Sustainability vs. Homeland Security

Sustainability is everywhere these days. Just browse through the ads in Architectural Record and you’ll be amazed how every single building materials producer finds something green in their product – no matter how energy intensive it was to produce. There is also an onslaught of “sustainability” events around us. Earth Day had just passed when […] Read more..

EnergyPlus for SketchUp

If you liked Demeter, then you’ll like this one. The Department of Energy has just released a plugin for SketchUp (works with both the free and full version) that allows for an EnergyPlus analysis to be run on a SketchUp building model from within the familiar SketchUp interface. The geometry of a building can be […] Read more..

A House for 8,054 US-$

As reported by the BBC, a 52-year-old software engineer in Scotland has built a wood and straw-bale house for a total of UK£ 4,000 (equals 8,054 US-$). Talk about affordable housing. You can see a break-down of all costs on the BBC website. Somehow reminds me of another guy from Massachusetts. He got it done […] Read more..

Autodesk Polishes its Green Thumb

It seems like this is the year for industry consolidations in the technology field. After Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo and their purchase of Caligari it is now time for Green Building Studio to be acquired by a much larger company, Autodesk in this case. In an announcement that just fluttered into my inbox, GBS acknowledges […] Read more..

Nice match: Carbon neutral design with Revit and GBS!

Greenbuildingstudio.com, the green-design web-extension for your cad software online service has just announced their third overhaul (i.e. v. 3.0). With more and more architecture and engineering offices embracing parametric building design (catchword: BIM = “Building Information Modeling”), this is a great tool to run a quick industry-standard (DOE-2) energy check on a virtual building and […] Read more..

Green Design Using SketchUp

Apparently today is blog action day. I didn’t know that myself… Oh, well… The official SketchUp blog just published an environmental design feature with examples of green building design using SketchUp. It is always good to learn from how others are using a design tool like SketchUp – particularly in a commercial environment.

Put some Carbon Dioxide into your Baby’s Crib

Now what kind of a suggestion is that?!? A good one, trust me. It all comes down to global warming and reducing greenhouse gases. Some background first: When a tree grows, carbon dioxide is processed in the good-old elementary school photosynthesis and stored in the wood as Carbon (while releasing yummy oxygen as a by-product). […] Read more..