Designer Jennifer Siegal’s own house is a modest 1920s Spanish bungalow on the leeward side of busy Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, California, that looks nothing like what she makes at her day job.
In Sydney’s cramped beachside suburbia, architect Steve Kennedy defied a small footprint and a terrible drought with a generous double-height extension and a cutting-edge custom-made…
As the bike industry begins to meet the growing demand for practical, sensible bicycles tailored to commuting and urban outings, the time has never been better to get back that freewheelin’…
A bird flying over Houston, Texas, sees only a sprawling canopy of trees. It seems the perfect nesting place for creatures both avian and human alike; unfortunately, the green ends at the tree line.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the coupled concerns of population growth and resource depletion might be considered the parents of energy innovation.
Probably the most evocative term among the otherwise technocratic energy vocabulary, vampire power is the continuous current that appliances and electronics draw from an outlet even when turned off.
When we think of alternative energy at home, our minds leap straight to solar panels, the most obvious symbol of a site-generated grid-free power source.
We don’t keep a kettle boiling on the stove all day for the one moment when we want tea, so why do we keep water heated around the clock when all we need it for is a shower or a load of laundry?
It’s become increasingly common to hear the term “zero energy” or “zero carbon” used to describe buildings that achieve complete energy sustainability by generating as…
It may be simpler to build a zero-energy home from scratch than to retrofit an existing structure, but buildings constructed in the 20th century are generally the most in need of upgrades for energy…
The land we purchased—a little less than 40 acres in the Floyd County foothills of southwestern Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains—is the hilly, unfarmable center of several large…
