Green Building

The Living Building Challenge is a new environmental rating system that focuses on required environmental design elements, diverging dramatically from the credit-based approach of the built environment's dominant rating system, LEED.

WebEcoist has pulled together a fascinating gallery of imaginative designs for green dwelling and living spaces, including a design for co-op housing inspired by Anasazi cliff dwellings.

Witold Rybczynski bemoans the green movement's emphasis on sustainability measure that treat environmental action as a process of accessorizing rather than changing lifestyles.

A new HVAC system for a building in Minnesota that was expected to meet high environmental standards was going to come in at almost three times its originally estimated costs. So city officials are delaying.

The Los Angeles Conservancy has been building a coalition to preserve the Century Plaza Hotel after developers announced plans to replace the hotel with new mixed use development.

With what some are calling the worst classroom conditions in the nation, California is trying to solve the problem by replacing all of its portable classrooms with green buildings.

Developers are finding it easier to get funding for sustainable building projects due to federal incentives and investor interest in green certification.

The new documentary The Greening of Southie follows construction workers in Boston as they adapt to the new rules and regulations of green development (sometimes unwittingly).

The Democrats of the U.S. House of Representatives have passed a bill that would create a green school building program in the U.S., investing more than $6 billion in its first year to build more environmentally friendly schools.

Builders, architects and designers are increasingly looking to nature for guidance as they try to build greener and more sustainably.

An historic house in Placerville is preserved and expanded to create a sustainable new office building for an architecture firm.

In Detroit, a couple bought a foreclosure for $1900. They've been steadily piecing together a community out of their neighborhood ever since.

A study released last week by NAIOP, the Commercial Real Estate Development Association, concluded that green standards were not financially feasible for Class A office buildings. Not so, experts say.

This piece from Construction Week looks at the environmentally-conscious Xeritown proposed in Dubai and the methods it will take to conserve and create energy.

Masdar City, the elaborate and ambitious planned green development in Abu Dhabi, is slowing coming into shape. This piece from Technology Review looks at how the city's development could inform the future of citybuilding.

New green building projects aimed at low-income residents are popping up across the country, and federal stimulus money is helping.

The newly passed stimulus bill's sustainability elements are blessings for green builders and environmentalists. As far as commercial property owners are concerned, however, those elements may be seen as too much work for little benefit.

The master plan for Salem, Oregon's Pringle Creek Community is ambitious, says Jim Fitzsimons, incorporating mixed-use, sustainable development with the community-enhancing aspects of old city neighborhoods.

Dongtan eco-city was to be a community of 50,000 residents living in a utopian, eco-friendly development. But since the mayor of Shanghai, a big supporter, was arrested on fraud charges, the whole project may be dead in the water.