Last month, everyone was talking about Las Vegas’s CityCenter, the $8.5 billion, 18-million-square-foot hotel-and-entertainment complex that now seems like the last gasp of a rapidly-receding era of starchitect cache and real-estate hubris. Well, not quite the last gasp—this morning another emblem of aughties excess officially opened in the UAE: Adrian Smith and SOM’s Burj Dubai—the world’s tallest building!—rising 160-plus stories above a city-state that is now reeling from plummeting property values and crippling debt.

Related: In 2007, Stephen Zacks took a look at the serious ambitions behind Dubai’s insane rate of development in “Beyond the Spectacle.”

The USGBC’s new headquarters are housed in a renovated 1970s office building, for which Wilson negotiated a green lease. Photo: Larry Olsen/courtesy Envision

If green building is to ever become mainstream (and, trust me, it’s not even close today), it will need people like Sally Wilson working behind the scenes. A trained architect, Wilson is a real estate broker in the CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) Washington office, and the firm’s global director of environmental strategy. She had the distinction of being the first real estate broker in the world to be LEED accredited. Since green building will never become business-as-usual unless business itself signs onto it, this was a very significant first. Wilson served as a real estate consultant for the USGBC’s new headquarters—her husband Ken’s firm, Envision Design, created it—helping to negotiate its green lease. Recently I spoke to her about the USGBC, her work with the real estate behemoth CBRE, and the next frontier for green building.

Let’s begin at the beginning. What is a “green lease”?

We think of it as LEED integration into the lease. When we begin the process with a client who is pursuing sustainability, we start by sending out a general RFP to landlords, and we attach an additional rider to it, which is an environmental-qualification statement. This rider is structured around opportunities for the building to pursue LEED credits. It’s roughly twenty-five points. It varies depending on the location, but we customize it for each tenant. Read more…

Tom “Mayor-for-Life” Menino made a name for himself as a pothole-fixing regular guy with a thing for green building. He’s a popular four-termer who’s set to become the longest serving mayor in Boston’s history, so it came as little surprise recently when he started thinking legacy, evincing SimCity–like ambition with his scheme for relocating City Hall and his support for an ally’s thousand-foot office tower in the financial district.

That these moves were debatable on functional and aesthetic grounds—and that they would entail razing a pair of Modernist icons, Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles’s City Hall and Paul Rudolph’s Blue Cross Blue Shield Building—didn’t seem to matter. Menino is firmly entrenched in a “strong mayor” system that gives him serious leverage over development.

But there’s a recession on and it’s an election year, and he now finds himself on the defensive about open construction pits and cronyism. Read more…

The proposed Atlantic Yards design in 2006 and now. Images: Gehry Partners and Ellerbe Becket

How should we greet the news today that the Frank Gehry–designed arena for the Nets in Brooklyn has officially been scrapped in favor of a cheaper scheme by Ellerbe Becket, the Kansas City, Missouri, firm specializing in convention centers and sports complexes? The world’s most famous architect has essentially been “value-engineered” out of the project. This is hardly shocking. Gehry laid off dozens of architects working on Atlantic Yards at the end of last year and let slip in an interview that he thought the project was dead, only to recant later under pressure from the client, Forest City Ratner. But it is depressing. Read more…