A conference focusing on "green" building issues is expected to draw several hundred attendees to the Hawaii Convention Center Tuesday and Wednesday.

Resource Interactive: 2008-05-19

“LEED 2009” focuses on energy and carbon performance of buildings, transparent “weightings” and regional LEED credits (PRWeb May 19, 2008)

Read the full story at http://ww1.prweb.com/releases/Green_building/sustainable_construction/prweb956214.htm

HALIFAX, May 12 /CNW/ - Alex Wilson, President of BuildingGreen Inc. and also known as "The Dean of Green", will headline a series of workshops across Atlantic Canada, where he will speak to promine...
[in CNW Group]

Building Simulation: An International Journal
http://www.springerlink.com/content/1996-3599

Building Simulation: An International Journal will publish original, high quality, peer-reviewed research papers and review articles dealing with modeling and simulation of buildings including their systems. The goal is to promote building research by utilizing various modeling approaches. Of particular interest are papers that reflect recent development and application of modeling tools and their impacts on advances of building science and technology. Papers are submitted on:
* Theoretical and numerical modeling of building physics including heat and mass (moisture, air pollutants) transfer, air movement, architectural lighting and sound/vibration control systems.

* Simulation of performance of energy supply systems including heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems, renewable energy systems, thermal storage, district heating and cooling, combined heating and power systems.

* Modeling health, productivity, thermal comfort of humans, fire/smoke and emergency control systems, cold/hot water supply systems, sewage systems. Simulation of building chemistry.

* Advances in modeling including optimization, product modeling, fault detection and diagnostics, inverse models.

* Advances in software interoperability, validation and calibration techniques.

* Simulation tools for sustainable buildings and experiences on teaching building simulation.

TAMPA -- As part of the city's effort to promote environmentally sustainable construction, building officials are shaving three to five days off the permitting process for developers of green projects.

Organizers expected to see about 70 people attend their first meeting last Thursday to form a new Rhode Island chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council, designed to promote green building standards throughout the state.

Interested in finding out how your building, or building design, rates in terms of energy usage and carbon emissions? Integrated Environmental Solutions is making it a lot easier to do so.

In line with its commitment to the sustainable building design movement and responding to Architecture 2030 Challenge, IES on May 14 announced the release of VE-Ware, freely downloadable software that enables building owners, facilities managers and architects to analyze, better understand and take steps to increase the energy efficiency and reduce the carbon emissions associated with existing and planned buildings.

The free version of the tool provides limited, but potentially valuable, access to IES’s Virtual Environment (VE) Apache thermal analysis software. Users input specs on their buildings’ geometry and use it in tandem with international data on climatic conditions and typical characteristics of different building, room design and systems types to assess energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.

Simulated assessment outputs include a comparison of buildings’ energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions with the US benchmark for the Architecture 2030 Challenge, which shoots for realizing 50% reductions in energy usage for all new buildings and major renovations.

Model inputs currently have to be exported from Autodesk’s Building Information Modeling Revit platform but IES intends to expand the range of input options over coming months, according to a company press release.

“I expect VE-Ware to make a considerable difference in helping reduce the energy consumption of buildings throughout the world. As a direct response to the Architecture 2030 challenge and other international green building regulations, standards and codes, VE-Ware gives everyone the capability to get involved in mitigating climate change,” Dr. Don McLean, IES founder and managing director stated.

(Please click the headline if you would like to comment on this post)

Green" building near Gramercy Park
[in Technorati NYC]

One useful guide to environmentally sensitive building products is "Green Building Products: The GreenSpec Guide to Residential Building Materials," by Alex Wilson and Mark Piepkorn. (New Society Publishers, $37.95)

(((Gosh, these are the best Lovecraftian architectural musings I've read all week.)))

http://www.aggregat456.com/2008/05/anti-architecture-of-hp-lovecraft.html Link: a456: The Anti-Architecture of H.P. Lovecraft.

(...)

