Contract furnishings provider, Hightower received multiple awards at NeoCon 2021, including IIDA's 'Best Small Showroom' (under 4,000 sf) and 'Best of Competition' for its newly designed Chicago showroom.
Humanscale welcomes Elizabeth Margles to its Marketing Division in the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Margles comes to Humanscale with twenty years of experience in design, fashion and retail and a background in public relations and advertising.
The exclusive relationship with Kontrol's BioCloud® Technology will provide real-time detection of airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 to help make workplaces safer as organizations return to the office.
This spring, the American Institute of Architects unveiled the latest updates to its core set of documents, and the addition that has the AEC industry buzzing is the Sustainable Projects Exhibit (E204–2017). Every 10 years, the AIA updates its documents to reflect changes to the industry and set new standards for negotiations between architects, contractors, clients and consultants across the country.
The new carbon calculator from Conservation International gives you a sense of what your impact is, so you can work on making it smaller. But the real changes need to be systemic, not personal.
Along with the growth of workplaces that take sustainability seriously, in offices everywhere nature is increasingly making its presence felt. Plant-studded living walls might have once seemed a fleeting fad, but they’ve put down roots as a perennially covetable feature. Nature is also invading the offices of bluechip companies in the form of spectacular jungle-like internal gardens and courtyards or roof terraces, which offer employees luxuriantly planted outdoor rooms that dissolve the traditional boundary between indoors and out.
Here’s how to close the gap between interior spaces and the outside world. A building’s primary purpose may be to keep the weather out, but most do such an effective job of this that they also inadvertently deprive us of contact with two key requirements for our well-being and effectiveness: nature and change.
Joining the buzz is Platio, a Budapest-based solar paver company that’s already installed public projects in Hungary, Sweden, and Kazakhstan. Platio’s modular solar panel system can be embedded in everything from sidewalks to street furniture and beyond.
all the talk about sustainability among architects hasn’t actually translated into lots of sustainable buildings in the real world. In reality, the industry faces a massive problem: By some estimates, the building sector consumes nearly half of the energy and produces 45 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Many architects have signed on to an industry challenge to become carbon neutral by 2030, but new buildings are already slipping behind the targets to get there. Permissive building codes, industry inertia, and market demands — like clients clamoring for floor-to-ceiling views — have widened the discrepancy between the kind of buildings cities say they want and what they actually allow. So while the industry inches towards better environmental performance, buildings in Boston and other cities still fall short of the sustainability goals that everyone claims to embrace.
Well before the Paris Agreement’s signing, builders and cities have been adopting green building practices, particularly those endorsed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The growth of ENERGY STAR and LEED-certified space in 30 of the largest U.S. office markets has increased steadily over the past 10 years, according to the 2016 National Green Building Adoption Index, a joint report developed in partnership with Maastricht University, CBRE Research and USGBC.
Barely a day passes when we cannot see a new image of turtles malformed after getting caught up in plastic netting or six pack rings, whales beached after choking on dozens of discarded plastic bags they’ve mistaken for food, clogged waterways and oceans, piles of rubbish and beaches that consist in large part of plastic eroded to the size of sand grains.
The San Francisco office of Perkins+Will was recently certified LEED Platinum by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC).
The project’s rigorous performance goals were achieved with a holistic sustainable design approach. The primary design principle was to employ passive strategies to limit solar gain, encourage natural ventilation, and harvest daylight.
Interface has carried on his mission and continued to innovate with research into new products. Their goal is to prove that business can be a climate positive actor.
Hospitality is a competitive marketplace and sustainability is now increasingly mainstream – partly because social responsibility and the environment are becoming more of a focus area within the corporate world
The WELL Building Standard, which builds on the success of and complements the LEED rating system, is playing an increasing role in green building design. WELL is a holistic, evidence-based system for measuring, certifying and monitoring the performance of building features that impact health and well-being. These goals are closely aligned with the USGBC Northern California community’s longtime focus on human health, dating back to its Building Health Initiative that began in 2013.
Interface continues to demonstrate its staying power as a global sustainability leader, recognized for the 20th consecutive year in GlobeScan and SustainAbility's annual Sustainability Leaders Survey. Earning third place in the 20th anniversary of the survey, Interface is the only company to appear on the list each year since the study began in 1997. Additionally, Interface has held its place in the top four amidst an evolving set of companies represented in the report since 1998.
Announcing that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, President Donald Trump misplaced the blame for what ails the coal industry and laid a shaky factual foundation for his decision. A look at some of the claims in a Rose Garden speech and an accompanying fact sheet about the deal to curtail emissions responsible for global warming:
The American Institute of Architects has released a statement in response to President Donald Trump’s decision today to pull the Untied States out of the landmark Paris climate deal. The national organization openly opposed the withdrawal and reaffirmed its commitment to mitigating climate change in the United States and around the world.
Only future generations will be able to calculate the full consequences of President Trump’s incredibly shortsighted approach to climate change, since it is they who will suffer the rising seas and crippling droughts that scientists say are inevitable unless the world brings fossil fuel emissions to heel.
Only two other countries aren’t part of the Paris agreement, the landmark deal to cut climate pollution and keep global temperatures within safe limits. One of them–Syria–is in the middle of a devastating civil war. The other, Nicaragua, thought that the agreement wasn’t ambitious enough. Now the U.S. will join them, despite the fact that the majority of Americans and even polluting companies like Chevron and Exxon think that staying in the agreement was the best decision. The Trump Administration was never planning to be strong on the climate, but even if this decision is largely symbolic, it will have deadly consequences for the planet. And it will sacrifice the ability of the U.S. to be both a moral and technological leader in the most imperative fight–and one of the most viable opportunities for economic growth.
New joint venture will deliver enhanced services and support a broad range of green business tools and programs throughout Canada.
