As those who work in the field know, old buildings can also be sustainable buildings. A LEED green building certification is often associated with modern new office towers, but in fact, some of our oldest structures benefit the most from sustainability upgrades. Increasing energy efficiency and...
Editor's note: Twenty years ago the U.S. Green Building Council helped take the concept of “green building” mainstream with the launch of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system. Today, LEED is written into building codes across the country, guiding not only the...
Homes constitute the largest number of historic properties in the United States. The actual number of older residential properties listed in or eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places is in the millions. A 1997 study by the U.S. Energy Administration estimated that 18.1...
Last year I moderated a session at the 2008 National Preservation Conference in Tulsa, Okla., titled “How Green Is Your Historic Neighborhood?” The session description stated that “Most green building efforts have focused on commercial construction, but this is about to change...
Buildings are the largest contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming—and making buildings more energy efficient is one of the most immediate and measurable ways to address this growing concern. The advantages of “green buildings” are well documented:...
Climate change has put us all on the defensive. Preservationists, in particular, are defending their sites and their value system. On the one hand, they are devising physical defenses for historic resources threatened by flooding and other effects of global warming, and on the other, they are...
A page has turned. In decades hence, 2006 may well be regarded as the year when the national discussion about the future of our cities, perhaps our civilization, changed from a debate over whether human impacts on the environment are leading to potentially severe problems to one focused on what...
"Cultural resource preservation is intrinsically a form of sustainable conservation. The built environment represents the embodied energy of past civilizations… historic preservation is conservation in every sense of the word.” 1 Preserving a building is often called the ultimate recycling...
Sustainable and Resilient Communities: A Comprehensive Action Plan for Towns, Cities and Regions by Stephen Coyle, AIA, LEED AP, CNU is an insightful and well-thought-out manual for municipalities in need of some soul-searching into their planning methodology. A co-founder of the National...
By Mark Huppert It’s not often a cause or a movement has the opportunity to magnify its reach in one fell swoop, but after attending Greenbuild 2013 , the annual gathering of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), in Philadelphia this past November, clearly the preservation movement and...