News

Berkeley, California, started the trend. In July 2019, it outlawed natural gas hookups in new construction. The law will take effect in 2020 starting with single-family homes, and it will eventually apply to all buildings. The primary goal? To completely electrify new buildings as the grid gets cleaner and thereby reduce greenhouse gas (GHG)... Read more

Almost 95% of the construction materials used to create any given building come from only 400 to 600 raw materials and 75 to 100 composite building products, according to Grace Farms Foundation. Yet supply chains are so vast and convoluted that they can mask many instances of human exploitation: forced labor, human trafficking, and child labor... Read more

Green buildings are for the privileged.

That’s a really tough reality for most of us to face, but it’s our current state, according to Jacqueline Patterson, senior director of the environmental and climate justice program at the NAACP. She’s on a quest change that.

It all started when Patterson was researching sustainable... Read more

Editor’s note: This project will be featured at the first national conference on resilience in the built environment taking place November 7 and 8 in Cleveland. Join BuildingGreen, the International Living Future Institute, and the Resilient Design Institute there for Building Resilience 2019. Building Resilience 2019 will focus exclusively on... Read more

It’s a bold step forward, and The American Institute of Architects (AIA) isn’t shy about saying so. It’s nicknamed the change “the Big Move Toward Environmental Stewardship.”

The move began gradually, years ago, with a “sustainability scan” that took stock of how AIA was foregrounding sustainable design across its... Read more

The modular construction approach—in which a building’s large-scale modularized components are prefabricated in an offsite manufacturing facility for rapid assembly onsite—is garnering an increasing amount of attention in the building industry. This is due in large part to the interrelated issues of the rising costs of traditional construction... Read more

What if you could write a check to magically cancel out your carbon footprint?*

Actually, you can: that’s the whole idea behind carbon offsets, which building owners can purchase in order to negate their greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon offsets can be used to make up for either embodied carbon (the emissions associated with construction... Read more

Agricultural fiber (agfiber) boards made from wheat straw seem like a great idea. They replace wood—a valuable commodity—with a waste product from agricultural production. In the late 1990s, these wheat straw-based panels found a brief market niche for use as a particleboard replacement in cabinetry, but manufacturing challenges, costs, and... Read more

Awareness and concern about embodied carbon—the upfront greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with producing building materials and constructing a project—has skyrocketed recently. Building professionals and owners alike want to assess and reduce the embodied carbon footprint of their projects in order to cut their near-term emissions (see... Read more

U.S. residents are concerned about the future state of the environment, but they’re not doing much about it. They also don’t see green building as part of the solution.

These were some of the conclusions of a recent study commissioned by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and conducted by ClearPath Strategies. Part of the new “... Read more

From Brooklyn to Buenos Aires and from Vancouver to Vermont, architects around the globe have committed to joining an international climate strike on the morning of September 20, 2019.

At the center of the move to #StandWithGreta (16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg) is the organization Architects Advocate, headed by Thomas Jacobs, AIA... Read more

Dear Editor,

I am writing to express some concerns regarding your recent article “The Two Passive Houses: A Comparison.” For disclosure, I am a current member of the Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS) Technical Committee and a PHIUS instructor for onsite QA/QC professionals. Despite being more directly familiar with and professionally... Read more

It was a long time coming. After years of turmoil over whether Passive House should be more flexible, in 2011 the international Passive House Institute (PHI) issued a judgment about Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS): the American institute could no longer certify Passive House projects to the international standard or administer... Read more

In a historic move, the United Kingdom in June 2019 passed a legally binding target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. According to research by the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC), the new goal can be reached with a relatively low price tag.

“It is achievable with known technologies, alongside improvements in people’s lives,... Read more

Glass is everywhere in buildings—especially in large commercial buildings. It’s essential for views and daylighting but often a liability when it comes to thermal comfort and energy savings. Here are the metrics you need to know in order to understand their performance.

U-factor (also called U-value) is the rate at... Read more

Thermal bridging, where thermal energy finds pathways from the outdoors through the building envelope, is the Achilles’ heel of rainscreen systems. The reason: exterior cladding has to be mounted to the building, and this typically requires clips or screws that have to pass through the insulation. The clips not only create a thermal bridge to... Read more

It is hard to turn on the news without seeing warnings about rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and how time is running out for action. Design teams trying to lower their building materials’ carbon footprint usually look at reducing the amount of known high emitters, such as steel and concrete. But heavy interior products... Read more

Editor’s note: The first national conference on resilience in the built environment takes place November 7 and 8 in Cleveland. Join BuildingGreen, the International Living Future Institute, and the Resilient Design Institute there for Building Resilience 2019. Building Resilience 2019 will focus exclusively on how to create more resilient... Read more

C40 Cities, an international network of 94 municipalities committed to realizing the goals of the Paris Agreement, has announced the 15 winners of its Reinventing Cities competition. The competition rewards urban building projects designed to net-zero-carbon standards that also demonstrate resilience, noteworthy architecture, and... Read more