Bilt Magazine:

Too often we ignore homegrown heroes for those who were born further afield, reared on fairy dust and magical fruit and who must have something better.

BILT doesn’t believe in fairies and so is giving a whoop-whoop where it’s due, to Bruce Mau, a northern Ontario boy who’s is talking revitalization of his hometown of Sudbury, while dabbling in a little redesign of Mecca and changing the face of the planet one visionary project at a time.

From Mau's 1998 “Incomplete Manifesto to Growth”:

1. Allow events to change you.
2. Forget about good.
3. Process is more important than outcome.

...and 40 more tips...

via avnerd.tv

Classrooms of the Future: Opening symposium on green school design

Classrooms of the Future: Opening symposium on green school design - Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Join SPUR for opening night of Classrooms of the Future, an exhibit produced by Architecture for Humanity, on view at the SPUR Urban Center through Feb. 26. The exhibit features winners of the 2009 Open Architecture Challenge, an international design competition for sustainable classrooms. Moderated by Kate Stohr, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, a panel discussion will explore the potential of good design to enhance the learning process in schools around the world.

via www.spur.org

Sustainable Urbanism’s Douglas Farr: Urban Design with Nature

Terrific video of Doug Farr’s recent lecture, “Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature”, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Farr is the author of Sustainable Urbanism and founding principal and president of Farr Associates, an architecture and urban planning firm in Chicago.

The VPL Authority: Welcome to “smart-sprawl”

By Rustam Mehta and Thomas Moran with Keller Easterling

Deep in the desert Southwest, a public-private corporation is building a mega-eco-city that will be the hub of a new high-speed rail network. Welcome to “smart-sprawl.”

via www.canopycanopycanopy.com

IMAGE: VPL Authority
Building a high-speed rail network and eco-friendly mega-station in the desert Southwest

Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design

It could be argued that architecture is one of the most propitious of professions, as to practice it is to have the opportunity to experiment with building design – making a detail work, trying out a new material, challenging a construction assembly – in essence encouraging a spirit of innovation discouraged by most other professions. Doctors would frown upon a colleague experimenting with new surgical methods in situ, or bus drivers of their co-workers improvising new routes during their shift. Yet quite to the contrary, architects on a daily basis have to provide workable solutions to problems that have no rulebook or roadmap, and engage themselves in the immediacy of their physical resultant. The product of this experimentation is a kind of architectural detritus - piles of scribbled tracing paper, study models, mock-ups – all are themselves a kind of art which the architect creates, and so have architect/editors Sarah Bonnemaison and Ronit Eisenbach done there best here to present a few examples of this phenomena they call ‘architectural installations’.

via regardingplace.com

Toward an Architecture of Place

By Fred Kent, President, Project for Public Spaces

Good design involves much more than making bold and innovative aesthetic impressions; design should help people find solutions to the major urban issues confronting the world today – from environmental destruction to economic decline to social alienation. The current economic slump provides opportunities to emerge armed with bold design innovations that can be used to strengthen local communities and economies and establish a new kind of architecture rooted in a sense of place and the mission to help improve people’s lives.

The most successful cities are being defined by their public destinations, which presents a major challenge and opportunity for design today. Examples of these public destinations are Bryant Park and Central Park in New York City and Lower Downtown in Denver, and are found in cities like Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Melbourne.

The best public destinations are defined by the local community. Nearly every city can point to at least one success story in which determined residents, guided by the principles of place making or creating great places, have made a difference in their hometowns.

via www.pps.org

Builders Zero In on New Goal of Energy-Neutral Housing

By Jim Carlton

The green building movement is targeting a goal once thought virtually unattainable: zero net energy use.

While the trend is nascent, dozens of "net zero" and "near net zero" developments – projects designed to use only about as much power from the public grid as they can save or produce on their own – have sprung up across the U.S. over the past five years.

via online.wsj.com

Deep Green Design: Bernheim Arboretum Visitors Center by McDonough + Partners

Deep Green Design is our new short series devoted to showcasing some of the greenest built projects completed and/or recognized during 2009. From lifecycle designs to living buildings and the creation of sustainable city blocks, this series offers a snapshot of selected projects that are pushing the limits of green design around the world.

