Function Follows Form: A conference center’s soaring roof multitasks to green effect
June 2009
In Los Angeles, Marmol Radziner designed a new facility for TreePeople, an organization that plants trees and promotes water conservation and sustainability throughout the city.

Image © Benny Chan

Sip Lightly: In Las Vegas, a refresher course in the preciousness of water
May 2009
Tate Snyder Kimsey designed The Origen, a visitors center for the Las Vegas Springs Preserve, to draw attention to the finite resource that makes the desert city habitable.

Image courtesy Tate Snyder Kimsey

Going Native: A contemporary visitor’s center rooted in local inspirations and resources
April 2009
How do you design a facility suited to showing contemporary art, but connected to regional traditions and local resources? Peter Franck and Kathleen Triem of F:T Architecture + Interiors solve the problem with a building for the Omi International Arts Center.

Photo © Mark Larosa

Coming Out of the Dark: A former Federal Reserve bunker protects a different kind of currency
March 2009
BAR Architects turns a former Federal Reserve bunker—it protected $3 billion in U.S. currency during the cold war—into a conservation facility for some six million films, sound recordings, videotapes, and other audio-visual materials from the Library of Congress.

Photo courtesy BAR Architects / © Rien van Rijthoven

Light Fantastic: A school facility shows off a variety of daylighting techniques
Febuary 2009
When Barba + Wheelock and Winter & Company designed a Maine classroom building, they wanted to maximize passive solar heating—but blasting the interiors with distracting levels of daylight was not an option. Instead, the facility combines multiple daylighting strategies.

Photo © Brian Vanden Brinck

Water World: A giant rainwater cistern is transformed into the centerpiece of an Australian getaway
January 2009
Australia’s Paul Morgan Architects creatively incorporated a rainwater cistern into a vacation home. It not only supplies water for a number of uses and provides effective passive cooling in the summer; it also plays an important role in the house’s design and structure.

Photo © Peter Bennetts

Off the Wall: Trombe walls at a visitor’s center bask in the sunshine
December 2008
Lord, Aeck & Sargent reinvent a method of passive solar heating popularized in the 1960s for a project in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Photo © Jonathan Hillyer

Natural Healing: An Exemplary Healthcare Environment Hits the Road
November 2008
Anshen + Allen’s exhibition “Greening the Patient Experience” offers an object lesson for making healthcare design more sustainable.

Photo © Desroches Photography

Park(ing) Garages
October 2008
This month, we profile a Portland, Oregon, firm’s solution for getting a church’s underground parking structure into the green spirit.

Photo © Michael Mathers

Daylighting for Deep Interiors
September 2008
This month, we profile a Kansas City, Missouri, renovation project by BNIM Architects and the unique solution that the firm devised for letting natural light penetrate deep into a million-plus-square-foot warehouse.

Photo © Farshid Assassi