I’ve been exploring various aspects of living or green roofs since I first started my own architectural practice about ten years ago. In fact my very first project was to fix up a shingled Victorian in San Francisco. It had a tiny garage in front of the house dating back to 1912 and a nice [...]

My wife, Cathy, and I really liked our one-story cottage near downtown Palo Alto, but the floor plan didn’t work for us at all. The most direct path to the backyard was through the master bedroom, and loving to backyard-entertain as we do, running through our bedroom with plates of meat headed to the grill [...]

On the central plateau of Kenya, near the lush city of Nyeri, the windswept arid town of Mweiga stands in the shadow of Mount Kenya.  Locals diligently farm the land, but their livelihoods are beholden to an average of 6” of rain per year.  Despite the lack of water, the people have a thirst to [...]

If you’re remodeling or building a home, you know that California has some of the toughest energy codes in the nation, and getting tougher every couple of years.  From a lighting perspective that means that lighting must be highly energy efficient. Luckily, we have a tiny new player in the world of lighting: Solid State [...]

People often ask me to recommend the ‘greenest’ hardwood flooring option, expecting me to tell them to use reclaimed wood or Bamboo, and they’re shocked to hear my answer. After years of witnessing the impacts of our purchasing decisions on forests worldwide, I tell them to use FSC-certified tropical hardwood. Reclaimed wood and Bamboo are [...]

I recently wanted to build a home. After spending over 30 years in the energy industry focusing on energy efficiency, energy R&D, environmental issues, and energy policy, I wanted this home to be energy efficient. My wife wanted our home to look very beautiful, and be “green”. A LEED home sounded nice. We didn’t really [...]

Comprising 70 percent of our bodies, covering 70 percent of our earth’s surface, and providing more than 50 percent of the world’s ‘renewable’ energy, water is also the ultimate adaptor: evaporating, condensing, crystallizing, icing, melting, flowing and filling, according to its environment. The beauty of water, and its emotional power as a latent energy force, [...]

Competitions give us a chance to elevate the ideas of transforming our existing cities into something new, inspiring and green.  Tackling the environmental challenges of dense living has been a theme of the eVolo Magazine’s Skyscraper Competition for the past few years.  Their forms reflect idealism and digital visualization, yet the ideas face real-life problems. [...]

In this video, lighting designer and author Randall Whitehead IALD discusses energy-efficient lighting design.  With several examples of LED and fluorescent lighting, Randall dispels the myth that a compromise in design must be made when choosing these efficient, long life alternatives to incandescent lighting. Click here for the video.

With so much buzz surrounding the modern green movement - grant money, tax credits, and an ever increasing market demand - there is an important question of the associated role of water and where it stands.  Energy, for the most part has been a topic that has elicited an enormous political response, especially, at the federal and [...]