Sustainable Design and Construction

This week on The Weekly show, BD+C editors speak with AEC industry leaders from Brookf...
read more
A rendering of Tallhouse, a 35,000-sf mixed-use residential building in Roxbury, Mass., devised by Generate Technologies to be built with mass timber. Images: Generate
Hybrid designs reconcile metropolitan growth and lower CO2 emissions.

Denver Water's new administration building has been designed to achieve net-zero energy standards. Images: Courtesy of Stantec
The utility is showcasing a new admin building and a water reuse plan that’s a first for the st...
read more
EV charging port at The Kensington, Boston. Photo: Gustav Hoiland
A top sustainability expert gives the whys and wherefores of installing electric vehicle chargi...
read more
The Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator helps building teams evaluate a project’s overall embodied carbon emissions during design and procurement decision making.
Nearly 50 AEC industry organizations partnered to develop the groundbreaking Embodied Carbon in C...
read more
Sto's beetle-inspired exterior coating and Dörken Systems' UV-resistant vapor-permeable barrier a...
read more
The Oxford word of the year: climate emergency. Graph sourced from the Oxford Corpus
The Oxford Word of the Year 2019 is climate emergency.

Laval University’s TELUS Stadium houses a 328-foot by 197-foot indoor practice field for soccer, football, and rugby. Thirteen arches span 222 feet and provide a clear height of 59 feet at the center of the stadium, which seats 450 spectators. Photo courtesy Nordic Structures | Photographer: © Stéphane Groleau
Projects throughout the U.S. and Canada showcase the design and environmental traits of large-sca...
read more
Turner Construction is using this card to summarize its program. The "Green" graphic represents how the contractor is elevating what green means, and the three pillars of its program. Image: Turner Construction
The company targets a 50% cut in greenhouse gas emissions and water use from construction activit...
read more
The 159,000-sf Catalyst building will be eastern Washington's first net-zero-energy ready building. Image: McKinstry
Catalyst will be part of an innovation hub, with Eastern Washington University as its main tenant...

Drawing from more than 60 research reports, stok, the global real estate service provider, has calculated how occupancy in high-performance buildings improves the tenant's profitability over a decade. Image: stok
A stok-generated report calculates dollar gains from improvements in employee productivity, reten...
read more
The Morningstar solar house is one of the features at Penn State's Sustainability Experience Center, where the university is contemplating a permanent structure for classrooms, research labs, and offices that would be built to Living Building Challenge standards. Image: Patrick Mansell
The university, encompassing 13 colleges and 24 campuses, adheres to protocols established by the...
read more
SEG’s 12-person team works out of a historic commercial building that has achieved net zero energy using strategies that include waste heat recovery, natural ventilation, a photovoltaic roof system, and real-time energy-use monitoring. Image: HGA
Sustainable Engineering Group will bolster its new owner’s design and planning abilities.

In her talk at Accelerate Live! 2018, micro-buildings design expert Aeron Hodges, AIA, Senior Designer/Manager Stantec Architecture, explored the key drivers of the micro-buildings movement, and how the trend is spreading into a wide variety of building typologies. Photo: BD+C
BD+C’s second annual Accelerate Live! AEC innovation conference (May 10, 2018, Chicago)...
read more


Major cities, like Washington, D.C., make up less than 2% of the world’s landmass, but they contr...
read more
The Living Building at Georgia Tech is on track to become the first Living Building Challenge 3.1-certified facility of its size and function in the Southeast. Image: The Miller Hull Partnership, in collaboration with Lord Aeck Sargent
Sustainability, it’s a trendy term. The problem, however, is that it’s being used in so many diff...
read more
Image courtesy of DoepelStrijkers
The sustainable structure will be a mixed-use development with a hotel, apartments, and office sp...
read more
The research involved investigating the feasibility of adapting the design of a sustainable mixed-use high-rise building in the 2016 New York City market to Passivhaus requirements. Rendering: FXFOWLE
A new study conducted by FXFOWLE shows that Building Teams can meet stringent Passivhaus performa...
read more
Clover Payments, a payments software startup, installed a 30x22-ft living wall in its office in Sunnyvale, Calif., a net-zero-energy building. The wall provides air filtration for the company's tenants. Image: Courtesy Habitat Horticulture
One installer offers his thoughts on why, and what works.

PlanIt Impact's cloud-based platform is helping CB Properties and Milhaus Development plan a $24.3 million mixed-use building on 27th and Troost Streets in Kansas City, which will include 182 market-rate apartments and 12,000 sf of commercial space. The developers are using this platform to better understand operational costs so tenant occupancy would be more affordable. Image; Planit Impact
PlanIt Impact's sustainability scoring is based on myriad government and research data.

Pixabay Public Domain
An expansion of ‘heat networks’ is viewed as a possible means for Britain to accomplish its goal...
read more
Brock Environmental Center in Virginia Beach, Va. Photo: Prakash Patel, courtesy SmithGroupJJR
The education building generated 83% more energy than it consumed over the last year en route to...
read more
University of Florida Health Jacksonville. Images courtesy GS&P.
GS&P's Corie Baker shows how to design and orient a building to efficiently collect or dissip...
read more
Toronto. Image courtesy Perkins+Will.
Perkins+Will's Jon Douglas has eight strategies that will start an organization on the path to em...
read more
Image/ Visualization by Luxigon
The single-story structure is designed for sustainability as well as function.

The 90-sm prototype ICEHouse demonstrates the benefits of circular economy construction at The World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. Photo @2016William McDonough + Partners
ICEHouse is a prototype for temporary, easy-to-assemble structures that deploy locally available...
read more
Aerial photo of the California Aqueduct at the Interstate 205 crossing, just east of Interstate 580 junction. Photo: Kluft via Wikimedia Commons
Data from NASA shows carbon emissions could be the driving force behind devastating water shortag...
read more![6 steps toward better water management [AIA course] 6 steps toward better water management [AIA course]](https://www.bdcnetwork.com/sites/bdc/files/styles/content_feed_medium/public/VanDusen513.026_grassfix_stairfix.jpg?itok=WKQqPjh3)
The VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Centre in Vancouver, B.C. Integrated MEP engineers at Integral Group and structural engineers at Fast + Epp worked with Perkins+Will’s Peter Busby, FRAIC, LEED Fellow, DSC (Hon.), to design this petal-shaped, LEED-NC Platinum building. Photo: Nic Lehoux, courtesy Perkins+Will
When it comes to water conservation, Building Teams tend to concentrate on water-efficient plumbi...
read more