By Nick Chambers •
September 29, 2009
The demise of retail giant Filene’s Basement may have a positive effect on proponents of vertical urban farming and algae biofuels alike. Since 2007, the developers of a Filene’s site in downtown Boston have been unable to find funding to move the project forward. But now Höweler + Yoon Architecture and their partner Squared have put forth a proposal to erect a temporary vertical, modular, algae bioreactor high-rise in its place.
By Moiz Kapadia •
August 4, 2009
Energy Secretary Steven Chu was recently on the Daily Show, with a carbon reduction strategy that is readily applicable: cool off our roofs.
Your home or office building has to endure the solar radiation it receives from the sun on a daily basis. Much of this radiation gets transferred through conduction into the building, placing a further burden on your air conditioning system. Painting the roofs of buildings white and laying softer colors of roofs on homes will reflect that heat energy back into space.
By Lisa Wojnovich •
June 5, 2009
One of the biggest problems with solar cells currently on the market is that they are extremely easy to break. Companies intent on manufacturing any sort of solar powered products have to find solutions, and few have yet been perfect. Hoping to change this trend, Dupont recently announced the launch of two new lines of encapsulants specifically designed to contend with the trials inherent in manufacturing photovoltaic products.
By Levi Novey •
May 22, 2009
Technological innovations can solve some of the world’s biggest problems right? That’s what a firm of Chilean architects would like us to believe. They’ve come up with a creative idea for how land-locked Bolivia could regain access to the ocean. It was not too long ago, in 1883 to be exact, that Bolivia lost the little coastline it had in a war with Chile. Since it’s only be gone for a short time, now’s the perfect time to get it back!
Whenever I see my friend James D’Addio, the architectural photographer, I ask him about which new green buildings he’s been shooting. Not surprisingly, in a city with dedicated green building blogs and the NYC Department of Design & Construction’s award-winning programs, NYC may be the greenest city in the United States. Here two projects in NYC that exemplify where green building is going.
It seems like if a building is going up, its just as likely as not to be green. McGraw-Hill research tells us that 53% of building professionals expect to be dedicated to green on over 60% of their projects in the next five years. It seems like there is ample opportunity for innovation in the building industries despite a downturn in overall building. I guess NYC is as good a place as any to lead the charge.
Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower, which sits atop a 1928 landmark building in Manhattan is engineered to use 25% less energy than required by code and boasts the world’s largest “air conditioner.” The two-story, stepped waterfall is also a huge radiant cooling system that along with other measures saves 1.7 million gallons of water every year. Other interesting facts about the building include:
90% of the structural steel used came from recycled materials
More than 80% of the orginal structure was recycled for future use
26% less energy was used during construction
Light sensors and controls throughout the building
It has a 14,000 gallon water reclamation system in the basement
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In the case of St. Thomas 7-Hot Pepper Sauce, it was definitely the chicken. Without the chicken, there wouldn’t be the fertilizer to grow the hot peppers to make the hot sauce that the sent kids from the St. Thomas projects in New Orleans Lower Garden District off to college.
And without the chickens, Derek Hoeferlin and his architectural students from Washington University would not have had reason to take interest in this little community garden which has begun to harbor interest for it’s uniquely designed “urban chicken coop”, the story of its recovery post-Katrina and the sustainability recipe it holds for other communities across America.
By Timothy B. Hurst •
April 14, 2009
Though green roofs are reemerging in the most advanced building designs around the world, for centuries, people constructed buildings out of materials immediately available to them in their surrounding environment. It is only a relatively recent luxury, for example, that people have easy access to roofing materials like asphalt shingles made hundreds, perhaps, thousands of miles away.
On the island of Læsø, Denmark there still stand a handful of buildings that are excellent examples of what communities would do with what was immediately available to them — if only they had any of it left.
In the Middle Ages the island of Læsø became famous for its salt industry. Hundreds of salt kilns were built, throughout the island, requiring constant fuel for the important final stage of commercial salt concentration. But on the island of Læsø—a community with a finite availability of natural resources—constantly feeding the hundreds of salt kilns eventually led to the island’s deforestation.
Under recommendations from the UK Green Building Council, otters could return to urban rivers, bats could roost under bridges, swifts could flock to office blocks and peregrine falcons soar above cathedrals. Written by Felicity Carus and shared via the Guardian Environment Network.
What do the Westfield shopping centre, Canary Wharf and a Victorian museum have in common? They are all at the vanguard of a move to encourage biodiversity in buildings that could take on an unprecedented scale if guidelines published today are adopted.
By Scott Cooney •
March 16, 2009
There may be few occupations that have more opportunity to incorporate sustainable choices into their products, services, and day-to-day operations than architecture. The market for green building has cooled down along with everything else, but it seems inevitable that it will replace its traditional counterpart faster than most other sustainable industries. Organic foods, for example, grew 20% year after year for almost a decade before slowing to a 6% growth in overall sales last year, but no one believes that organic will completely replace traditional agriculture anytime soon. Green building, however, may be lined up to become mainstream.
It just makes sense. Rising energy prices coupled with decreasing costs of many green building products and widespread acceptance of the many benefits of green building have produced a perfect storm that could realistically propel green building forward to mainstream acceptance. The other major influence is the economic downturn, which is bringing liquid clarity to the costs of maintaining a traditional home, and the corresponding benefits to planning for energy efficiency.
Warren Lloyd, of Lloyd Architecture, says, “Things will be very different [when residential construction starts to heat up again after the downturn]. Green Building will just be how we do things.” Lloyd, whose firm
