BIO-SOLAR HOUSE IN THAILAND It's an environmental dream: a self-reliant house that produces its own electricity, water, and cooking gas. Solar energy powers the air-conditioning, lights, and household appliances. Rain, dew, and condensation from the cooling system produce enough water for a family of four. Recycled water irrigates the garden, and surplus electricity is sold to the power company or used to drive an electric car 30 miles (50 kilometers) a day. — Published 2003.0514
	SHADE CONDITIONING The sun is one of the most abundant resources in the tropics, and diverse technologies already harness its energy successfully. However, as a design determinant, it is not sun but shade that is a fundamental element of architecture in tropical latitudes. Here, shade summons and generally conditions behavior. Just as sunlight and its warmth are invigorating in cold climates, in the tropics it is the coolness of shade that allows people to be active. — Published 2002.0925
	NEW HOME FOR OLD PHOTOS Last year, the American Academy in Rome moved its valuable photographic archive to a newly renovated villa built in the early 1920s. The challenge for Studio Abbate & Vigevano, the architects designing the villa's renovation, was to create a delightful, daylit interior while protecting the delicate negatives from heat and humidity. They call the result a "minimalist model of sustainable architecture." — Published 2002.0417
	UK GARDEN OF EDEN It was like a scene out of Stanislaw Lem's science fiction classic Solaris, with the swirling mists spiraling upward from a giant crater deep within the earth. Slowly, through the haze, emerged a city, no ordinary urban conurbation but an epicenter under giant geometric domes on a lunar landscape. This is not life, as we know it, this is the future. Welcome to the Eden Project. — Published 2001.0620
	OWNER-BUILT SUSTAINABLE SHELTER Buying a tract house so insensitively placed on the land that extensively remodeled terrain results and using foreign materials that require large amounts of nonsustainable fuels for their manufacture and transport are signs of a people without guiding principles in their relationship to the environment. That we have become such people and willingly pay for this disconnected life suggests the depth of our alienation and distance from a secure relationship with sustainability and environmental sensitivity. — Published 2001.0418

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