First up is the Bernheim Arboretum Visitors Center, winner of the Lifecycle Building Challenge 3: Building-Professional Built; Outstanding Achievement Award for Best Greenhouse Gas Reduction. Located in Clermont, Kentucky (25 miles south of downtown Louisville) this LEED Platinum center was completed in 2007. The design by William McDonough + Partners emphasizes wood for the building’s structure and skin as a natural gateway to the 14,000-acre Arboretum and Research Forest. As the LBC3 summary states:

“The visitors' center design roots the building firmly in its woodland context by blurring distinctions between the indoors and outdoors, and by incorporating the surrounding forest into the building's lifecycle analysis. Construction emphasized safe, closed material loops of biological nutrients, which break down to safely return to forest soil; and technical nutrients, which can be remanufactured into new objects.”

In short, lifecycle building design involves the use of materials, components, systems, and practices to create buildings that facilitate and anticipate future changes and eventual recovery/reuse of those same systems, etc. As one of the top entries recognized for the 2009 LBC competition, the visitor center’s design highlights flexibility and disassembly. The bolted connections, reusable brackets and removable infill panels of its structural system allow for reconfiguration or building additions in any direction. At the end of its useful life, most elements of the center can be unbolted, loaded on a truck and delivered to another site for reassembly or repurposing with ease.

Additional design elements for the 6,408-square-foot center include passive and smart HVAC systems, integrated to make the building 51% more efficient than ASHRAE standards. Over 90% of the interior is daylit; stack-driven natural ventilation within its tall pavilions reduces energy use; the concrete floor stabilizes the interior temperature against daily extremes of heat and cold; deciduous trees and trellis vines provide summer shade but let winter sunlight warm the thermal mass.  Also, vegetated bioswales reduce runoff into downslope lakes while a planted rain garden creates habitat and allows infiltration. Reclaimed sources provide 60% of water used: the effluent of a peat moss blackwater treatment system for irrigation and rainwater for flushing toilets.

Other key green features include a vegetated roof, photovoltaics to produce energy on site, and geothermal heating and cooling systems. See more photos and details on the project at William McDonough + Partners.

ALL IMAGES: Lifecycle Building Challenge

Green building? Pshaw. Race is on in Capitol Hill to build WA's 1st "living building"

By Josh Mahar
Capitol Hill Seattle blog

How progressive is Capitol Hill development? A Capitol Hill project on Madison was hoped to be the first construction in the state to achieve the lofty standards required to called a Living Building. That's not going to happen. Instead, a different Capitol Hill project is now on track to be Washington's First Living Building. It's a hippie design geek wonderland up here.

via www.seattlepostglobe.org

IBM's Focus on Cities: Five Innovations in the Next 5 Years

Recently IBM has looked into their crystal ball to determine the 5 most important innovations that in the next 5 years will have the potential to radically change our lives. IBM’s fourth annual “Next 5 in 5″  is focused this year on Cities. The companies future thinkers have complied a list of innovations that have the potential to change how people live, work and play in cities around the globe over the next five to ten years:

Here are the 5.

• Cities will have healthier immune systems
• City buildings will sense and respond like living organisms
• Cars and city buses will run on empty
• Smarter systems will quench cities’ thirst for water and save energy
• Cities will respond to a crisis — even before receiving an emergency phone call

via www.mygreeneducation.com

Creating the Greenest Office Building in the U.S.

