The NYCx initiative, a collaborative effort between the tech industry and the New York City’s mayor’s office, has announced the names of the 22 tech leaders who will be advising the program’s efforts to use smart city ideas to tackle urban issues. First announced in October of last year by Mayor Bill de Blasio, NYCx was designed to tackle pollution,

At the age of 26, eight years after I had left the comfort and safety of my parents’ mid-90s brick-and-vinyl ranch, I moved into my first apartment with central air conditioning. For many of us in the United States, central air is a given—a background whisper to contemporary life, acknowledged only when it stops working

The Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC) describes itself as “an industry-based, nonprofit corporation created to facilitate the development, use, and testing of energy-efficient, durable, healthy, and cost-effective building technologies for people living in circumpolar regions around the globe.” Aaron Cooke, the architect who leads the Sustainable Northern Communities Program at the CCHRC in Fairbanks, Alaska, is

AGENCY Architecture is located in El Paso, Texas, and our work has focused largely on ideas that shape our border-adjacent desert context, with a particular sensitivity to social issues, ecological instability, and resource depletion. Current work is looking at the Chihuahuan Desert—a unique and uniquely challenged binational territory that crosses the U.S.-Mexico border. Here, climate

Sandeep Ahuja, co-founder of cove.tool, brings her experience of working on over 200 high performance projects. Most recently, Sandeep presented at the UN environment assembly, with 1500 global delegates, on the impact of buildings on climate change, showcased at the Tedx Atlanta and won the Forbes 30 under 30 for developing cove.tool, the automated sustainability

Tamar Warburg AIA, LEED AP BD+C works with Sasaki teams to develop sustainability and resilience goals appropriate for each project and access critical resources to reach those goals. She enjoys collaborating to integrate sustainability considerations throughout the design process, from preliminary programming through construction management practices. In this era of climate change, she believes that

Europe has, as of late, become the site of robust environmental technological developments designed to reduce global waste and carbon emissions, from BIG’s waste-to-power plant in Copenhagen to a proposal for a mass timber neighborhood in Sweden. As of last Wednesday, it has also become the site of the latest advancement in carbon capture technology. 

In September of 2020, Sebastian Aristotelis and Karl-Johan Sorensen, founders of SAGA Space Architects, embarked on a three-month mission to Northern Greenland in hopes of simulating the experience of living on the Moon. Drawing inspiration from the tradition of origami folding and the form of a budding leaf, SAGA designed a habitat specifically for the

It’s a well-known fact that buildings painted lighter colors reflect more light: it’s what made New York City’s plan to combat the urban heat island effect and lower cooling bills by painting roofs white so effective. Now, scientists have discovered a “whitest-white” paint that reflects 95.5 percent of light, a potential boon for passive cooling

It should, perhaps, come as no surprise that the “city of canals” is being threatened by rising tides. It has been less than a year since Venice, Italy, experienced its highest level of flooding in half a century years, as two-thirds of the city was swamped in mid-November. Some areas saw as much as six

If you mingle within the spheres of design and architecture, I’m sure you’ve seen them. They dwell within endlessly scrollable design websites and social media feeds; some even make it to print. Slick renderings of tree-lined balconies and floating cities; design “solutions” involving AI or 3D printing or bitcoin or whatever the new tech buzzword

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE) has announced that architect and entrepreneur Dennis Shelden will be taking over as its director. The academic-industrial research and teaching alliance, focused on using technology to address concerns of “built ecology,” was founded in 2007, and is located across RPI’s main campus in Troy, New

Construction remains one of the most carbon-intensive industries, with materials often contributing significantly to the final project’s total pollution (concrete production, for example, is responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions). A report from the Carbon Leadership Forum, a network of academics and industry professionals hosted at the University of Washington to focus on reducing

Human-driven climate change is threatening the coastal areas that nearly half of the world calls home with rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms. While dams, barriers, dredging, and artificial reefs are sometimes used to address these “forces of nature,” these strategies come with their own drawbacks and, in some cases, significant environmental and ecological

Londoners will see the Thames in a whole new light beginning this summer. In a collaboration between British architecture firm Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands (LDS) and U.S. artist Leo Villareal, up to 15 London bridges—including UNESCO World Heritage sites—will be outfitted with an array of new lighting for at least the next decade. The project, called Illuminated

