The 2012 What Makes it Green Award Winners were announced April 18th, at Seattle City Hall. Established over a decade ago, by the AIA Seattle Committee on the Environment… (COTE), these awards recognize outstanding regional sustainable design, through a process designed to help other design professionals and interested parties to

Check out this article by HOK titled “The Path to Net Zero C o2urt – Where Form Follows Performance”.  An integrated design team led by HOK and energy and daylighting consultant The Weidt Group… undertook a 10-month virtual design charrette to create a prototype market-rate, zero-emissions design for a

To help round out your integrated design toolbox, NEEA’s BetterBricks – in collaboration with the University of Oregon’s Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory – developed a new interactive resource:  http://designsynthesis.betterbricks.com…. This video-driven website describes the four major elements of integrated design, articulates important differences between the design process and

…How does the scope of energy modeling change to better support the integrated design process? This is a question that leading designers and NEEA’s BetterBricks have been grappling to answer. We have been promoting an integrated design approach that emphasizes the synthesis of energy efficient solutions from opportunities related to

Part II:
Integrated Design, MEEB and The Green Studio Handbook: Environmental Strategies for Schematic Design
This is the second of two interviews with the authors of the Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings (MEEB)… Alison Kwok, Professor of Architecture, University of Oregon, and Walter Grondzik, Professor of Architecture, Ball State

Are you hankering to design an ambitious Net-Zero Energy Building (NZEB), but you just can’t overcome your assessment of the potential risk? Ever wanted the designers and project managers who have been there before you to whisper lessons learned into your ear? Well, here’s your chance to hear from some…

The aim of Rocky Mountain Institute’s Built Environment Team (BET)  is to transform the built environment into a sustainable and regenerative global ecology.  With an emphasis on achieving energy efficiency through integrated design, the BET has contributed to numerous high-performance projects throughout the world.  Two of the projects they’ve worked…

The Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance’s BetterBricks initiative congratulates the Seattle AIA 2010 What Makes It Green Award winners and the Seattle AIA and Seattle COTE for an outstanding program and process. The program culminated in the 11th annual awards event held in Seattle on June 2^nd…. This came

Students in one Portland, Oregon middle school just earned some serious bragging rights among their peers.  The Evans – Harvard High Performance Classroom at the da Vinici Arts Middle School… was recently awarded LEED platinum certification – the first K-12 public school building to achieve this level of certification. The

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A groundbreaking new research effort reveals how hospitals, which account for four percent of all energy consumed in the U.S., can achieve a 60 percent reduction in energy utility use by redesigning the way they use energy. A newly constructed, code-compliant hospital in the Northwest following the process and employing strategies