BuildingGreen Report

At this point, there is no escaping the effects of global warming on our climate and our society. But what will those changes look like? Arup tries to answer that question in a December 2019 report titled Four Plausible Futures: 2050 Scenarios. The purpose of the report is to help firms prepare design solutions based on global trends.

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Vermont’s Green Mountain Power is a unique utility. It actually encourages the use of renewable energy and, as of December 2019, its customers will be the first in the U.S. able to sell the power they generate directly to local businesses through the utility’s Vermont Green pilot program.

This program... Read more

The Greenbuild Expo hall is a great place to look for exciting product developments and industry trends. Though there seemed to be fewer new products on the expo floor at Greenbuild 2019 in Atlanta, there are always innovations and developments worth exploring. This year, we’ll look at electrical vehicle (EV) chargers, PV systems, and natural... Read more

Inequity is woven into the fabric of our built environment.

Cities are endemically segregated by income and race. Many building projects seek to enhance the profits of developers, often at the expense of the surrounding community. The building professions (as detailed in part one of this series) lack diversity, leading to the... Read more

Sustainability isn’t enough anymore, and that realization is starting to catch on in the green building world. That’s why participants in the GRESB survey—a way for real estate and infrastructure companies to track and disclose their environmental performance for investors—are beginning to focus on climate risk management in addition to... Read more

In 2019, The American Institute of Architects announced a shift that is nothing less than transformational for the 160-year-old organization, and unprecedented among professional associations. The Institute, which has historically dedicated itself to defending the turf of licensed architects and recognizing the professional achievements of its... Read more

Inequity is woven into the fabric of our built environment.

Cities are endemically segregated by income and race. Many building projects seek to enhance the profits of developers, often at the expense of the surrounding community. The building professions lack diversity, leading to the unconscious but systemic exclusion of... Read more

This article highlights an initiative of the Sustainable MEP Leaders peer network, one of several peer networks supported by BuildingGreen. While BuildingGreen convenes the networks, initiatives are entirely directed by the participants.

As momentum builds for electrification—with some cities going so far as to ban natural gas—MEP... Read more

Which structural component would you expect to have the most embodied carbon? The foundation? The framing? The answer is actually the floors, according to an analysis of more than 600 buildings conducted by the engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti. (Disclosure: BuildingGreen’s president, Nadav Malin, is on Thornton Tomasetti’s Sustainability... Read more

You hope your building is going to last for at least 50 or 60 years—so why are you designing it for the past?

More and more building professionals are beginning to ask this question. The climate is already changing, but the weather files used to model features like passive design, choice of mechanical equipment, and sizing of stormwater... Read more

The City of Boston is projecting 40 inches of sea-level rise by 2070, putting vast new swaths of the city within the 100-year flood plain. To prepare, the Boston Planning and Development Agency has recommended adopting a zoning overlay and released a set of design guidelines for projects residing within that zone.

If the zoning overlay... Read more

In November, California’s Marin County adopted the world’s first building code that limits carbon emissions from concrete. (Concrete’s Portland cement content accounts for more than 6% of anthropogenic carbon emissions.) The code focuses on concrete performance, creating standards for composition that “maintains adequate strength and durability... Read more

Refrigerants are a unique problem in the green building world. Even the most energy-efficient chillers and heat pumps use them, and many of these refrigerants have global warming potential (GWP) more than a thousand times that of CO2. The “next generation” hydrofluoroolefin (HFO) refrigerants are a good solution, but if they are dropped into... Read more

People from marginalized communities are shockingly underrepresented in the U.S. building industry. It’s past time to change that.

In this report, we look at the depth and breadth of the building sector’s equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) problem; the negative implications for the industry; and some things individuals and firms... Read more

Black people can’t be architects.

That bigoted statement came from the mouth of a child in reference to William Bates, FAIA, 2019 president of The American Institute of Architects (AIA). Although most adults wouldn’t say such a thing, our minds might go there due to messages we’ve assimilated based on cultural norms—messages like “... Read more

The Center for Active Design (CfAD), operator of Fitwel Certification System, recently launched Fitwel 2.1 which advances a vision where every building and community is optimized for health. Fitwel 2.1 features several new and enhanced products and systems including:

Have you been moving toward electrifying HVAC systems but struggling to find the equipment you need?

Many engineers are in this position—and the Sustainable MEP Leaders are trying to change that. The Sustainable MEP Leaders peer network brings together the most committed sustainability directors from leading MEP design firms throughout... Read more

In theory, district-scale energy systems are the future. But there’s a big problem: it is very difficult to model them—which in turn makes it difficult to design them. That’s now being rectified with the Urban Renewable Building and Neighborhood optimization (URBANopt), an EnergyPlus- and OpenStudio-based simulation platform being developed by... Read more

A proposed rule from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would limit which scientific studies can be used to make regulatory decisions, according to an analysis by Lisa Friedman of The New York Times. The Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science Proposed Rule calls for full transparency of underlying datasets, including the... Read more