BuildingGreen Report

Office work is changing. During the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the average commercial office vacancy rate across the U.S. leapt from about 12% to 15%, according to CBRE. Some big companies, including Facebook, Salesforce, and Microsoft, have announced that they will be allowing remote work indefinitely. Experts disagree about how... Read more

Just when local officials began to take an interest in shaping the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), the International Code Council (ICC) decided to strip them of their vote. Bowing to trade group pressure, the ICC has proposed recategorizing the creation of buildings codes as an ANSI standard process in reaction... Read more

[Disclaimer: BuildingGreen’s founder, Alex Wilson, was a primary author of this report, with project support from Candace Pearson.]

What do holeless elevators and termite shields have in common? They’re both recommended resilient design features for public buildings, according to a recent guide released by Washington, D.C.’s Department... Read more

Office work is changing. During the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the average commercial office vacancy rate across the U.S. leapt from about 12% to 15%, according to CBRE. Meanwhile, nearly every major city in the U.S. is struggling with a years-long affordable housing crisis that is forcing people to share close quarters or move... Read more

As people struggle to return to the office due to concerns over COVID-19, design teams and building owners are looking for solutions to keep occupants safe and healthy. You can never be too careful, so while cleaning protocols, vaccines, and herd immunity may help provide partial protection against our current pandemic, how do you sanitize... Read more

Passive survivability—the idea that buildings should be designed to ensure safe thermal conditions during extended power outages—is about to get a whole lot easier, according to Mary Ann Lazarus, FAIA. And all the credit goes to the ongoing pandemic, which proved that the best way to survive might be to avoid the building entirely.... Read more

In a legal twist following the January 6 insurrection, attorneys claim their clients were assessing the thermal performance of the U.S. Capitol Building, and not illegally invading it as prosecutors allege. Furthermore, they say the boisterous energy audit was fully lawful, having been endorsed by President Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas... Read more

In a rush to lower the carbon footprint of new construction and ward off the worst impacts of climate change, design teams are increasingly turning to reclaimed materials. Furniture, cladding, wood flooring, stone, and even structural beams can be repurposed at a fraction of the environmental and fiscal costs of new materials, and architecture... Read more

The Donald J. Trump Library Foundation has unveiled preliminary plans for the former head of state’s presidential library, which it says will be located near the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The building is designed to have maximum environmental impact, and activities for guests will range from interactive museum exhibits to... Read more

Responding to the extraordinary news that the 2021 Pritzker Prize winners Anne Lacaton and Jean-Phillippe Vassal have pledged to never demolish a building, the Copenhagen-based firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) announced on April 1 that the company will go one better by avoiding new construction altogether.

“From now on,” said company... Read more

Renderings of Amazon’s forthcoming Arlington, Virginia headquarters wowed the world with a swirling centerpiece dubbed “the Helix.” Sustainability features include access to copious daylight, indoor gardens that double as flexible workspaces, and an awe-inspiring tree-lined ramp—open to the public, like the rest of the grounds—that promotes... Read more

MEP systems contribute to both the initial construction and lifetime embodied carbon footprint of an example office building. This MEP footprint begins at construction and grows over time is due to operations, refrigerant leakage, and replacement.

The Sustainable MEP Leaders group, organized by BuildingGreen, is a group of motivated... Read more

The Cradle to Cradle (C2C) product standard just got much more stringent. So stringent, in fact, that the lowest level of the new version 4 (Bronze) “in many categories is better than v3 Silver,” said Matteo Kausch, Ph.D., director of technical development at the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute (C2CPII). Here’s a look at what’s... Read more

Building electrification is a great idea to promote decarbonization, but is the industry ready for it? The Building Electrification Technology Roadmap from the New Buildings Institute (NBI) suggests the answer is yes.

The report examines the status of 38 different technologies for residential,... Read more

Net-zero energy. Not so long ago, full-scale adoption of energy efficiency and onsite renewables was the dream of the green building community. But as climate change worsens, the focus has gradually turned to carbon rather than energy.

A shift has also occurred in what kinds of emissions we need to... Read more

Denton, Texas; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Reading, Pennsylvania—nearly 210 cities have pledged or have already achieved 100% clean electricity or net-zero emissions, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. And then there’s Des Moines, Iowa, which recently pledged to achieve 24/7 carbon-free electricity by 2035—a... Read more

With COVID-19 protocols shutting down many offices, our homes have now become our workplaces. This shift in energy consumption to the home is an opportunity to upgrade these spaces to make them as efficient as possible and to incorporate technologies that will reduce our carbon output, such as renewable energy, battery storage, “smart”... Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is partnering with seven state and local governments to create “proving grounds” designed to test advanced building technologies. Many of the technologies enhance “grid harmonization,” using strategies that are responsive to the grid’s supply in order to reduce energy costs while also keeping the grid cleaner... Read more

The largest design firm in the world made a bit of a splash in 2020 with its Gensler Cities Climate Challenge (GC3 for short). “Within a decade, we will eliminate all net emissions associated with our work,” the GC3 boldly states. The commitment explicitly includes both operating carbon (greenhouse gas emissions associated... Read more

It has been quite a wild ride! As The BuildingGreen Report (formerly Environmental Building News) celebrates its 30th year of publication, we decided to track the growth—and explosion—of the green building movement. We start in 1990 with the founding of AIA’s Committee on the Environment.

To celebrate Volume... Read more