Staff housing for the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, inspired by the colorful forms found in local art, is designed to be sustainable and also resistant to seismic forces.

Sorg Architects, an international architectural firm, has created sustainable staff housing for U.S. Embassy staff members stationed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Construction on the housing units will begin in March 2012 and is scheduled to be completed in January 2014.

Will home automation become something that we can’t imagine living without? Jeff Wilson takes us on a tour of a design showroom that highlights some of the time- and energy-saving benefits of automation.

Home automation sounds a little intimidating. Just the mention makes me think of the USS Enterprise on Star Trek – seamless integration of controls for everything from lighting and sound to heating and air-conditioning to security and energy-efficiency. Oh, and don’t forget to set those phasers to stun.

This month’s featured home in Madison, Wisconsin, is the personal residence of Carol Richard, AIA, LEED AP, and founding partner of Richard Wittschiebe Hand, an award-winning firm in Atlanta, Georgia.

Architect Carol Richard isn’t new to the challenges and rewards of designing and building green homes. In fact, she has spent her entire career helping her clients to marry livable, modern aesthetics with sustainable design. So when she and her husband, mechanical engineer Fred Berg, began to make plans to build their full-time residence upon retirement, the experienced duo was determined to pour all of their collective knowledge and expertise into a sustainable-living dream home.

HOK Architects has partnered with the U.S. Green Building Council to rebuild a Haitian orphanage. As early adopters of biomimicry principles, HOK Architects took inspiration from the native Kapok tree for the building’s design.

The lives of thousands of children were devastated by the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010, but thanks to a building initiative, many of these children will soon have a new place to call home.

Welcome to the On Site channel’s Construction Administration Column. What should you do when there is a discrepancy between the amount on a payment application and the amount that was contracted? Here David A. Todd, P.E., CPESC, gives his opinion.

Columnist David A. Todd, P.E., CPESC, has 37 years of experience in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry and has performed much construction administration during that time. He will answer questions from our readers or from his own practice and will provide answers based on his understanding of the construction process and administration of the construction contract. The focus will be on the customary duties of the owner, contractor, and design professional as typically described in the contract documents.

Contractor to Contractor: In this first of a two-part series, contractor-turned-homebuilder Fernando Pages Ruiz discusses permeable pavement, which allows rain and snow to seep into the ground.

What Is Pervious Pavement?

Pervious concrete came to the attention of the building community in the United States after Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1987. With restrictions in the amount of stormwater runoff permitted from roads, parking lots, and other impermeable surfaces, some developers began to look for environmentally friendly alternatives. They found it in an exotic, water-sucking concrete first tested in Florida about 30 years ago as a flood-control device. Engineers placed highly porous concrete paving in spots along Florida roadways frequently submerged by heavy downpours. The permeable surface provided a quick-drying roadway that didn’t stay flooded after the storm.

In September 2011, publisher Rizzoli New York released The Glass House, a photo tour of Philip Johnson’s famous estate. The book includes text by Philip Johnson himself and by architecture critic Paul Goldberger, and is the official Glass House book of The National Trust for Historic Preservation. Robin Hill’s photo “Glass House Dawn” was selected to appear on the book’s cover.

Below is the final piece of a three-part installment wherein Robin Hill shares his experience of photographing the Glass House estate. View Part One and Part Two for the rest of the story.

My journey continues in its roundabout way, and I am now upon a gate, the likes of which I have never seen before. It is most unusual. I try to find a historic connection to its design but find none. What I do find is a beautifully scaled, welcoming structure that entices one to enter. It is everything that an entrance way to a gated community is not. Even when the barrier is down, it feels open. The Pillars rise high on both sides and are painted a welcoming tone of brown, quite different from the brown that smothers the library. Slung low across the bottom quarter is a brushed aluminum tube that splices the composition perfectly, both in terms of its height and its color. The gate is also quite a trick of visual play, as it actually consists of four pillars, not two as it appears from the full frontal view. The pillars on either side stand back to back with their identical twins behind them. This is a very clever way of hiding the mechanism that lifts and lowers the gate. The wires are hidden from the front view and delicately balance the gate between the two pillars. The engineering is sublime and gives a gentle equipoise to the whole structure. There are not enough Os in the word "smooth" to describe this gate.

In September 2011, publisher Rizzoli New York released The Glass House, a photo tour of Philip Johnson’s famous estate. The book includes text by Philip Johnson himself and by architecture critic Paul Goldberger and is the official Glass House book of The National Trust for Historic Preservation. Robin Hill’s photo “Glass House Dawn” was selected to appear on the book’s cover.

Below is the second of a three-part installment wherein Robin Hill shares his experience of photographing the Glass House estate. Read part one here.

Now I am making my way the few steps toward the lakeside pavilion. Here Johnson is up to new tricks. As I approach the lakeside, I am reminded of the London Underground loudspeaker system, which brusquely ejaculates "MIND THE GAP" every time you board or deboard a train. Instead of designing the pavilion to gently nudge the shoreline, there's this intentional but irritating gap that Johnson has deliberately placed in one's way. Why? My first thought is "to mess with your head" or perhaps it is to make you pay attention. OK, so now I'm paying attention, and the impression is that ordinary scale has been obliterated by the architect's hands. This is a perfect modern folly. It is barely functional, save to sit underneath and have an uncomfortable picnic. Through these photographer's eyes excellent framing opportunities are created by the multiple archways. The visual pun is too obvious for my taste, however, and the pavilion does nothing for me in an architectural sense. I begin to feel that this is a dud, a Johnson experiment that doesn't really work very well in either form or function. Perhaps, this is indicative of Johnson's uneven career as an architect, brilliant one minute and mediocre the next. In the space of a few steps I have gone from momentous elevation to ungarnished mediocrity, from design excellence to controlled vacuousness. Still, the adventure of being here leaves my intellect alone for a while and I am left in solitude in the middle of a 46-acre design campus. Heaven! There is a serenity here that is both palpable and meaningful.