You know what really gets me frustrated? Sitting through yet another presentation where some eager young landscape architect tries to convince me their drought-tolerant garden needs a misting system. It’s…
You know that moment when you realise you’ve been doing something backwards for years? That hit me hard walking through a cabinet manufacturing facility outside Flagstaff last month. The smell…
So I’m sitting in my kitchen last Thursday morning, wrestling with yet another zoning variance application that probably won’t get approved anyway, when there’s this persistent knocking at my door.…
There’s this spot in my garage workshop where the morning sun hits the concrete wall, and I noticed something years ago that completely changed how I think about windows and…
I was reviewing project specs at my desk last week when a colleague from the sustainability office stopped by with a question that caught me off guard. “Marcus, you work…
About six months ago, I found myself doing something I swore I’d never do again—touring college campuses. My sister had cornered me at Thanksgiving, asking if I’d cheque out Cornell’s…
Last month I was consulting with a local organic food startup on their packaging redesign when something finally clicked for me. They’d been wrestling with this problem I see constantly…
You know what’s been eating at me lately? How completely backwards we’ve got this whole sustainable building thing. I mean, the intentions are good – everyone wants to build better,…
Last spring I was wandering around Copenhagen – you know, trying to look like I belonged there instead of obviously being an American tourist – and I kept staring at…
I was grabbing coffee in Flagstaff last month when these two engineers at the table next to me got into this heated argument about a water treatment project. One guy…