"The novelist John Banville, writing in a 2005 issue of Artforum, even notes when Lovecraft moved to New York in 1924 with his wife, he "found the city a great and, despite an initial period of uncharacteristic uncheeriness, terrible shock; the baroque metropolises of his fiction, infested with monstrous beings, are his response to the spectacle of New York in the early years of the Roaring Twenties." Banville then quotes a particularly gruesome bit from Lovecraft's "He" (1939): "Garish daylight shewed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantasis of climbing, spreading stone ... the throngs of people that seethed through the flumelike streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes" [3].

"But perhaps the greatest enthusiast of Lovecraft's architectural pretense is French novelist Michel Houellebecq. His strange meditation, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (2005), plays up the architectural musings in Lovecraft's fiction. Houellebecq is so fascinated by this most "anti-literal" of authors that he begins deploying Lovecraft's own persona into his writing...."

Hi, I found this Steve jobs Video, It really did changed my life! Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA[^] Do watch it, and reply, wat do u think, we must DO, DO and just DO. Cheers, Ravi S ravifree@gmail.com, //A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, //butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, //balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, //take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, //analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a //tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is //for insects. //- -Lazarus Long ravis

is opening the fridge for lunch and seeing an icy cold bottle of your favorite beer on a humid day. Not that I think one beer is a problem during lunch at work, I used to have a beer at lunch with my co-workers all the time. I just know I can't stop at one today. A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long

Cambridge University professor Andy Hopper is leading a team ofresearchers at the Cambridge Computer Lab that will focus on ways computingtechnology can help maintain our current way of life and give more peopleaccess to the comfort, safety, and pleasures of technology whileapproaching the problem of building a sustainable and supportable economywith a focus on its environmental impact. The research effort, dubbed"Computing for the Future of the Planet," is examining whether digitalalternatives to physical activities such as shopping really make adifference, and if the environmental cost of creating an iTunes economy isactually greater than the CD-based economy that preceded it. During aspeech about such issues at the Royal Society, Hopper suggested that weshould start placing server farms near renewable sources of energy, as itis a lot cheaper to transmit data than to transmit energy and the datanetworks are often already in place. Doing so would require making cloudcomputing an effective tool so processing tasks can be distributed over thenetwork from desktop computers, laptops, and even mobile phones. Societyalso needs data centers that can cope with varying power supplies so serverfarms only use electricity that is locally generated. The Cambridgeresearch could be seen as overly optimistic, writes Bill Thompson, but hesays such research efforts, combined with small changes in our wastefullifestyles, offer hope.

In January, one of my Muay Thai instructor's best young students broke his ankle and foot in a car accident. The rub is that this kid was scheduled to fight in June. Long story short, I was asked to fill in and said ok. I've been dieting and training like crazy ever since. I'll be stepping back into full contact competition for the first time since I was 22. To date myself , it's been 13 years. Now, I'm getting really excited and felling a bit of trepidation. So, if my feet don't get too cold, I'll be fighting agin for the last time in 30 Days. Anybody else got something exciting coming up next month? A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long modified on Friday, May 9, 2008 5:49 PM

In January, one of my Muay Thai instructor's best young students broke his ankle and foot in a car accident. The rub is that this kid was scheduled to fight in June. Long story short, I was asked to fill in and said ok. I've been dieting and training like crazy ever since. I'll be stepping back into full contact competition for the first time since I was 22. To date myself , it's been 13 years. Now, I getting really excited and felling a bit of trepidation. So, if my feet don't get too cold, I'll be fighting agin for the last time in 30 Days. Anybody else got something exciting coming up next month? A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - -Lazarus Long

Mukesh Ambani , the fifth richest man in the world, the 22-story home you share with your wife and three children is a little too close for comfort. The Indian businessman is currently building the wo...
[in NY Daily News]

PISCATAWAY, N.J., April 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Demands for occupant comfort, energy efficiency and total cost of ownership continue to increase, placing added pressure on building professio...