Like all of us, buildings of a certain age often have problems with their facades.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe no acoustic environment is expected to perform in such a variety of ways as the contemporary school.