green building
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Live your tiny house fantasies by renting one on AirBnB
The highest-rated listing on AirBnB, the site that allows you to rent homes, apartments and other temporary quarters as an alternative to staying in a hotel, is a tiny house. The Mushroom Dome Cabin in Aptos, Calif., sports a loft bed under its geodesic dome roof and is in walking distance of a grove of […]
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Making federal buildings green cuts costs by a fifth
Paging Ron Paul: Once you're done transforming the U.S. into a neo-feudal patriarchy whose fiefs are ruled by their respective John Galts, you could make a huge dent in whatever government spending is left by simply making the feds' buildings "green." That's the conclusion of a new report [PDF] from the Department of Energy's Pacific […]
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Old-school flower house leaves LEED in the dust
This is not your grandmother’s flower house.Photo: c/o Phipps ConservatoryThe Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh is the kind of place your grandmother would have loved. You know the routine — the spring tulip show, a whole room full of orchids, 5,000 varieties of rosebush. Housed in a classic Victorian glass house, it’s the kind of place […]
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Putting the wilderness back in our cities
Neil Chambers’ new book, Urban Green: Architecture for the Future, is a study in imprecision. Ankle deep and a mile wide, the book reads like a half-baked primer in green design and conservation science. It could have used another year or two in the oven. It’s too bad. At the heart of this book — […]
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Which green home solutions pay for themselves?
Trick question: They basically all pay for themselves in the long run! But a new infographic from One Block Off the Grid helps you choose home energy improvement projects based on up-front cost and how long they'll take to start paying you back. The quickest payback is a smart thermostat, with a payback time of […]
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Tile your roof with solar shingles
If you want to generate some solar energy but don't want to have weird-looking solar panels on your roof, Dow Solar has a solution for you. The company has achieved solar shingularity: Its roof shingles are solar panels! The solar panels are shingles! The discerning homeowner can live out green dreams while still conforming to […]
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Universities try to out-green each other in bid for NYC science campus
New York City is fielding proposals from universities to build a new science and technology campus on Roosevelt Island, and the competition is showing how desirable green buildings are becoming. The two front-runners, Cornell and Stanford, are falling over themselves to offer all manner of green features in their plans: acres of solar panels, geothermal […]
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The world's first vertical forest is under construction in Milan
We've pretty much established that trees are awesome -- they make you smart, improve your home's value, filter pollution, provide shade, and produce oxygen. But even in a city that prioritizes green spaces, surface area is at a premium. How do you provide enough trees while still living densely? Milan, Italy, has a creative answer: a forest in the form of a skyscraper.
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If you want a green building, make it out of wood
The third little pig might have staved off disaster, but the second little pig was the greenest, according to the USDA. The agency looked at dozens of studies comparing wood to concrete and steel and declared wood the winner when it comes to emissions. Attempts to use materials other than wood in construction yield, on average, 2.1 tons more greenhouse gases per ton of material.
