The Case for AIA Committee on the Environment's Obsolescence
The AIA/COTE Top Ten represent the profession’s leading edge. But why hasn't that edge permeated the profession in the age of “mainstream green”?
Kira Gould
No Such Thing as Bad Publicity? Why Clickbait is Bad for Affordable Housing
The headlines covering Rural Studio’s 20K Project suggest the project is revolutionizing affordable housing for the masses, but ignore the vital differences between student work and building in the real world.
Lessons on Expanding Diversity From the Field of Sustainable Design
Activist designers at the U.S. Green Building Council's annual conference prove that equity happens when you take the lead, engage, design a plan, and follow through.
New App Allows Employees to Personalize Temperature Control
Physical comfort and energy savings come together in a new app by Building Robotics.
What If Buying a House Were More Like Buying a Car?
Architects recognize that modern families care about the environment and aesthetics.
Remembering the Life and Work of Ecological Artist Jackie Brookner
Jackie Brookner was a pioneering ecological artist, designer, writer and educator. Here, she is remembered for her passionate work with ecologists, design professionals, and communities on water remediation/landscape restoration for parks and wetlands, among many other projects.
A Workspace for Wordsmiths: Inside Medium's San Francisco Offices
Sara Morishige Williams and Huntsman Architectural Group design a space for Medium employees to find inspiration in themselves as well as others.
Ayse Birsel: How I Learned to Design the Life I Love
Designer Ayse Birsel keynoted an IIDA chapter event with a fascinating lecture that instructs you how to refocus your life via a series of exercises.
Advocates Stand up for the Built Environment's Material Health
Healthy products advocates collaborate, see a growing market
Librii: A New Kind of Library for the Developing World
A network of libraries in Africa feed communities with knowledge, creativity conduits, and revenue
A Card for Keeps
KieranTimberlake sends out a holiday greeting card that is both informative and beautiful
AIA's Robert Ivy on Committing the Profession to Public Health
The American Institute of Architects is committed to creating solutions for public health.
Women in Green: Simran Sethi
I’ve written about Simran Sethi here before. She’s an inspiring, energetic green diva—a strategist, educator, and journalist. She’s had a worldwide career, yet somehow she landed in Lawrence, my hometown in Kansas, and taught for some time at the University…
A Taste of the Bay Area's Green Architecture
Boucher Grygier Shipping Container House, Innovation and Transition tour Courtesy Jan Grygier From giant redwoods to adaptive reuse, San Francisco is chock full of memorable sights – green buildings and beyond. At USGBC’s annual Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, held…
Women in Green: Austin's Chief Sustainability Officer Lucia Athens
I first met Lucia Athens when I interviewed her while working on Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design with Lance Hosey. She has been a leader in the green movement for many years and is currently a member of…
Q&A: Jerry James Stone
I was recently asked to join the Advisory Board for SXSW Eco, an offshoot of the huge SXSW conference now in its second year and coming to Austin in early October. In my new role I have organized one panel…
Cultivating the Present
We talk, endlessly, it seems, about the impact of technology on our lives, our relationships, our work, and workspaces and we worry about what it’s doing to our physiologies. Now the inimitable writer, Diane Ackerman offers, in her blog in…
Voices of Sustainability
Five years ago, Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design was published after Lance Hosey and I spent 18 months interviewing hundreds of people and trying to understand why it seemed like there was a preponderance of women doing “green”…
If we love it, will it last? Lance Hosey's Inspirational Book on Green Design
If we love it, will it last? This is a question at the heart of architect Lance Hosey’s new book, Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design (Island Press, 2012). Because the book is just out I want to offer…
Applying the Occupy Model to Sustainability
There’s something daunting about a speaking slot called “15 Minutes of Brilliance.” At the Living Future (un)conference, these speaking engagements took place before the keynotes each day, a nice way to give individual speakers a platform. But the “brilliance” and…
Nine Lives of Green
Recently at the Living Future event in Portland, Oregon, I had an opportunity to explore “lives of green” with eight other women working in the sustainable design space, as it is often called. We followed the Pecha Kucha format (my…
What if "sustainability" meant just doing the right thing?
