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BuildingGreen’s president, Nadav Malin, recently received the Honorary AIA designation. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) “recognizes the notable contributions and service of people outside of the architecture profession with honorary membership in the Institute,” according to its website.

I sat down with Nadav to discuss this distinction and talk about some of the highlights of his 25-year career in the green building world.

Why and how do buildings fail? In this quick video, Paula Melton and Peter Yost discuss what they learned in the process of writing their feature article “How Buildings Fail Their Users.” The article includes seven stories of building failure and lessons learned. Read the feature article.

[bg-slideshow] At the end of my recent blog post on Kooltherm rigid phenolic foam insulation, I mentioned that the roof and wall assemblies at an energy retrofit project in Brattleboro, Vermont, were insulated with cellulose by a company called American Installations.

BuildingGreen interviewed designers from several leading sustainable design firms to learn what sustainable design literacy means, what it looks like, and how the best firms are supporting increased knowledge—and action. The research resulted in our feature article Sustainable Design Literacy: A Foundation for Transformed Practice.

[bg-slideshow] Improving the thermal performance of an existing attic is often challenging: workers are faced with narrow cavities, low clearances, and cladding systems that make it hard to achieve desired R-values while still maintaining the necessary drying potential of the assembly. The house at 81 Chapin Street in Brattleboro, Vermont, is no exception. It’s a 100-year-old wood-framed two-story home that Candace Pearson and Alex Beck are determined to comprehensively retrofit to high performance.

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Julie Paquette has been Director of Energy Management at Yale University for about 6 years. That means the buck stops at Paquette’s desk for the energy consumption of over 400 buildings on campus. Yale has a pretty sophisticated approach to energy, including the Yale Facilities Energy Explorer, an energy dashboard system that shows energy consumption and details for every one of those 400 Yale buildings.

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Typical pins on moisture meters are ½ inch long, meaning you can only determine moisture content by weight near the surface of building assemblies and materials (including wood, gypsum wallboard, and concrete). But I often find myself needing to assess moisture content of first condensing surfaces in walls and ceilings or well below the surface of basement slabs. This article looks at ways to extend the reach of a moisture meter. (For introductory information on moisture meters, see Tools of the Trade: Moisture Meters.)

Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown looks at a number of strategies that would “reverse the buildup of atmospheric carbon within thirty years.” Based on careful analysis, his team concluded that the number-one action we can take to reverse anthropogenic global warming is to manage high global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants. Wait…what?! What about increasing insulation in our buildings? Or replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy? Or reducing the impacts of steel and concrete? Or biking to work? They can’t be serious.

The latest version of LEED, LEED v4, became mandatory a little over a year ago. That was just after the U.S. Green Building Council’s 2016 Greenbuild conference. This year at Greenbuild, USGBC announced that it is fast-tracking development of a new iteration, LEED v4.1.

When we bought our home (built in 1907), I called in a favor from an electrician friend of mine to upgrade the 60-amp to a 100-amp service. Having worked together in New Hampshire where many of our projects were on sites full of ledge, he smirked when he told me: “Here, you go try and drive this 12-foot copper grounding rod!” No more than 10 minutes later I came in and said, “How much of the rod should remain above grade?”

If the number of events on this topic is any indication, 2017 will go down as the year that Greenbuild became all about products. Why? Here’s my take on it:

Over the last 20 years LEED has become the dominant U.S. green building design standard and is the most widely accepted and influential green building standard globally. This is an extraordinary achievement and has made for healthier, more productive and greener homes, workplaces, schools, hospitals and public spaces for tens of millions of families, students and workers.

I first got interested in California’s Assembly Bill 262—signed into law by Governor Brown this week—because it appeared to be thrusting Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) into the mainstream construction industry spotlight. Until this bill, EPDs had been an arcane tool of interest primarily to sustainability professionals.

At least 55 cities and communities around the world have signed on to test the LEED for Cities pilot, and Washington, D.C. has achieved the first certification in the new system—a Platinum rating.