Tag: Big Steps In Building

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  Flame Retardants May Kill More Than They Save

  It's time to rethink our practice of adding dangerous chemicals to combustible plastics and putting them in our houses.

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  Architect Uses Ancient Techniques To Cool Modern Building in India

  Architect Manit Rastogi uses stepwells and screens, technologies that are thousands of years old

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  Gimme A Thermal Break Redux: Engineer Calls Chicago's Aqua Tower "Architectural Pornography"

  Jeanne Gang's tower is lovely to look at but really, we shouldn't build buildings with radiator fins any more.

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  Do Smoke Detectors Save As Many Lives As We Think?

  We are relying on technology that is better as a kitchen appliance than a life saver

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  Big Steps In Building: Stop Ignoring Orientation And Sun Control

  There are some very simple moves one can make to reduce the amount of energy a house uses, that any builder in America could do without adding much to the cost of a house. Builders ignore orientation, window placement

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  The End of the Glass Box Is Nigh

  There are a lot of reasons that architects design condos with floor to ceiling glass; people like views and they can look very elegant in the right hands. But the main reason they do it is cost;

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  Which Is Worse, Air Leaks or Heat Loss? Neither. It's Energy Consumption That Matters

  There is a strange debate going on at Green Building Advisor, where a writer thinks "home buyers have been "brainwashed" into thinking only about R-values, as energy codes give short shrift to the

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  Better Than A Smoke Detector: An Add-On Sprinkler

  In our Big Steps in Building series, I advocated for sprinklers in every housing unit, not just for fire safety, but so that we could also get rid of all those flame retardants that are building

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  Architects: Go Back To The ABCs and Design Buildings Like Letters Again

  Julia Gersovitz of Montreal's FGMAA Architects made the point: Buildings used to look like alphabets, to minimize the distance to an exterior wall and maximize natural light and ventilation. We have all seen many Cs, Os and a few Es (I forgot to draw

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  7 Ways Fixing Building Construction Will Slash Greenhouse Gas Emissions

  It really isn't that hard; every architect and builder knows exactly what they have to do to cut greenhouse gases significantly. People just don't want to pay the price, either in cash or in lifestyle changes. Here are just a

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  Waxman-Markey Targets For Buildings Are Exactly What Builders Say are Impossible

  A few months ago TreeHugger reported on a silly study (That 70s Show: Developers Still Don't Know How To Make a Building Green) from the Commercial Real Estate Development Association (abbreviated as NAIOP, don't ask why)

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  Architect Alert: Waxman-Markey Has a Big Impact on Building

  Many people are screaming that the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) doesn't go far enough; when architects, builders and building code officials get through it, there will be a lot of screaming that it

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  Solar Hot Water First. Then Photovoltaics.

  The solar power subsidy is an equal opportunity employer; according to Brian's post, "any solar system you purchase this year is 30% percent off, thanks to the government (or at least, you'll get a tax rebate for that much). Solar powered water heaters

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  GreenBuild: Buildclean is a Breath of Fresh Air

  I have never understood why the Environmental Protection Agency is in charge of the Energy Star rating system; it is not as if the American government really believes that Carbon Dioxide is a problem, and yet in the interest of reducing fossil fuel use

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  Memo To US Government: Five Ways To Fix The Housing Industry

  Now that the United States Government owns all the mortgages, the guarantors of the mortgages, and the reinsurer of all the insurers, and possibly pretty soon $700 billion

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  Save Energy, Put A Meter On Everything

  As we head down the rabbit hole of recession, one of the best tools we have for reducing our consumption is transparency; being able to see what we are using and how much it is costing us as we use it. Prius drivers find that the fuel consumption

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  Fire Sprinklers To Be Required In New Houses

  Smoke detectors have helped drastically reduce the number of house fires, but 3,000 people still die every year in them, and a house burns every 80 seconds. The environmental costs are high as well, as burning vinyl produces dioxins and other toxic

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  Stop With the Glass Façades Already

  We have noted before that the current design trend of floor-to-ceiling glass makes a lovely looking building, but that it is ridiculously extravagant in terms of energy. Now we learn from the Wall Street Journal that gee, there are other problems: One