Living off-the-grid in the foothills of the colorful Colorado Rocky Mountains, Andrew Michler LEED AP BD+C and his wife Jennie are learning firsthand what low entropy living really means. He is building a Passive House rest/work space and is currently writing the book [ours] Hyper-Localization of Sustainable Architecture to be published in 2014.
Follow Andrew on twitter @andrewmichler
At first glance SOM looks to be channeling Norman Foster's Hearst Tower with the strong diagonal frame, giving the building its charatertisic shape. And just like Hearst Tower, the structure’s
The largest apartment building since the beginning of the Great Recession has broken ground in Los Angeles, promising to reinvigorate the Koreatown neighborhood. The Vermont is a two-tower,
OK, we've seen concepts like this for years now - round floating retreats complete with a transparent room in the belly to see all the fish swim by. The idea is certainly appealing considering
EVolo's towering 'Skyscrapers' book, which quickly sold out, is now available for special order until May 31st. If you’re an aficionado of futurism in building design, then this decisive
Toyota’s vaunted Prius line is racing into third place in total cars sold worldwide, proving that, far from being a niche market, hybrid technology is as mainstream as it gets. The news comes
After the Gulf Coast was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, FEMA provided temporary trailers to displaced people in Louisiana and Mississippi, which turned out to be not only inadequate
The LED-lit One Raffles Place Tower Two is a worthy successor to its taller neighbor, One Raffles Place Tower One, with a flair for environmentally advanced design. Located right in the heat of
It’s a pretty old trick to take a simple steamer or colander and use it as a light shade, so designer Nadia Belalia upped the ante with her series of transformed and customized steamer lamps.
Dr. Steven Chu, head of the US Department of Energy, gave an information-packed, 50-minute speech at the World Renewable Energy Forum in Denver on Wednesday. Speaking to a crowd of renewable
Could what's in this little container keep our planet healthy? The simple reality is we need to find a way to put carbon back into the soil, and making something called 'biochar' is perhaps the
The banks of shades are composed of individual petals, each pivoting from the bottom of a hexagonal grid and attached to the adjacent one with a threaded connection. Each horizontal row has
It’s not easy to write about sound, so maybe it’s better to start with the objects that emit them. As part of a NSF program which invites artists and writers to explore Antarctica Cheryl
GE just announced a new LED light bulb replacement for the 100 watt incandescent that uses pulses of air to keep cool. The design is the first of its kind in the LED industry, and it comes just
Bullet trains in Texas by 2020? That's the proposal laid out by the Texas Central Railroad, and it could become a reality if it can come up with $10 billion in private funding. The railway would
Shigeru Ban’s temporary cardboard cathedral finally got the green light to be erected in Christchurch, New Zealand. Now called the “Transitional Cathedral”, the building will replace a
A new type of heat map was introduced in the UK and it maps out, quite literally, the heating needs of the entire country. While designed to help implement heating infrastructure like
Hydraulic fracking is getting a pretty bad reputation for its potential to pollute water, cause cancer, and trigger earthquakes -- need we go on? But a new study from Cornell reports that the
Driving through town, the bright and airy Plaza Diane jumps out amongst the older buildings. The original plaza is named after a prominent civic leader Diane E. Bonner who was instrumental in
The two-toned building is placed on Rue Rebière, a narrow street in northern Paris, across from a graveyard which by code cannot have the building facing it. The design solves the conflict of
The self-funded project dates back to 1992, with the vision of filling a valley river with a canopy of flowing silver fabric. After engineering tests, prototypes, environmental reports, many
Boston’s Big Dig tunnel is set to undergo a complete LED lighting retrofit, as many of its existing lights have prematurely corroded and the older fluorescent tube fixtures are failing at
Chinese material scientists have been studying the design of butterfly wings to unlock ways to make solar electricity more efficient. Inspired by the way that butterflies use their wings to
The price tag for the proposed high speed rail system in California has just taking a major cut, with a price chop of $30 billion. The latest budget projection comes in with last-minute design
The 2012 International Green Construction Code was just announced this week by the International Code Council - and it intends to be the first holistic code based on environmentally positive
A pavilion on the campus of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany provides shelter behind a wall of solar panels. The visually striking design by Austrian architecture firm Ortner
MIT researchers just unveiled a new three-dimensional solar array that can produce up to 20 times more energy per square foot than traditional flat arrays - and it's potentially more efficient
When we first broke the news of the split between Passivhaus Institute (PHI) and Passive House US (PHIUS), it was a murky proposition to project what the results would be. That answer has become
President Obama is hitting the west and midwest with a series of speeches touting his “all of above” energy policy, which reads like a Country Buffet menu. Few will like everything on the
Much of the design of Swinburne University of Technology's Advanced Technologies Centre is about openness, circulation, and adaptability. The lower labs are glassed on
While we write a lot about a sustainable built environment, we often overlook the contribution of engineers. We recently talked at length with Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley Systems,
