News

Since 1997, The American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment (COTE) has been giving its Top Ten awards to the world’s most sustainable building projects. That’s more than 200 projects with information and insight on how teams met their environmental goals. And Varun Kohli, head of sustainability and analytics at... Read more

In a sign that the backlash against toxic stain and dirt repellents is growing, Home Depot has announced it will be phasing out carpets and rugs coated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The new ban, effective December 31, 2019, is part of a larger chemical strategy that began in 2017 and also includes limitations on triclosan,... Read more

“All structural engineers shall understand, reduce, and ultimately eliminate embodied carbon in their projects by 2050.” Simply worded but dauntingly difficult to achieve, that is the Structural Engineers’ 2050 (SE 2050) Challenge.

Structural elements like concrete and steel are a massive source of so-called embodied carbon—the... Read more

Sakhi Arora contributed to this report with interviews from her Master’s thesis: “Understanding and Integrating Biophilia in Work Environments for Achieving a More Human-Centric Model: From Theory to Practice.”

Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

The Ancestral Pueblo’s Mesa... Read more

It’s the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine.

–R.E.M.

It’s not just coming: it’s here. Climate change has crept up on us. Farms, entire ecosystems—even whole nations—are collapsing. Our food and fresh water supplies are gradually shrinking. More and more property and land are being destroyed. People are going to... Read more

The durability of self-growing bricks. Augmented reality for electrical and plumbing installation. The cost-effectiveness of low-voltage lighting. These are some of the innovations currently being tested at Co|Lab, a new building project from HITT Contracting, designed by William McDonough+Partners.

“Our goal for Co|Lab is to be our... Read more

Concrete is one of our most versatile building materials—and one of our worst carbon polluters. Manufacturing the main ingredient, ordinary Portland cement (OPC), accounts for approximately 5­%–8% of anthropogenic CO2. With carbon in our atmosphere reaching critical levels, we need to find cement alternatives, and fast. There are few... Read more

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

Linoleum is regarded as one of the most sustainable options for resilient flooring, and for good reasons. It’s made from natural materials—typically a combination of linseed oil, pine rosin, wood dust, cork, limestone, and colorants attached to a jute backing. And linoleum is a versatile flooring that has been manufactured in some form for more... Read more

Life-cycle assessments and embodied carbon are gradually becoming a bigger focus in the architecture world. But even for project teams that carefully track carbon impacts, rarely does the accounting include the site’s landscape design. A new tool called Pathfinder helps teams fill that gap and create projects that sequester more carbon in the... Read more

The United Nations recently called for people everywhere to make the transition to zero-carbon buildings. Now, a new report from the World Resources Institute (WRI) finds that making this transition is feasible from a regulatory standpoint in several countries that have historically put little emphasis on energy efficiency or renewable energy.... 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

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

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

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

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

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