Sitemap - 2024 - Carbon Upfront!
How did those 2015 predictions for 2025 work out?
NKBA 2025 Kitchen Trends are all about "sustainability and wellness." Really?
Study: Higher hoods + higher speeds = more death
Happy 130th birthday, Wells Coates, an almost unknown Canadian modernist architect
Why do open kitchens feel so wrong?
How can an aging population shape our cities?
Should a RIBA House of the Year have wood stoves?
In praise of ugly old buildings
The Ship of Theseus sails into in Toronto
Jargon Watch: Qualinesia, or forgetting when things were better in the past
Jargon Watch: "Optoppen" or "topping up" buildings with mass timber additions
The 15-Minute City Needs Small Business Saturday ... Every Day
From the archives: How should we approach Black Friday?
How car-brained is Doug Ford's Ontario Government?
Reality checks on "net zero" are coming fast and furious
Jargon Watch: Circular-ish vs Circular
Beef consumption is a global problem and meatwashing is making it worse
A new report explains why we must put sufficiency first
How technology is changing heritage restoration
Even with LEDs and e-bikes, we have to ask how much we need and what is enough.
From the archives: Baby boomers will be among the hardest hit by climate change
From the archives: Why aging boomers need walkable cities more than convenient parking
On my birthday: My favorite life hacks for getting older
On my birthday, I wonder: How do you stay relevant as you get older?
What do we do now in the age of know-nothingism?
New OXFAM report goes after the billionaires
Lessons from Livermore's 2023 Energy Consumption Chart
From the archives: Why cyclists ride through stop signs
Doug Ford will have blood on his hands if he rips out Toronto bike lanes
Monte Paulsen on "Windows with purpose"
Apple claims its new Mac Mini is "carbon neutral." This is a problem.
Happy International Day of Danger and Death for Pedestrians
Study: Gas stove emissions kill 40,000 Europeans each year
Deja vu: construction of giant cube building starts in Saudi Arabia
Mind the emissions gap, it's getting wider
Why NOW carbon emissions matter more than LATER
Why cohousing could be the answer for aging baby boomers
How to design homes for the "club sandwich" generation
Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism
Remember ice palaces? Probably not.
Why electric cars of the future might be smaller, safer, and fewer
Forget about system change vs individual behaviour change; what matters now is political change.
How I slept my way across New Zealand and Australia in Passivhaus bedrooms
Why avoided or imaginary emissions are the future of carbon accounting
The Conservative war on bikes continues
Austin Maynard's ParkLife represents a different way of doing housing
Cohousing is hard, but the results are worth it
Visiting Christchurch, the city of missed opportunities
How Donald Trump's giant faucet of Canadian water will get turned on
Passivhaus or Passive House? Efficiency, low carbon, or Comfort and Security?
Riding the Northern Explorer: This is how to run a railroad
Should we value upfront carbon savings higher than operational carbon savings?
Who will they blame for the Grenfell Tower disaster?
Yes, air conditioning is a necessity now.
Stop the Presses for Labor Day
Lindal Cedar Homes gives Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian homes a second life
New study confirms: take the stairs and live longer
Is wall to wall carpeting really making a comeback?
New study finds Bisphenol A increases risk of autism
On Leisure, "positive idleness" and "negative idleness"
Nice shades: Beat the heat with awnings
Is nostalgia stealing our kids' future?
Sustainable design is dead, long live regenerative design!
The coming crises caused by aging baby boomers like me
Have I been wrong about 3D printed houses?
The Passive House Network's marketing pitch: It's all about comfort.
Ultrafine particles are killing us, and most of us have never even heard of them.
Why Scope 3 emissions should be like an apple pie
Is good old plywood the ultimate engineered mass timber?
Where do you start in your home to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions?
Particulate Pollution Is Worse Than We Knew, and Is Damaging ‘Every Organ in the Body’
We have think about air quality the way we do about water
Facit Technologies can digitally manufacture a home in your driveway
What's wrong with this picture?
What happens when the young-old get old-old
TVs and home theatre: how much is too much? How big is too big?
