Green Building

The world's leading certification system for sustainable architecture is set to undergo its most sweeping changes in 2009. The proposed revisions encourage designs that would reduce a building's impact on global climate change.

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, commonly known as LEED, has become the standard for green building design since the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a nongovernmental organization, crafted the rating system eight years ago. Architecture that voluntarily improves energy efficiency, water conservation, and indoor air quality has surged in popularity in the past two years, especially in Europe and major U.S. cities.

One of the house projects we've been working on at home is replacing as much of our lawn with garden beds as makes sense. We do want a little bit of (unwatered, organic) lawn, for sitting, but we're planting most of our mid-sized urban lot in vegetables, herbs and bird-/butterfly-friendly flowers. We aren't talking the 100-yard diet, and we definitely have a ways to go before you could call our backyard a wildlife sanctuary, but just removing some the grass has already made us feel more comfortable in our home.

We're not alone. One of the biggest underground cultural shifts in North America is focused in some vague yet powerful ways on the question of sod. Big, perfectly smooth, green lawns have become for many of us, a symbol of unsustainability that rivals the SUV.

Finally, after years of criticizing just about everything going on in Dubai, even the so-called green twisting tower that everyone else seems to love, a project that is not, well, dubious. X-Architects have designed Xeritown to be "a novel example of man and nature working in harmony, an entire town is to be built along a north-south axis to take advantage of cool breezes blowing in off the sea." It is sort of like Foster's

I used to be a strict modernist; my role at TreeHugger was to demonstrate that green design could be wonderful and cool and I filled the site with all kinds of modern houses with some claim, often weak, for being green. Those houses became less common on the site in recent times, as I worried more about house size, the appropriateness of single family dwellings on big suburban lots, and trying to justify my love of clean, modern design with my concern about the use of fossil fuels or building materials that cannot be maintained in a world made by hand.

With some trepidation I recently posted

The walls of Elmer Bear Eagle's house are covered in mold. The black intrusion began in the basement. It crept up the sides. Now it blocks sunlight through the windows.

The problem is fairly common throughout the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. Overcrowded conditions - homes built for four people have held more than 20 - contribute to high levels of indoor humidity, creating a mold haven.

The homes are also fraught with poor insulation, which Bear Eagle says leaves his mobile home uncomfortably exposed to the region's harsh summers and winters. "Here the climate is really extreme," he said. "These houses are fire traps."

Image: Phooey Architects
What can’t the shipping container do? We know you can live in these fabulous prefab versions of shipping containers (such as the All-Terrain Cabin or Detroit's planned container condos by Steven Flum); you can shop in them (like in Freitag’s shipping container store in Zurich); you can even serve beer out of them (we like...

Design is evolving, but according to “Garbage Warrior” (2008), a timely documentary on unconventional architect Michael Reynolds and his so-called “earthships”, it’s not evolving fast enough. Partly, it’s because the “powers that be” are afraid of making mistakes, of learning how to live sustainably through trial and error. But can Reynolds’ thirty-year long approach to self-sustaining building – which involves using discarded tires, plastic bottles, old beer cans, rammed earth, rain-harvesting, solar power and on-site food production – be a feasible solution to the

Image credit: Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS

Aerogel was invented in 1931. But at $3000 per kilogram, it's use has been limited to visionary projects and unique structural applications like reinforcement of tennis raquets. But that could change soon. Halimaton Hamdan, a Cambridge-trained professor of chemistry at the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (Technical University of Malaysia), has announced the discovery of a cheap process for turning waste rice husks into aerogel. Actually into "Maerogel", as Hamdan has dubbed the "Malaysian aerogel"....

www.cascadiagbc.org/lbl

The argument about whether or not the tremendous challenges our planet faces - now and in future years - can be reversed by proactive human action falls short. We have enacted the planet’s decline, and together we can and must move to affect vital regeneration. Yet the heated debates over defining how and the means by which this action will take place wage on.

Amid the politics and global chatter that translate to more talk and less action, a few enlightened groups around the world are engaged in leading a straight-forward, inspired charge with impacting vision.
In the heart of the United States’ Pacific Northwest, a veritable hotbed of sustainable development and leader in the op-timization of natural resources, a movement is emerging that has the potential to rival anything else of the sort in the world with respect to its aggressive approach, and potential lasting impact for change.

We admit we should have jumped on this news earlier, like in late 2007, but better late than never to report that the HSBC Tower in downtown Mexico City is the first building in Latin America to receive LEED Gold certification from the Mexico Green Building Council, an institution that promotes and certifies sustainable and environmentally friendly design and construction. Fortunately a columnist for the Mexican paper

Here's a debate where none is needed: the argument about whether green building, compact communities, or transit-supportive design is a better approach to improving the world.

The latest piece to kick up some dust is a report from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, which, as reported by Reuters, says