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Jerelyn and Alex Wilson of BuildingGreen

What kind of truck doesn't use any gasoline or diesel fuel to move heavy materials around the city? A bicycle truck, of course. Back in March BuildingGreen was introduced to The New Amsterdam Project , a bicycle trucking firm in Cambridge, Ma.

The AIA 2008 National Convention and Design Exposition — "We the People" — starts next week Thursday, on the East Coast for the first time in almost a decade. As usual, BuildingGreen will be there. If you are, too, come see us at booth 14079. We also have people involved in a couple sessions.

If I could adopt a conference, it would be the USGBC Cascadia chapter's Living Future 'Unconference'. As someone who generally prefers to stay behind the scenes talking shop, it was a delight to find myself surrounded primarily by the obsessed of the green building world. Even better, as presenters we were encouraged to bring our own big challenges to the table and get attendees to help us address them — which is exactly what we and many other presenters did.

As Research Director at BuildingGreen, I dabble in - or dive headlong into - a wide range of BuildingGreen internal and collaborative projects, and am part of the team working to make the GreenSpec product directory as robust as possible.

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"Green buildings have captured the imagination of many in the mainstream, but for green professionals the time has come to stop designing for mere energy efficiency and start designing to regenerate and restore.

Amy Levin and friendsphoto: Heidi Glenn, NPR

I was a pretty lucky guy this past week. Firstly, I got to be in Washington, DC near the peak of their spring blossom season on a picture perfect day. Secondly, I was there to talk with National Public Radio's Robert Siegel and realtor Amy Levin about her LEED for Homes Platinum (pending) gut rehab of a townhome in Mt.

With the addition of three new case studies from the 2008 AIA COTE Top Ten awards (Aldo Leopold Legacy Center - Platinum; Yale University Sculpture Building and Gallery - Platinum; Macallen Building Condominiums - Gold), BuildingGreen.com now features over 100 LEED certified building case studies from the High Performance Build

Last year, our own Alex Wilson served as a judge for the Lifecycle Building Challenge, a competition organized by West Coast Green, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Building Materials Reuse Association, The American Institute of Architects, Collaborative for High-Performance Schools, and Southface Energy Institute. There are two main categories: buildings and ideas. In either category, the idea is to design a project that takes a material's entire lifecycle into account.

Rebecca Henn, AIA, was a jury member for the 2008 AIA Committee on the Environment Top Ten Green Projects awards. She is pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, studying how sustainability influences the building team, and although you won't find it in her official bio, she worked here at BuildingGreen during the summer of 2006. I called on the connection to ask for her perspective on the Top Ten experience.