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Performance Anxiety

Peter Fairley
December 16, 2013
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Creating buildings that deliver on progressively more ambitious environmental goals will require energy simulations that reliably predict post-occupancy consumption. Higher energy performance has evolved from an aspiration to an expectation. Owners of buildings—especially those certified under rating systems like LEED—increasingly count on an energy savings payback. And a wave of “net zero energy” buildings promises to generate enough energy on-site from renewable sources to equal or exceed demand. As a result, predictive energy models face new scrutiny. “In the last five years, energy modelers have learned that they will have to answer for their models,” says Laurie Canup, an associate
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Making Sense of the New LEED

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.
Nadav Malin
September 16, 2013
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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.


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Urban Agriculture Grows Up

A wave of rooftop greenhouses and vertical farms captures the imagination of architects while offering an alternative to conventional cultivation methods.
Peter Fairley
July 16, 2013
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Community-gardening advocates have sold urban farming as a sustainable local alternative to industrial-scale farming and as an educational platform for healthier living.


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Dynamic Facades: Buildings Show Off New Moves

To enhance environmental performance and create dramatic visual effects, architects devise facades that adapt to changing conditions.
Russell Fortmeyer
Russell Fortmeyer
May 16, 2013
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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.


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A Force of Nature

Peter Fairley
April 16, 2013
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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
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A Fetish for Fabrication

Russell Fortmeyer
Russell Fortmeyer
October 16, 2011
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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
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Guggenheim Face-Lift Retains Original Wrinkles

Restoration team tackles thorny preservation issues while preparing a 50-year-old architectural icon for its next half-century.
Sara Hart
December 16, 2008
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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.


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BAM's Next Wave: A Forward-Looking Institution Updates Its Own Look with a Nod to the Past

Aric Chen
May 16, 2008
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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.


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