"I never said I was opposed to the LEED program or to green building — I’m not."

-- Frank Gehry (source)

Architect Frank Gehry talks LEED and the future of green building

By Abby Leonard

Photos: Left-AP Photo/Isaac Brekken; Right: Flickr/mikel.puga

Frank Gehry, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect best known for his titanium-scaled landmarks like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles and the Experience Music Project in Seattle, among others, stirred up controversy last month when he reportedly called LEED — an internationally recognized green building certification system – “bogus stuff” and told Bloomberg Businessweek that green building had become “fetishized,” like wearing an American flag pin. >> Read More

“Make no big plans, only small ones.”

-- Witold Rybczynski, author of "Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities" 

Photo by: Alfishstick 

Architect Witold Rybczynski on what happens in cities while the “experts” are busy making other plans.

By: Marc Steiner

Witold Rybczynski is no great fan of urban planning. In a recent column in Slate, he offered a note of caution about city “smart plans” championed by the director of President Barack Obama’s new White House Office of Urban Affairs. “The last binge of planning in the 1960s produced urban renewal, city expressways, and acres of housing projects from which many cities are still only partially recovered,” he wrote. He concluded by paraphrasing the great urban planner Daniel Burnham: “Make no big plans, only small ones.” >> Read More

"Biomimicry has the earmarks of a successful meme, that is, an idea that will spread like an adaptive gene throughout our culture."

-- Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature 

Nature Is the Model Factory

Eastgate Centre by Mick Pearce (Photo source)

Some of the most intriguing discoveries are being made in architecture and urban planning. In Harare, Zimbabwe, architect Mick Pearce, working with engineers at Arup Associates, constructed a midrise building modeled after termite mounds, which maintain a nearly constant temperature of 31 degrees Celsius even as the outside temperature varies from 3 to 42 degrees. >> Read More

School of Illinois Experts Indicate Us Little Known Approaches to Create More Efficient Pv panels

By Shannon Combs

 Thin Film Solar

Despite the fact that silicon is the market normal semiconductor in many electric products, which includes the photovoltaic cells that pv panels utilize to convert sunlight into power, it is not really the most cost-efficient component on the market. For instance, the semiconductor gallium arsenide and related compound semiconductors offer close to two times the effectiveness as silicon in solar units, but they are rarely utilized in utility-scale applications mainly because of their excessive construction cost.

“A lot of LEED is given for "bogus stuff"...they don’t pay back in your lifetime.”

-- Frank Gehry (source)

Frank Gehry echoes what I have been saying so often; "greening" the world is a political issue and should be addressed by politicians. Read More.

 Skyrise Greenery Awards 2010

 "The greenest square foot is the one you don't build."

-- Geoffrey Warner of Alchemy Architects (Source)