Image via Greenpeace Apple remains our culture’s most lauded example of great design. But could it be that the company considered to have reached the pinnacle of design is, in fact, an impostor? The definition of good design is changing. It used to be that design which combined form and function in delightful and unexpected ways was good enough. But in the 21st century, that’s just the price of entry. Good design today has to be beautiful and functional not just today, but tomorrow and yesterday....

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Whilst unearthing stuff for another article I turned over a stone that revealed some rather startling figures about the environmental impact of the built environment. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the guys who manage the LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) rating system, came up the following figures: In the United States alone, buildings account for: • 72% of electricity consumption, • 39% of energy use, • 38% of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, • 40% of raw materials use, • 30% of waste output (136 million tons annually), and • 14% of potable water consumption....

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Images by © Mike Dean Photography via Jetson Green

We don't as many single family houses as we used to; location and scale have to be considered as well. So it is a joy to show Arbor South Architecture, PCs Sage House, designed for USGBC founder David Gottfried. It is green through and through, but it is also a modest 1447 square feet on an infill lot. Jetson Green's Preston, perhaps the world's most popular LEED ac...

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Earlier this week, a crowd of passionate architects and city planners gathered at the Schusev State Architecture Museum, in Moscow, for the release of a new report on the state of architectural preservation in that city, written collaboratively by two advocacy groups, the Moscow Architectural Preservation Society (MAPS) and SAVE Europe’s Heritage. The findings were disturbing, to say the least. Many of the city’s most prized structures, from the neoclassical Bolshoi Theater to the Mayakovskaya Metro station (left), a landmark of the avant-garde, are in dire jeopardy, as are countless less famous places that together give Moscow its essential character.

Of course, Moscow residents doesn’t need a report to tell them that their city’s architectural patrimony is in danger any more than they need a weather advisory to tell them there’s snow on the ground in February. They need only look out their windows. The city’s brutal climate takes a toll on anything that stands outdoors. But the larger threat might just be rapacious developers, lately deterred by the economic downturn but typically contemptuous of anything that might stand in their way, including Russia’s poorly enforced preservation laws.

“We want Moscow to know that the international community cares about how it treats its architecture, that these are internationally significant buildings,” says Clementine Cecil, one of the founders of MAPS and a coauthor of the report. “Moscow is being destroyed more quickly by the bulldozer than any other European city and our motivation in writing the report was to present the case for another approach.”

The study also includes a chapter on St. Petersburg, where more than one hundred buildings have been destroyed over the last six years, even as many were on official state “protected” lists.

Today, the Sears Tower is officially being rechristened Willis Tower, in honor of its new principle tenant, the London insurance broker Willis Group Holdings. (The Sears company itself has not occupied the building since 2004.) Although newspapers and blogs have been busy reporting on the inevitable backlash from Chicago residents, who insist they will always call it the Sears, I think that Willis’s claim that people will eventually accept the name is probably correct. Old habits die hard, but die they do–just look at the MetLife Building. And while I  sympathize with the folks over at the online petition It’s the SEARS Tower, I also can’t help thinking that, hey, it could be a lot worse. Willis is a mercifully neutral, unoffensive name. Chicagoans should feel lucky that they’re not waking up this morning to the new Tropicana Tower, Time Warner Cable Tower, or Margaritaville Enterprises Tower.