The international conferences and workshops for young architects, designers, landscape architects and graduate students will be continued with four events in Israel, Thessaloniki, Krakow and Rome this year.

ECOWEEK 2011 in Athens offers an international conference and interdisciplinary design workshops for young architects, designers, landscape architects and graduate students.

Is it possible to certificate sustainbale urban development? Vacuum insulation or eco-theckness? Heating and cooling with heat pumps - these are the main topics of the Green English issue 1/2011.

Arup Associates has been awarded the title „Sustainable Designer of the Year“ in the Sustainability Awards 2010. Moreover, the practice received the „Sustainable Project of the Year (over £10M)“ Award for its BSkyB HQ project in West London.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics (IBP) intends to address sustainable and climate-conscious construction in different climate zones more strongly in the future. A fundamental part of this research project will be formed by an international graduate school – Climate Culture Building (CCB) – which is to support implementation of the relevant basic research.

The five winners of the Aga Khan Award 2010 – the most important architectural prize in the Muslim world – were announced in Doha recently. They include two European projects.

The issue is discussing the new EU regulations for the energy efficiency of buildings and presents a variety of examples. Further topics are heat accumulators, LED, and plastics.

Ecobuild is back on 1–3 March 2011 at its new home: The biggest event in the world for sustainable design, construction and the built environment will run at London’s ExCeL exhibition and conference centre.

The office building “Harmonia 57” in São Paulo is a hybrid of building, sculpture and machine, which, with its informal outwardly appearance, blends in perfectly with the urban chaos of the city inhabited by 11 million people. For the innovative building concept, the French-Brazilian architecture firm Triptyque received the main prize in this year’s Zumtobel Group Award.

Leading topics: The 2000 watt society - vision and reality / architectural integration of solar thermal systems / sustainable building with concrete

On April 15 and 16, 2010, Budapest will be the venue of this year’s „Build Green CEE“ congress. The event, which is organized in collaboration with the region’s Green Building council, aims to provide a broad overview of recent developments in sustainable construction in Central and Eastern Europe.

The Delft-based cepezed architects will design the new headquarters of Environment Brussels, the former Brussels Institute for Management of the Environment. The building, which is located in one of the larges urban renewal areas in the Belgian capital, is scheduled to achieve the Passive House Standard.

In downtown Dallas, a former parking lot is set to be transformed into one of the first truly sustainable building blocks in the United States. „Forwarding Dallas“ by Portuguese architects Atelier Data and Moov will feature roof gardens and 100% renewable energy supply.

Maya Lin, the architect of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., has completed a new sculpture for the Renzo-Piano-designed California Academy of Sciences. The cone-shaped artwork entitled „What is missing“ is part of a multi-sited, „multimedia memorial“ dedicated to species which have become extinct due to climate change and destruction of habitats.

Prof. Dr. Michael Bauer, Peter Mösle and Dr. Michael Schwarz offer a Green Building guide for principals, architects and planners. The English-language edition of their book entitled “Green Building – Guidebook for Sustainable Architecture” has been published by Springer.

As part of the ‘Green Architecture for the Future’ exhibition (on show until Dec. 18th), the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art invited the Danish architecture firm 3XN to design a pavilion demonstrating cutting edge possibilities with sustainable and intelligent materials. The result is a Moebius strip made of cork and bio-resin that features self-cleaning surfaces, phase changing materials and built-in sensors that generate energy from the footsteps of the visitors.

Congresses and cultural events can also be managed on a zero-carbon basis. But not all organisers go so far as the Bauhaus University of Weimar did with its campus cinema project. A team of students under the guidance of Professors Jürgen Ruth and Rainer Gumpp erected a cinema pavilion there in which all the energy required for construction and ongoing operations is generated by the building itself.

The landscape around Stoke-on-Trent in northwestern England is known for its lakes and canals. On Westport Lake, a new Visitors Center (rated BREEAM Excellent) has just been completed by Walker Simpson Architects that combines natural ventilation, natural building materials (such as straw bales) and the natural cooling potential of the lake water.

With this book, Georg W. Reinberg, a pioneer in solar architecture in Austria for the last 30 years, presents a monograph of the works of his studio, but in doing so also a kind of historical narrative of ecological building over that period.

Certification systems like LEED, BREEAM and DGNB are aimed at bringing more transparency to the business of rating sustainability. They claim to cover and assess all the aspects of sustainability that are relevant to buildings.

Sustainability is high on the agenda of public debate, but the variety of interpretations of what this term actually means is bemusing. They range from idiosyncratic definitions to “greenwashing”, or giving a veneer of sustainability to buildings, products and services that are definitely not environmentally sound.

PLUS to DETAIL Green English issue 2-2009 | Page 52

Problems can occur in the case of historic buildings when the recommended energy-efficiency improvements conflict with preservation requirements. These are not insurmountable, but in some areas call for specialist skills in planning and execution.

Certification systems like LEED, BREEAM and DGNB are aimed at bringing more transparency to the business of rating sustainability. They claim to cover and assess all the aspects of sustainability that are relevant to buildings.

The new tower-like solar power station at Samar Kibbutz in the Negev Desert in southern Israel is an energy supplier and design object in one. Called the “Solar Flower” this decorative, vibrant orange structure was designed by Haim Dotan, the architect of the Israeli pavilion at EXPO 2010 in Shanghai.

Manitoba Hydro Place, the new headquarters of the fourth largest energy utility in Canada, recently opened its doors in downtown Winnipeg. The 22-storey office tower with LEED Platinum target was designed by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects (Toronto) with Smith Carter Architects (Winnipeg) and climate engineers Transsolar (Stuttgart).

The Goethe-Institut in New York is starting on Thursday, February 7, 2008 a lecture and dialog series focusing on the topic of green architecture. The series will debut with a talk by Berlin-based architect Jürgen Mayer H., followed by a conversation with the series curator and moderator Dr. Andres Lepik.