Sustainable Building, Sustainable Architecture & Green Design Resources

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Sustainable Building & Architecture

Building Research Establishment (BRE)-BREbookshop.com
The BRE Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) tool allows the owners, users, and designers of buildings to review and improve environmental performance throughout the life of a building.

Building Standards Online
Welcome to the International Code Council (ICC): Your source for building safety products and services and the International Codes The International Conference of Building Officials (ICBO) "Building Standards Online" is a source for building related construction codes, products and services.

Carnegie Mellon Green Design Institute
The Green Design Institute is a major interdisciplinary research effort to make an impact on environmental quality through green design. The central idea of the institute is to form partnerships with companies, government agencies and foundations to develop pioneering design, management, manufacturing, and regulatory processes that can improve environmental quality and product quality while enhancing economic development. Carnegie Mellon researchers are working to address the regulatory issues that shape the global marketplace. Our research partners will have access to policy and management tools for environmentally conscious manufacturing and product and process design, as well as opportunities to explore comprehensive solutions to problems such as hazardous emissions, use of toxic materials and inefficient energy usage.

The Center for Resourceful Building Technologies
CRBT, founded in 1990, is a non-profit organization that educates the public on issues relating to housing and the environment, with particular emphasis on innovative building materials and technologies which place less stress on regional and global ecosystems.

The Cob Cottage Company Online
Conducts hands-on research on natural building methods and materials. Through practical training in natural construction, they help empower ordinary people to take charge of providing their own housing at moderate cost. By mail and phone, and through publications and tours, they supply information, support and inspiration for people to make healthy choices about buildings. Committed to de-consumerizing, to reducing the flow of cash, resources and waste, and to helping others to do the same. They work with a wide range of natural materials but specialize in unbaked hand-formed sculptural earthen building--cob construction. About 25 cob demonstration buildings all over Western North America are now open to visitors.

Cohousing Association of the United States
Cohousing is the modern approach to reclaiming a traditional village lifestyle where rich, intergenerational relationships, cooperation, and sustainability are the norm.

Green Architecture and Sustainable Living Websites
This web site is supported by the University of Missouri Outreach and Extension Outreach Development Fund.

Green Design Initiative
This initiative was created to promote environmentally conscious engineering, product and process design, manufacture, and architecture.

Green Home
Green Home is a nonprofit, all-volunteer organization dedicated to demonstrating and promoting affordable, sustainable design, construction, and landscape practices for homes and communities.

Greenpeace International
Greenpeace is the world's most effective environmental activist group dedicated to the issues of climate change, saving our ancient forests, stopping pollution, ending the nuclear threat, abolishing nuclear weapons, stopping genetic engineering, saving our oceans, and advocating sustainable trade.

Kraus Fitch Architects Environmentally Inspired Design
Integrating architecture with community, environment and the quality of our lives, we offer a full range of services with an emphasis on ecologically sound and socially responsible design.

Real Goods - Products For An Ecologically Sustainable Future
Shopping for a healthy home & planet - energy efficiency, non-toxic & environmental products for sustainable living, organic apparel & educational solar gifts - since 1978.

Rocky Mountain Institute
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) is an entrepreneurial nonprofit organization that fosters the efficient and restorative use of natural, human and other capital to make the world more secure, just, prosperous, and life sustaining. RMI does this by inspiring business, civil society, and government to design integrative solutions that create true wealth. Our staff shows businesses, communities, individuals, and governments how to create more wealth and employment, protect and enhance natural and human capital, increase profit and competitive advantage, and enjoy many other benefits—largely by doing what they do far more efficiently. Our work is independent, nonadversarial, and transideological, with a strong emphasis on market-based solutions.

Serenbe Community - A 900 Acre Sustainable Living Community
Let's say you could create the perfect place to live. Blank slate. Anything you want. Maybe Serenbe Community is the place you want to call home. A 900 -acre sustainable living community found in Palmetto Georgia on the Chattahoochee Hill Country. Where the principles of sustainability touched everything from your home’s methods of construction to the organic produce on your table that was grown by one of your neighbors. The founders of Serenbe realize that their largely untouched 900 acres presented a short window of opportunity for creating a community in a new and better way. How? By protecting this land from the typical growth patterns of urban sprawl. By merging ecologically sound sustainability principles with the design philosophies of walking neighborhoods made up of both homes and shops. By building villages and hamlets for single people, families and empty nesters of a wide range of economic and cultural diversity. And by creating real community, where people are drawn together over gardening, over cooking, over books, over art, over ideas, and yes, even over back fences.

Smart Growth Network
This nonprofit organization that helps created national and local coalitions to promote economic, social, and environmental development in communities. This site contains primers on alternatives to sprawl and a smart growth bibliography and policy database.

Sustainable Building Coalition
The Sustainable Building Coalition exists to facilitate the organization and education of the building and design community and the general public to foster: healthy and ecologically-sound, built environments, sustainable, cyclic use of resources, responsible and healthy businesses.

Wonderland Hill Development Company - Cohousing Intentional Community WHDC
Wonderland Hill Development Company specializes in the creation of cohousing communities and is the leading developer of cohousing neighborhoods in the United States. Having worked with over 17 communities, Wonderland supports this growing trend by bringing cohousing into the mainstream through a streamlined development model we have created.

Affordable Comfort - Your Key to Building Performance
Affordable Comfort, Inc. is a not-for-profit educational service organization that promotes energy and resource efficiency, comfort, health, safety, affordability, and durability in buildings, focusing on those buildings in which people live, and the people who live in them.

American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)
ASHRAE advances the art and science of HVAC through research, standards writing, continuing education, and publications.

Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR)-NorCal Chapter
ADPSR is an architectural organization dedicated to ecological and sustainable practices for the built environment.

Blueberry Hill Home
When some friends introduced them to the cohousing book in the early 1990’s, the Newcomb family, owners of farm property in both Fairfax and Loudoun County, began talking about this intriguing new concept with farm friends and neighbors. With the help of the Cohousing Company and some local cohousing experts, they formed a group in November 1994 and called themselves “Beulah Road Cohousing.” Twelve families attended the first meeting. Learn More! .....

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