It takes a certain ruthlessness to create the greenest office building in the nation.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy, is midway through construction of a $64 million project that lays claim to that title. The architects and engineers have spent hundreds of hours calculating the energy use of every aspect of the building, from the elevator to the exit signs. They have tweaked the design again and again with the aim of getting the 218,000-square-foot building to perform at net zero—meaning it will consume so little energy that it won't need to draw a single electron from the grid.

via online.wsj.com

Architecture in Times of Need: Make It Right - Rebuilding the New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward

The first book to document the progress of the Make It Right Foundation‚ efforts to rebuild in New Orleans‚ Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina is now available.  With contributions by founder Brad Pitt and designs for the green, affordable cutting-edge Make It Right homes.

Make It Right was launched by actor Brad Pitt, architecture firms Graft and McDonough + Partners and Cherokee Gives Back in 2007, two years after the storm, when the neighborhood was still deserted and devastated. The founders invited a group of high-profile and influential New Orleans, national and international architects to develop affordable, green, storm resistant housing for the community, incorporating the latest in innovative and sustainable design.

via www.makeitrightnola.org

Urbanisms: Working With Doubt, new book by Steven Holl

Contemporary urban development is increasingly characterized by a reliance on diagrams, maps, and graphs to convey the rational, statistical point of view of the professional urban planner. In his new book, Urbanisms, architect Steven Holl suggests that just as modern medicine has recognized the power of the irrational psyche, urban planners need to realize that the experiential power of cities cannot be completely rationalized and must be studied subjectively. With a selection of urban and architectural projects from his thirty-year practice, Holl stretches urban planning into the domain of uncertainty, from prose into poetry. Urbanisms examines how perception and the senses are intertwined with the material, space, and light of urban form.

via www.worldarchitecturenews.com

2050 and Beyond: Venice Biennale Finalists Announced

Twenty-four innovative submissions have been accepted for the Australian exhibition at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale.
 
More than 100 entries were received for the national 'Ideas for Australia's Cities 2050+' competition, run by the Australian Institute of Architects' 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale creative directors, John Gollings and Ivan Rijavec.

via www.architectureanddesign.com.au

Balance of Systems: Personalized Energy, New Solar and More

With global leaders in discussions about climate change, PopTech releases three talks this week from energy researchers approaching the problem from other angles. MIT chemist Dan Nocera shows how we can move from the grid to personalized energy, spatial designer Laura Kurgan demonstrates there are no neutral maps, and scientist Nicole Kuepper creates photovoltaic cells out of nail polish, inkjet printers, and pizza ovens.

via poptech.org

Greening CityCenter: World's Largest LEED Development

Walkable urbanism, collaborative design, optimized water and energy performance, and, of course, LEED Gold - it's big and it's Vegas, baby. Grand opening today, 12/16/09.

There is plenty renewable energy to fight global warming

The shift from our current fossil fuel based economies to sustainable renewable energy economies is usually presented as a great challenge. That is also the message coming from the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen. Oil companies tell us that it can be done but that we need decades to get there. The numbers tell a bit of a different story. Total world energy consumption is about 15 terawatts (2005). All that energy can be generated by today’s solar panel technology on a sunny piece of land of about 550 by 550 kilometers (340 square miles). That is for instance about 3% of the surface of the United States and China, 4% of the surface of Australia, 3.5% of Brazil and 9% of India. And we just need to capture about 20% of the solar energy that hits such an area. Of course the beauty of solar energy is that it can be generated locally. So we are not going to see such a centralized production. But the numbers clearly convey that the challenge is not as huge as it is often presented.

via solutionsweneednow.com

Green Architecture: What makes a Structure a "Living Building"?

A Pacific Northwest organization has the defined an environmentally sound structure as one that generates its own energy, captures and treats all of its water, operates efficiently, and is aesthetically pleasing.

Over the past couple of decades, architects and builders looking to green their projects turned to the addition of various piecemeal elements to save water here or cut down on electricity there. Those who added more than a few green touches could apply for and get certified by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) under its Leadership in Energy and Efficient Design (LEED) program. While these efforts have been laudable—essentially launching the green building industry as we know it today—they represent merely the infancy of what green building might someday become.

via www.scientificamerican.com