Global construction continues to steam ahead, even while seemingly mundane building materials (like sand) become rarer and more precious, and construction industry’s carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global climate change. The building industry seems to be demanding new solutions, but scalable alternatives remain scarce. Enter the Block Research Group at ETH Zurich. The group, which is

The ongoing threat of climate change and hazardous air quality in urban environments continue to foster sustainable elements within architectural design, ranging from the installation of photovoltaic panels to rainwater harvesting mechanisms. But what if a facade curtain could directly capture CO2? Responding to this challenge, London-based practice ecoLogicStudio, led by Claudio Pasquero and Marco Poletto, unveiled Photo.Synth.Etica at Dublin’s Climate Innovation Summit 2018. The large-scale

Smart City Expo World Congress, held this year in Barcelona, is an annual architectural, engineering, and technology exhibition dedicated to creating a better future for cities worldwide through social collaboration and urban innovation. Among the projects that were unveiled at this November’s event was CityIQ’s proposal to install 4,200 sensor nodes throughout San Diego, California, a major tech

The New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman once asked, “Do you know what my favorite renewable fuel is? An ecosystem for innovation.” If you pose the same question to Pavegen founder and CEO Laurence Kemball-Cook, his answer would most likely be: foot traffic. That’s because Kemball-Cook, who is passionate about climate change, believes “technology alone

Art and architecture have always been inexorably intertwined, as new innovations in materials and construction allow buildings to rise higher and branch out into experimental new forms. But after concrete, high-rise timber, and advances in digital design, how will the field continue to progress? What new technologies and typologies will arise in the future, and

A new plugin for Revit offers architects the opportunity to make informed material choices for building designs that put carbon reduction at front of mind. Tally Climate Action Tool, or tallyCAT for short, is a free open-access digital tool launched by nonprofit organization Building Transparency, Perkins&Will, and C-Change Labs. Work on Tally began in the

Miami-Dade County is known for its art deco buildings, subtropical climate, and a youthful exuberance ready to embrace the moment as exemplified by Maurizio Cattelan’s 2019 Banana at Art Basel. Miami-Dade is also notorious for hurricanes, looming sea level rise, and pioneering rigorous structural building codes coined the “Dade County Code” that set global standards

In May 2020, facing mounting criticism from privacy advocates, Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel Doctoroff announced that the Google-backed company was scrapping its smart city project in the Quayside neighborhood of Toronto. With its passing, there was a sense among critics that some sort of evil had been defeated—that the little guy had won and Alphabet/Google had been

In recent years, experiments in architecture have produced forms, moods, and effects that resist easy labeling. Still, some have tried putting a name to this diverse, variegated work: the “postdigital.” The term was first popularized by the British architect Sam Jacobs, who considered postdigital drawing (often taking the form of collage) to be a meaningful

Two weeks before Kate Wagner published her scathing treatise of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as simply an outgrowth of high-money architectural speculation, a Paul Rudolph-designed home in Westchester County, New York, hit the market as an NFT. The Edersheim Residence, located at 862 Fenimore Road in Larchmont, was originally built in 1958 and then later altered in 1982 by Rudolph at the

There is a prevailing sense among proponents of mass timber that building with wood is inherently good. This enthusiasm is largely premised on a key assumption that if a tree sequesters carbon as it grows, then mass timber building components must count as stored carbon. But if the source of that wood—a forest—is a source of carbon emissions, as is beginning

Architectural designer Jennifer Bonner and engineer Hanif Kara have a beef with mass timber, or, rather, the singular meaning its proponents ascribe to the term. The sustainability benefits of engineered wood products like cross-laminated timber (CLT) have overtaken the discourse around them, the duo finds. Manufacturers have an overwhelming influence on the design of timber buildings, many of which simply

There was a time when the internet, then new, and untested, was widely welcomed as a revolutionary technology that promised to alleviate—even fix—many of the evils then affecting late modern societies. That brief, juvenile spell was followed by almost 20 years of remorse and misgivings: from the early 2000s to this past month the internet,

Doctor Upali Nanda is reimagining the role of the architect. Where design today is often top-down and architects move on to new projects before doors of the project open, Nanda believes the role of architecture is to create living systems that respond to inhabitants’ changing needs, and architects have to stay involved during occupancy to