Recently I was asked to do a presentation on ‘Sustainability’ as it relates to a Museum of Art. The presentation was geared to the museum facility board and included the definition of sustainability, sustainable decision making, unique considerations special to museums, case studies and a conclusion about sustainable metrics and LEED. My co presenter, Mike [...]
BLDGBLOG Comes to Baltimore
This week Geoff Manaugh, creator of BLDGBLOG among other things, lectured here in Baltimore. He was invited to speak through the AIA’s Michael F. Trostel Lecture sponsored by Preservation Maryland. The lecture was generally angled to cover historic preservation, but to my delight, Manaugh managed to move the discussion well outside the traditional boundaries [...]
Danish Smart House Eco (Prefab) by Valbaek Brorup Architects
All photos by Mikkel Strange
The Danish Smart House Eco is an environmentally friendly housing system which can be optimized in a number of ways to meet the space needs of both individuals and families. Creators Eva Kristine Borup and Stefan Valbaek of Valbaek Borup Architects, designed the system to be flexible to the needs of [...]
The San Francisco Federal Building: A High Performance Sustainable Workplace?
The U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco is one of the General Services Administration’s (GSAs) most visible attempts at designing a high performance government building. The project is one of many started following the 1993 adoption of the “Design Excellence Program,” in which the federal government sought to “reach into the private sector to find [...]
House of Sweden in Washington DC
This week I had the good fortune to visit the Swedish Embassy (House of Sweden) in Washington DC. (No, I did not visit the DC IKEA…) What I found was a beautiful piece of modern architecture showing many of the traits people have come to expect from contemporary Scandinavian design. Powerful themes such as water, [...]
Zollverein School Building: Active Thermal Insulation
30°C Coal Mine Water + Radiant Exterior Wall System + Structure = Active Thermal Insulation
The Zollverein School of Business Management and Design building is a model project for systems integration. It uses a sophisticated Active Thermal Insulation system consisting of preheated water circulating through the facade which allows for thin exterior structural walls perforated [...]
Smith House: A Passive House in Illinois
The Smith House, located in Urbana Illinois, is an all electric house built to the German Passive House Building Standard. To achieve the passive standard, architect and owner, Katrin Klingenberg, created a clean, efficient and comfortable house design using many of the passive house design strategies used in German model buildings. She describes the house [...]
Waldsee BioHaus: First Certified Passive House in the U.S.
In 2006, the Waldsee BioHaus became the first building in the United States to be certified with the German Passive House Building Standard. The house, built at the German Concordia Language Village of Waldsee in Bemidji Minnesota, uses about 85% less energy than a house designed to meet the Minnesota Energy Code. For that reason, [...]
The Passive House (Passiv Haus) Building Standard
(above) The original Passive Houses in Darmstadt
The Passive House (Passiv Haus) standard is an ultra-low energy building design system which uses extremely efficient building envelopes to significantly drive down energy consumption in structures. The standard is completely voluntary but does have an extremely rigorous set of requirements that must be met in order to be [...]
Marmol Radziner Homes (Prefab)
Marmol Radziner Homes (MRH) are factory-built volumetric modular units. Mr. Radziner states that the homes:
are created with the environment in mind and are built to make LEED certification. Materials, methods and lifestyle is chosen in such a way as to have as little impact on the environment as possible. For long-term sustainability, the module structures [...]
FlatPak House (Prefab)
The FlatPak House is a factory-built house designed by Charlie Lazor. The house design is based on principles the designer acquired while doing work for his award winning modern furniture design company, Blu Dot. Furniture is of course increasingly being designed to minimize the cost of material, labor and transportation which are the major [...]
The Greening of Montgomery Park
In 2003 the doors were opened on the renovated Montgomery Park building in Baltimore Maryland. The 1.3 million square foot building, formerly a warehouse and distribution center for the Montgomery Ward retail chain, stood vacant for over 15 years and was illustrative of the plight Baltimore faced with many older industrial buildings near downtown.
The [...]
Adaptive Reuse of a Pigsty
Take a look at this adaptive reuse of a Pigsty! The building was originally built in 1780 and used as a pigsty (Saustal in German) for most of its life. The structure was partially destroyed during the Second World War and was only reassembled for minor use in the period since the war. The building [...]
2010 Olympic Village Using Sewage-Heat Recovery
After looking at a number of alternatives, the city of Vancouver chose to follow the example set by the city of Oslo, Norway and will implement North America’s first sewer heat recovery system for the 2010 winter games. It is scheduled to be completed in 2009.
An enormous amount of thermal energy is lost when the [...]
Wal-Mart Uses LEDs in Food Refrigerators!
Wal-Mart is installing LED lighting combined with occupancy sensors in it’s refrigerated food cases as part of an effort to save money on both energy and maintenance. The trials have done so well that per the guidance of CEO Lee Scott and based on the companies “ambitious vision for the future operations of the company [...]