Face-lifts for three buildings showing their age aim to correct performance problems, project a more desirable image, and address the needs of new occupants.
The latest version of the widely adopted green building standard is set to debut in November with the most thorough overhaul since its inception. Here’s what you need to know.
A revamped LEED is launching later this year. The new rating system, referred to as LEED version 4, or v4 for short, has generated a lot of controversy in the design and construction industry, both from practitioners concerned about how different it is from the current LEED, and from product suppliers worried about new demands from their customers.
A wave of rooftop greenhouses and vertical farms captures the imagination of architects while offering an alternative to conventional cultivation methods.
Community-gardening advocates have sold urban farming as a sustainable local alternative to industrial-scale farming and as an educational platform for healthier living.
The outer layer of the double-skin facade for the Design Hub at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) consists of more than 16,000 individually mounted translucent glass discs repeated on all four elevations of the eight-story main building.
As design teams work toward harnessing air flows around buildings, they are producing some intriguing structures. But just how viable is wind power as a source of on-site renewable energy? Wind power is the fastest-growing source of megawatts thanks to the jumbo-jet-sized turbines sprouting en masse worldwide. But it also has a significant presence in the city, where gusts regularly send umbrellas to landfills. Rather than considering it a nuisance, architects increasingly view urban wind as a renewable resource for on-building power generation. Building-integrated wind power (BIWP)—wind turbines mounted on or incorporated within an occupied structure—may lack wind farms’ economies
In digitally sophisticated Los Angeles, the Southern California Institute of Architecture's new Robot House ups the ante. The architects Peter Testa and Devyn Weiser like to point out that the robots are not people. The robots, in this case, are five white robotic arm Stäubli instruments installed last spring in the new Robot House at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles. For that matter, the Robot House is not a house, but rather a converted double-height space at the south end of SCI-Arc’s main building. The room has two glass walls and a catwalk overhead, which
The ink spilled in the media about the color of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s recently restored facade would probably cover its entire surface. The controversy has raged since the exterior restoration of the building, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, began in 2005.
Since the 1970s, Hugh Hardy’s work for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) has run the gamut, spanning new cinemas and a café for the experimental film and performing arts venue to, most recently, a faithful restoration of the 1908 facade of its historic Peter Jay Sharp Building. But one job was left unfinished: “We needed to install a permanent entrance canopy,” says Hardy, FAIA, the principal of New York–based H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture.
From cacophony in the schoolyard and tense quiet during finals to the social jungle of the cafeteria and the read-out-loud of Roald Dahl: Maybe no acoustic environment is expected to perform in such a variety of ways as the contemporary school.