Fear of planetary environmental catastrophe has motivated citizens and building professionals alike to take a hard look at anything likely to lower energy costs and preserve natural resources.
Green building practices are not only paying off more quickly as costs decline with demand, but home buyers also are seeking out greener developments over ones without green features … if they aren’t too pricey.
Where can you look to see what may be available in homes next year? Look at the 9-to-5 part of your life.
First-generation sustainable concepts often innovated in commercial buildings and government offices are increasingly migrating to homes and condominiums. They first appear on big projects where larger economies of scale and competition make ideas get used more quickly.
Society’s earliest mud huts had the first “green roofs,” but it takes advancements such as the roof-top meadow on the California Academy of Sciences building to clearly demonstrate their utility and inspire broader adoption. Among the earliest and best-known commercial-scale green roofs in the United States is the Gap’s headquarters in San Bruno, whose 62,000-square-foot expanse was planted in 1997 and is still reducing the structure’s carbon footprint today.
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