Yesterday, First Lady Laura Bush, architect Robert A. M. Stern, and landscape architect Matthew Urbanski unveiled the design of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Texas. Located on the east side of SMU's campus, the design will complement the consistent Georgian architecture of the rest of the university. And when complete, the $250 million building will be LEED Platinum certified.
The portable classroom is just about as ubiquitous as the mobile home, so our ears perked when Toby Long, principal of Clever Homes and Toby Long Design, mentioned these first-generation, prefab, green portable classrooms. Working with the Chartwell School in Seaside, California — itself the first LEED Platinum campus in the country — Toby Long Design designed, fabricated, and installed two relocatable classroom structures on the Chartwell campus. Almost incredibly, the on-site work only took about four weeks.
The new science and library building at Crossroads College Preparatory School, located in the city of St. Louis, is seeking LEED Platinum certification. If obtained, it will be the first K-12 school in St. Louis to earn certification. Head of School Billy Handmaker* was committed to achieving the highest level of certification possible, while still spending within the budget and ending up with a good looking building. He said, "from the beginning, we said 'we want Platinum, but won't compromise."
We've mentioned Arizona State University's green School of Sustainability, and we've also mentioned greenscreen modular trellis panels, but we're going to bring it all full circle here in one article. ASU used greenscreen green walls in the renovation of this 1960s building to add a little something extra — to cool the interior, clean the air, and bolster the design. A wall was removed to add this distinctive element, and the strategy seems to be working.
The Open Architecture Challenge is an international design competition that's hosted every two years. This year, Architecture for Humanity and Orient Global hosted the competition to bring the architecture, design, and engineering community together with students and teachers to envision the classroom of the future. After receiving over a thousand designs, each submission was rated on feasibility, sustainability, innovation in design, and overall design quality. Now, after four rounds, there are eight finalists and one of these will win in September. Check these designs out and tell us which is your favorite:
Last November, Project FROG demonstrated their FROG Zero classroom at Greenbuild 2008, and it was quite impressive. Now, the company has a couple projects in the works, and they just broke ground on a new Center for Science and Global Citizenship at the Watkinson School in Hartford, Connecticut. The 4,000 square-foot science center will generate more energy within its footprint than is required to operate the systems. To do so, it will rely on some of the following active and passive strategies:
