Earlier this fall, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) released performance data for the green roof planted on its Washington, D.C., headquarters. The findings demonstrate a number of environmental benefits, including a significant reduction in storm-water runoff, retaining 27,500 gallons of water, or nearly 75 percent of precipitation, during a 10-month monitoring period. Photography: Courtesy ASLA The installation includes planted “waves” that hide rooftop mechanical units. The results suggest that widespread implementation of green roofs and other sustainable site development practices could be a viable storm-water-management option, particularly in cities with older, and overburdened, combined sanitary and wastewater transportation

If there were a prize for the project most often mentioned during the conference “Engineered Transparency: Glass in Architecture and Structural Engineering,” it would go to the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio, designed by SANAA [RECORD, January 2007, page 79]. The first to present the building was the Tokyo-based firm’s principal, Kazuyo Sejima, in her keynote address on September 26 for the two-day event at Columbia University, in New York City. Photography: ' Christian Richters The apparent simplicity of Toledo’s Glass Pavilion belies its complexity. Several of the subsequent 30 speakers, including architects, consultants, and

Now hear this. For a giant, cochlear band shell called Tubaloon, which hovered over Norway’s annual Kongsberg Jazz Festival this past summer, the designers of Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta caught an echo from architectural history. Project architect Joshua Teas says his team drew inspiration for Tubaloon from the curving walls and warped twists of the steel-cable-supported Philips Pavilion, which Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis created for Brussel’s World Expo of 1958. Photography: © Bjørn Owe Holmberg But to realize the homage, Snøhetta riffed on an innovative engineering concept developed in 2000 by Swiss engineer Mauro Pedretti. Called Tensairity, Pedretti’s proprietary

Sustainable Design: Ecology, Architecture, and Planning, by Daniel E. Williams, FAIA. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2007, 304 pages, $75. High-Performance Building, by Vidar Lerum. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2007, 304 pages, $70. The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability, by Ann Thorpe. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2007, 225 pages, $29.95. We seem to have two camps emerging in the nascent field of sustainable design: an informed one that remains sensitive to the high aims of architecture, ecology, and site, and then one we might call “design services 2.0,” a kind of appliqué of green technologies onto

Now hear this. For a giant, cochlear band shell called Tubaloon, which hovered over Norway’s annual Kongsberg Jazz Festival this past summer, the designers of Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta caught an echo from architectural history. Project architect Joshua Teas says his team drew inspiration for Tubaloon from the curving walls and warped twists of the steel-cable-supported Philips Pavilion, which Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis created for Brussel’s World Expo of 1958. Photography: © Bjørn Owe Holmberg But to realize the homage, Snøhetta riffed on an innovative engineering concept developed in 2000 by Swiss engineer Mauro Pedretti. Called Tensairity, Pedretti’s proprietary

We presume that the link between intention in design and the materials we choose is deterministic: The right collection of materials will yield the desired effects both aesthetically and performatively.

To create Seattle’s new Olympic Sculpture Park, lead designers Weiss/Manfredi have fittingly sculpted the earth.

Efforts to make life-cycle assessment (LCA) an integral part of sustainable design practices are beginning to bear fruit. Since late 2004, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has been working to incorporate the methodology into its widely used building-rating system, LEED, and has committed to producing a detailed plan for integration by November 2007. The two-year-old not-for-profit organization, Green Building Initiative (GBI), has already created a climate change calculator primarily intended for use with its own rating system, Green Globes. But the organization also plans to release a stand-alone version of the software, without charge, to other green-building organizations, trade