Tag: Big Steps In Building - Page 2
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Put Sprinklers in Every Housing Unit
Not just because of safety; Fire Marshals have been demanding that for years. It is probably necessary if we want to build healthy as well as safe houses. Perhaps if houses had sprinklers, then manufacturers would not have to use flame retardants that
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12 Big Steps to Make Building Better
Buildings consume 76% of electricity generated; they create 48% of our greenhouse gases; a quarter of our waste in landfills comes from construction. Over the past year we have suggested a dozen big steps that could be taken to make our buildings better
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Big Steps In Building: Survival, Not Suburbs
Toronto architect Phil Carter bought a farm many years ago on the edge of Port Hope, Ontario. Today it is surrounded by shopping centers and subdivisions and the farmer who plants corn on it
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Big Steps In Building: Ban Formaldehyde
As we know courtesy of FEMA's optimization experiments, Formaldehyde exposure is not a good thing. It gets worse; a new study links it to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease. As we know courtesy of the Environmental Protection
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Big Steps in Building: Deconstruct, Don't Demolish
We have stated that the real big step in building would be to ban demolition and renovate, but if the building has to come down, at least it should be deconstructed. The demolition numbers from the US EPA are shocking;
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Big Steps in Building: Put Solar Hot Water Heaters on Every Roof
How dumb is this? Use coal to boil water. Use steam to spin turbines and run generators to make electricity then transported long distances to connect to a coil at the bottom of a tank- to make hot water.
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Big Steps in Building: Plant a Tree
Developers don't like saving trees; it forces them to adjust the lot grading and road patterns for tree preservation rather than efficiency. The installation of services and construction disrupts the water table and the trees sometimes die anyways.
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Big Steps in Building: Get Rid Of Those Radiator Fins
Studio Gang are very talented architects, and have shown that they know how to design for energy efficiency. and their Aqua project certainly is interesting. However every one of those balconies on each of eighty floors of highrise condos is a giant
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Steven Holl Unveils Huge Green Complex in China
At a time when few big name architecture firms are building green in China, Steven Holl Architects is working on a few LEED-seeking projects: the sustainability-minded Linked Hybrid housing complex in Beijing, the mixed-use Vanke Center in Shenzhen,
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Big Steps In Building: Make Natural Ventilation Mandatory
Hallandale, Florida's oceanfront is wall-to-wall condos; you can tell the ones built in the recent boom because they are generally huge stucco and glass monsters like the one on the left, interspersed with older, lower buildings that were just big
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Big Steps in Building: Install Gray Water Recovery Everywhere
John notes in an earlier post that gray water re-use is, well, a gray area. However in fact it has been studied and documented, and is accepted in the IPC, or International Plumbing Code. Most municipalities use this or the Universal Plumbing Code,
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Big Steps in Building: Ban Minimum Floor Areas
We spent the summer borrowing bandwidth from a timberframe builder in Dorset, Ontario. Early in the summer his design for a small 512 square foot tower was published in a popular cottaging magazine. Brad Johnson of Portico Timberframes is quoted: "If
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Big Steps In Building: Change Our Wiring to 12 Volt DC
Edison was right; direct current is better than alternating current. Tesla and Westinghouse won the current wars, because it was easy to transform into different voltages without electronics, and they needed high voltages, which travel longer
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Big Steps in Building: Change our Building Codes from Relative to Absolute
For at least 3700 years, since the code of Hammurabi, builders of houses have had building codes, a government minimum standard intended to protect the health and safety of its citizens. Possibly in all that time, the majority of builders have
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Big Steps in Building: Ban Demolition
Walnut Hall, Toronto TreeHugger defends the little steps that we all have to take to address the problems that face us, but we have to consider the big steps too, the initiatives that have to be legislated. Buildings consume 76% of electricity