As our cities get flooded or boiled, it's time to get serious about resilient design
From the archives: Oboy, we visit the Cykelehuset Ohboy! an apartment building built around bicycles
In praise of traffic congestion
Why houses should be built on stilts
We're facing a demographic time bomb
Aging boomers mean we need to crank up the soundproofing in our housing right now
Bonus: Why we should keep the cold chain as short as possible
Reading Frostbite: How refrigeration changed our food, our planet, and ourselves
Why do I love mid-century modern architecture so much?
What is the true energy fallacy?
Why can't we just use one standard set of symbols for washrooms?
Why is the Ontario government so in love with natural gas?
Cars need design for disassembly and repairability
Not everyone who rides a bike can lift it over their heads
How bio-thinking might help us out of our carbon crisis
No, your internet habits are not killing the planet.
At Home With Tomorrow: A look back at prefab in 1947
How the built environment enhances your mind's health
Can skyscrapers be turned into "gravity batteries?"
From the archives: Touring the toilets of Le Corbusier
Piles of peer reviewed research show how bad cooking with gas is for your health
"Materials: An Environmental Primer"- a new view through the lens of upfront carbon
New research shows that gas stoves emit unsafe levels of nitrogen dioxide
Fun at the book launch for The Story of Upfront Carbon
Why fighting small apartment buildings is self-defeating and short-sighted
It's Launch Day for the Story of Upfront Carbon!
Antimicrobial resistance will change the way we live
Why we need more bagel buildings
Why a symposium on embodied carbon gives me hope
Stop it with all the climate doomism in the news, it's worse than denial
I love this house of steel and glass! There are just a few problems....
Toronto has too many Ghost Bikes
Walkable neighbourhoods need places to shop
The Happy Planet Index measures what matters
Happy May Day, which used to be green instead of red
Why we will continue to be buried in single-use plastic
On water and windows in the UK today
Do we need to change the way we grow things, or change the way we eat?
Please join me at the book launch for the Story of Upfront Carbon
How to make buildings boxy but beautiful
It's Earth Day, and thank you, Denis Hayes
Stop blaming 57 companies for greenhouse gas emissions and look in the mirror
Things to look forward to in our electric future
Why everyone should care about upfront carbon (and why I wrote a book about it)
Retrofit and the AI revolution
On sufficiency, upfront carbon and Passive House
What North Americans can learn from modern European bathrooms
Manifesto puts sufficiency at the heart of the EU's future
Architects and engineers like Steve Webb are rethinking the conventional wisdom of how we build
A visit to two Passivhaus schools shows how far green building has come
Other thoughts on Paris and the Declaration de Chaillot
Happy Våffeldagen (Swedish Waffle Day)
In praise of the four-poster canopy bed
What's right with this picture? No overhead wires!
The Isokon shows us how to design for living in small spaces
Tropical Modernism exhibition shows how to live without air conditioning
Strategies from the Sufficiency Toolbox: Flexibility
How to build a low-carbon home
The UNEP Conference on Buildings and Climate could make a real difference
Why the "bathroom of the future" always fails us
Between the crowds and the carbon, we should reconsider the "museum without walls"
Enough already: why we need sufficiency as well as efficiency
We should rethink the toilet from first principles
Bonus: Who will save our digital memories?
Social housing project embraces radical and elegant simplicity
The war on cars blows up in Canada again
How careless design of showers is killing, maiming, and scalding people of all ages
After learning how to read books again, I try to review them.
Car and truck front ends reach new heights
Bonus: Why boomers aren't budging
Why 2024 may be the year of the Brompton
Writers: Stop it with the AI images already. You're next.
Why your toilet should have a room of its own
Bonus: How Did Our Fridges Get So Big?
Should I heat my home with a pile of bricks?
What will the kitchen of the future be like?
Why Cohousing Could Be the Answer for Aging Baby Boomers
We don't just have a disposable cup crisis; it's a symptom of a much bigger problem.
Happy anniversary to my new life working for me
BuildingGreen's top ten products for 2024 are not the most boring ever
How will we build with wood in a future neighbourhood?
At the Interior Design Show: the latest in killer bathtubs and silly sinks
The hot design trend of 2024: Comfort
Sorry, Doomers: Hannah Ritchie says it's Not the End of the World
Burning stuff is depriving us of years of healthy living
The new manual: What is the purpose of a window?
My TMU Sustainable Design students on how to fix the world
Don't say goodbye to the kitchen (or dining) table
From the archives: Boomers and bikes were made for each other