A short article on upgrading a Victorian house in London to meet the Passive House standard.  They don’t quite achieve the very low energy use threshold of Passive House but the story does show how much is possible, as well as far we still have to come.

For Europe.  Why can’t we have one?

This project in Italy by Renzo Piano is staggering; a volcano shaped “commercial center” (read: mall) complete with verdant slopes and a pine forest in the central courtyard, or is that the ash dome? It’s a stunning piece of architecture, the sort of elegant integration of modernity and environmental responsiveness I am always hoping will become the norm.  The massive sea of parking that surrounds it, however, detracts rather heavily from the Arcadian imagery. It’s a shame that public transportation to this commercial center does not appear to be an option.

I’ve posted about the Passive House Diary before.  Bill Butcher of the oddly named Green Building Store is cataloguing their construction of a single family house in the UK (Yorkshire, to be specific) to the German Passivhaus standard.  They’ve progressed significantly and are now making the structure truly airtight, one of the major differences between this sort of project and standard construction.  I am amazed by the detail Butcher delivers in his diary entries.  The latest is here.  If you haven’t been following the diary you can begin here.

The winter gift season keeps on giving.  I had not seen this post over at the UK Architect’s Journal outlining the creation of public Christmas tree sculpture from 35 recycled bicycles.  Those damn Brits are so clever.

A fascinating project in England to build a modern, extremely efficient, prefabricated home from straw bale.  We need a lot more of this sort of project that embraces ancient, low-impact technology (straw bale) and figures out how to implement it within our mechanized, industrial system of building construction.  The results have enormous potential to prove that a straw bale house need not look like something out of Hobbiton, and is a replicable technology with broad appeal and application.

A great, albeit discouraging, graph over at Revkin’s DotEarth blog documenting the distance between the current pledges of CO2 reduction in Copenhagen and the “safe zone” goal the G8 agreed to target. And of course no one is talking much about the tragic disparity between the stated CO2 reduction goals of the developed world and our INCREASING drive to open up more fossil fuel supply. Have you heard of the tar sands pipeline? If you are going to stop burning the stuff you’ve got to stop digging it up, right?

There have been so many reports and studies verifying the low cost carbon emission reductions available through building retrofitting that the subject is no longer really news.  But following on efforts by the World Green Building Council to place building efficiency high on the Copenhagen agenda, a few experts are hoping they can get the attention of this critical international summit. The authors of an international guide to retrofitting office buildings point out that a 30% reduction in building carbon emissions is possible through low cost solutions. And the Carbon Trust is making similar recommendations for the UK in particular, but the international implications are crystal clear- improving building efficiency is among the most effective and least expensive means of reducing global CO2 output.

Der Spiegel considers the feasibility of some of the stranger schemes to introduce urban farm skyscrapers.

The NYT notes a new report from Osram on the efficiency of LEDs. We are going to dig deeper into this report but the findings seem to strongly favor LEDs. Of course- one of the major issues of LEDs is not addressed- the number of really badly manufactured LED fixtures are on the market.

And in another article the NYT notes improvements introduced by, Luminanz, a small British firm.