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4 weeks ago | 
greenbuildingadvisor.com | Justin Wolf
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is coming after America’s green banks. Once you’ve had a moment to process the naked irony of this statement, let us review the facts and what has transpired of late. Green banks have long been considered a reliable institutional response to the climate crisis.
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1 month ago | 
greenbuildingadvisor.com | Justin Wolf
The Edison is officially going up! The planned 31-story, hybrid mass timber building in Milwaukee, being developed by Neutral (formerly the Neutral Project), began construction earlier this month. Appropriately, the building site, which is situated in the city’s Deer District, on the eastern bank of the Milwaukee River, was once a lumberyard. When completed, the Edison will become the world’s tallest mass timber residential building.
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1 month ago | 
greenbuildingadvisor.com | Justin Wolf
The strongest structural shape is the arch. (To all proponents of the triangle, I’ll see you in the comments.) As a model for compression-focused design, the arch represents one of the oldest forms of construction, dating back to ancient Rome. And because compressive forces are distributed efficiently along its surface, an arch can span wide distances without the aid of other large structural supports like beams and columns.
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1 month ago | 
metropolismag.com | Justin Wolf
The Taiwanese project byBio-architecture Formosana claims to be the first residential village in the country to be integrated within a circular economy. Green buildings alone cannot save our environment.
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1 month ago | 
greenbuildingadvisor.com | Justin Wolf
The city of Cambridge, Mass., famed for being the home of Harvard, MIT, and the birthplace of the Continental Army preceding the American Revolution, is a town of immense wealth, historical heritage, and very old buildings. As the fourth largest city in the state, there are several things that make Cambridge unique.
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1 month ago | 
greenbuildingadvisor.com | Justin Wolf
Waste comes in many forms. When it comes to felled timber and lumber products especially, any and all waste is a serious problem. In past pieces for GBA, I have written about the need for larger industry players to better synergize their operations. “The waste industry is not connected to the lumber industry,” Eric Law, co-founder of Urban Machine, told me in 2023.
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1 month ago | 
greenbuildingadvisor.com | Justin Wolf
The state with the fastest-growing market of renewable energy is Texas. Last year the Lone Star State deployed more solar capacity and energy storage than any other state (including California!), owing largely to the abundance of cheap land and an isolated electricity market that places comparatively few logistical burdens for new energy projects to interconnect with the grid.
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2 months ago | 
greenbuildingadvisor.com | Justin Wolf
A North American trade war is looming. For context, the cumulative value of items traded between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico is more than $1.5 trillion, according to U.S. government data. The potential impacts of the U.S. trading tariffs with its neighbors to the north and south are now coming into focus, and the prognosis is bleak.
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2 months ago | 
greenbuildingadvisor.com | Justin Wolf
Does the U.S. have an energy crisis? According to at least one source, yes. On January 20, minutes removed from Donald Trump taking the oath of office, the White House released an executive order declaring a “National Energy Emergency.” “The energy and critical minerals identification, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, and generation capacity of the United States are all far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs,” the order reads.
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2 months ago | 
greenbuildingadvisor.com | Justin Wolf
As we ease into 2025, we are contending with the established reality that the last few years haven’t been great for the construction and home building industry. By some accounts, downward trends have been unfolding for the better part of the last two decades. Looking back, the biggest contributor was the Great Recession, when housing starts in the U.S. hit an all-time low of 478,000 in April 2009.
