The top picks from the “most green” and “most important” lists: William McDonough’s Adam Joseph Lewis Center (left) and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

This week, when Lance Hosey released the G-List, his survey of the top green buildings since 1980, he was responding to Vanity Fair’s celebrity rankings of the top-rated buildings of the last 30 years, which anointed Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao as the most important building of our time. But Gehry’s name was nowhere to be found on the G-List. Why was I searching for some signs of him among the greens? Read more…

Design was in the air this month, and we took in great heaving gasps of it as we ran from one event to another (and from one blog to another). New work was released, exhibitions were exhibited, and awards were awarded. For those who feel like the month passed them by, here’s our shortlist from May’s cornucopia of design news:

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A Pavilion Fiasco at the World Expo

What could possibly go wrong with an event that combines Shanghai and showiness? The pavilions. The U.S. pavilion has been called “a sorry spectacle,” and don’t even get us started on the terrifying animated baby mannequin in front of the Spanish pavilion. The only point of agreement, it seems, was the general nostalgia for the great Expo designers of yore.

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Honored by the AIA

Early this month, the American Institute of Architects announced the 2010 AIA/HUD Secretary’s Awards and the 2010 AIA Housing Awards. But the ones to really look out for are the seven young firms that won the New Practices New York awards: EASTON+COMBS, Archipelagos, Leong Leong, Manifold SOFTlab, SO-IL, and Tacklebox. Their prize-winning work will be on view at New York’s Center for Architecture from July 15.

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The Pritzker Ceremony and the RIBA Awards

A galaxy of starchitects and other glitterati descended on New York’s Ellis Island for the Pritzker Prize ceremony, where the Japanese firm SANAA received architecture’s biggest prize. Meanwhile, 101 buildings received the architectural excellence award of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

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Frank Gehry Stirs Up a LEED Controversy

Frank Gehry’s cavalier comments on the LEED ratings system raised a few hackles. While the focus of the discussion shifted from Gehry to the legitimacy of the ratings themselves, New York’s Bank of America tower was awarded LEED Platinum, making it the greenest skyscraper in town.

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On Friday I spent all day at the Regional Plan Association’s annual conference. This year’s terrific event was entitled “Innovation and the American Metropolis.” The RPA, as it always does, cast a wide net, bringing in experts from the fields of architecture, urban planning, sustainable design, transportation, alternative energy, city planning, computer technology, politics, and so on. Bill McDonough—whose lucrative speaking engagements seem to have survived the hatchet job Fast Company did on him two years ago—kicked off the event in the morning with a typically rousing and poetic speech that had attendees still buzzing at lunch. (I, alas, missed him, but I’ve heard some version of Bill’s song and dance before.) Read more…

Yesterday was the ground-breaking ceremony for William McDonough + Partners’ new Collaborative Support Facility at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in Silicon Valley. The 50,000-square-foot facility is expected to be the highest-performing building in the federal government, and thus will incorporate a dizzying array of green-building strategies (natural ventilation, a geothermal system, radiant cooling, on-site photovoltaic energy generation, and on and on) as well as some of the latest NASA technologies. “I like to think of it as the first lunar outpost on Earth,” the center’s director said. Learn more about the mission and features of the “Sustainability Base” with this five-minute video.