News

“Think in terms of being evolutionary, not revolutionary,” says Mike Steffen, AIA, director of innovation at Walsh Construction. He’s learned that when it comes to building high-performance projects, the best strategy is to focus on fundamental principles rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

This is one reason why the Passive House... Read more

President Trump has imposed 30% tariffs on solar cells and panels manufactured in other countries, following the recommendation of the United States International Trade Commission (USITC).

When the president signed the action imposing the trade barriers he said, “…our workers are going to have lots of really great jobs with products... Read more

President Trump has until later this month to respond to recommendations from the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) to impose tariffs on solar equipment manufactured in other countries.

Companies in China manufacture 60% of the world’s solar cells, according to the International Energy Agency.

The case before... Read more

Julie Paquette has been Director of Energy Management at Yale University for about 6 years. That means the buck stops at Paquette’s desk for the energy consumption of over 400 buildings on campus. Yale has a pretty sophisticated approach to energy, including the Yale Facilities Energy Explorer, an energy dashboard system that shows... Read more

Every year we walk the Greenbuild Expo floor, looking at products and talking with manufacturers to find out what is new in the green building products world. This year’s show added vendors from the ArchitectureBoston Expo (ABX), but we found some gems on both floors, including electrochromic glazing, pelletized wool insulation, and cold-... Read more

How much more efficient can HVAC, lighting, and other building systems get?

Not much more while still remaining cost effective, according to a recent report from the Alliance to Save Energy (ASE). In the face of these diminishing returns, claims the report, the best way to coax our buildings to save more energy is through systems... Read more

Portland cement, the major binding agent in concrete, is one of the single largest emitters of greenhouse gases. But thanks to lobbying by industry groups, you won’t find concrete in California’s new carbon legislation, the Buy Clean California Act.

The law requires contractors to get environmental product declarations (EPDs) for... Read more

How can we prepare the next generation of building professionals to create architecture that is environmentally responsible as well as beautiful and humane?—or “whole” and “living,” to use terms coined by architect and theorist Christopher Alexander.

Alexander—best known for his work producing and testing a “pattern language,” a... Read more

The net-zero-energy building market has come a long way since the first commercial projects to target net zero were constructed nearly two decades ago. They include the Oberlin College Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies in 2000 and the Audubon Center at Debs Park in Los Angeles, which earned a LEED Platinum rating in 2003.... Read more

You can learn a lot by simply talking to people. That’s the idea behind a new take on the value of speaking directly with occupants to understand the impact of design. In the paper “Oh behave! Survey stories and lessons learned from building occupants in high-performance buildings,” Julia Day, assistant professor at Washington State University... Read more

When President Trump backpedaled the United States out of the Paris Accord last year, the New Buildings Institute (NBI) was in the midst of designing new provisions for energy codes that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.

At the time, NBI was developing energy code strategies for 12 cities from the Zero Cities Project... Read more

Typical pins on moisture meters are ½ inch long, meaning you can only determine moisture content by weight near the surface of building assemblies and materials (including wood, gypsum wallboard, and concrete). But I often find myself needing to assess moisture content of first condensing surfaces in walls and ceilings or well below... Read more

In re-reading the feature article I wrote this time last year for The BuildingGreen Report after President Trump was elected, 20 Ways to Advance Sustainability in the Next Four Years, I was reminded of just how optimistic—indeed quixotic—I can be. Perhaps it is this serial optimism that has allowed me to keep at it some 40 years after I first... Read more

Waste is a design flaw.

That’s the thinking behind the Zero Waste Design Guidelines, recently issued by the NYC chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The guidelines recommend a set of best practices for designing buildings, streets, and neighborhoods to reduce the amount of material that ends up in landfills.... Read more

The latest version of LEED, LEED v4, became mandatory a little over a year ago. That was just after the U.S. Green Building Council’s 2016 Greenbuild conference. This year at Greenbuild, USGBC announced that it is fast-tracking development of a new iteration, LEED v4.1.

“LEED v4 has been out a long time,” says Corey Enck, director of... Read more

The building industry has set ambitious goals for sustainability and resilience, and is recognizing that a building-by-building approach is not enough. At the same time there is an increasing focus on making healthy, vibrant, and resilient communities accessible to all.

“There’s certainly an urgency. I think people really understand... Read more

Within the design and construction industry there is a growing sense of urgency to find sustainability and resilience solutions that can be applied at scale. One way to do this is to focus on neighborhoods, and over the past few years several organizations have responded by launching programs designed to support this strategy. (For an in-depth... Read more

One disaster after another, like a game of dominoes, toppled communities across North America this summer and fall.  

Harvey, Irma, Jose, Maria, the earthquake in Mexico, the wildfires in northern California. More than enough to numb the most empathetic into listless apathy.

But those in the building industry are not sitting... Read more

Affordable housing developers have a new reason to prioritize health and safety: it can save them money. The new program Healthy Housing Rewards, from lender Fannie Mae, provides loan recipients with a reduced interest rate when projects achieve certification through the health-promoting program Fitwel (see Fitwel: Science That Works). Fannie... Read more

More than half of the voters in Denver approved a ballot initiative in November requiring new buildings 25,000 square feet or larger to build green roofs or roofs that combine vegetation and solar arrays. The rules also apply when additions are built that expand a building to 25,000 square feet or more, and to existing buildings of that size... Read more