Business consultant, regenerative systems thinker, planner, business consultant, regenerative systems thinker, and author of The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability & Success (2011), Carol Sanford gave a keynote address on the last day of the Living Future “un-conference” in Portland, Oregon.…
Dangerous Four-letter Words and more
Jason McLennan has a potty mouth. The head of the International Living Future Institute, which recently hosted the Living Future conference in Portland, Oregon, says that he regularly uses his keynote to christen the conference’s four-letter word. Last year, there…
The case for interdependence
The physicist-turned international environmental activist Dr. Vandana Shiva gave the opening keynote address at the Living Future “unconference” on May 2 in Portland, Oregon. Shiva is the author of Earth Democracy and Water Wars, among other books, including Soil Not…
Eating Real
Only a species as clever as ours would need to designate a “Food Day” to celebrate and promote the prospect of “eating real food.” Seriously. But the problems with our food system are, as we know, very serious indeed. I…
Our Toxic World
As a writer, Sandra Steingraber has the eloquence and urgency of Rachel Carson. As a biologist, she has a fiercely acute perspective on how human health is affected by the many outputs of so many clever human inventions. Her latest…
Q&A: Framing Nature
Eva Hagberg’s latest book is a collection of gorgeous rooms with views of “nature” as the architectural elite frame it for elite clients. But Nature Framed: At Home in the Landscape (Monacelli Press, 2011) is anything but a book about…
Q&A: David Gottfried
In 2010, David Gottfried founded his latest membership organization, the Regenerative Network; a business consortium that brings together leading green building product manufacturers and service providers and connects them to real estate portfolio owners, architects, engineers, and contractors. The mission…
Q&A: Jason McLennan
Jason McLennan, CEO of the International Living Future Institute (home of the Living Building Challenge, a standard launched by the Cascadia chapter of the Green Building Council in 2006 and intended to push beyond LEED at the time) has published…
Plastiki
Looking at my overstuffed book shelves I wonder if and when I might join the e-reader set. Just then a lovely book reminds me how this media offers something that no digital text nor fun web site nor quality documentary…
Sustainism
Naming “movements” can be a tricky business. Naming a worldwide shift toward systems thinking, social responsibility, and “all things green” has been particularly dicey. For better or worse, all these things, together, have been summed up as the sustainability movement.…
Finding One Good Chair
Late last month I had the pleasure of joining three amazing women on a jury for the One Good Chair competition in Las Vegas. While it’s always confounding to talk about sustainability in windowless convention facilities, in a city that’s…
Q&A: On design, delight, and long-term sustainability
Stewart Brand wrote, “A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.” Jean Carroon’s book, Sustainable Preservation: Greening Existing Buildings (2010, John Wiley & Sons) cites this Brand quote (and a few others—his book How Buildings…
Learning from New Orleans
Last December, Katherine Grove of William McDonough + Partners and Richard Maimon, of Kieran Timberlake, shared the stage at Ecobuild in Washington, DC. They were invited to discuss their work at the Make It Right project in New Orleans, where…
Q&A: Burke and Meinberg Burke
Timepiece by Carrie Meinberg Burke and Kevin Burke, Photo: Prakash Patel Kevin Burke is an architect. Carrie Meinberg Burke is an architect and industrial designer. Together, they…
Women: Systems Thinkers
On the opening day of West Coast Green (which took place in San Francisco a month ago), I moderated a panel that included architects Carrie Meinberg Burke and Lynn Simon; Valerie Casey, a designer and the founder of Designers…
Telling Stories
Green media maven Simran Sethi believes journalism can change the way people think—and so teaches students to be storytellers for the environment.
Q&A: Prefab
Casa Chiara, Photo: Jim Turley/SweetWater Photography At West Coast Green this year, architect Michelle Kaufmann of Michelle Kaufmann Studio, hosted a panel called “The Future of Prefab,” in which she discussed the topic with Ann Hand, CEO of Project Frog…
