The “green building revolution” is a worldwide movement for energy-efficient, environmentally aware architecture and design. Europe has been in the forefront of green building technology, and Green Building Trends: Europe provides an indispensable overview of these cutting edge ideas and applications. In order to write this book, well-known U.S. green building expert Jerry Yudelson interviewed a number of Europe’s leading architects and engineers and visited many exemplary projects. With the help of copious photographs and illustrations, Yudelson describes some of the leading contemporary green buildings in Europe, including the new Lufthansa headquarters in Frankfurt, the Norddeutsche Landesbank in Hannover, a new school at University College London, the Beaufort Court Zero-Emissions building, the Merck Serono headquarters in Geneva, and a zero-net-energy, all-glass house in Stuttgart. In clear, jargon-free prose, Yudelson provides profiles of progress in the journey towards sustainability, describes the current regulatory and business climates, and predicts what the near future may bring. He also provides a primer on new technologies, systems, and regulatory approaches in Western Europe that can be adopted in North America, including building-integrated solar technologies, radiant heating and cooling systems, dynamic façades that provide natural ventilation, innovative methods for combining climate control and water features in larger buildings, zero-netenergy homes built like Thermos bottles, and strict government timetables for achieving zero-carbon buildings. Green Building Trends: Europe is an essential resource for anyone interested in the latest developments in this rapidly growing field.

As buildings are responsible for fifty per cent of CO2 emissions, their design has become the focus of intense technical scrutiny. Knowing how to build more technically efficient, or ecologically responsible, buildings, and being able to assemble the social resources to do so, requires different forms of knowledge and practice. There is wide contestation over the optimal pathways to greener buildings design and great diversity in practices of sustainable architecture. This volume brings together leading researchers from across the European Union and North America both to illustrate the diversity of practice and to provide a critical commentary on this key debate. The reader is provided with an introduction to competing perspectives on the sustainable architecture debate, international exemplars of differing practice and an overview of new theoretical and methodological resources for understanding and meeting the conceptual, social and technical challenges of sustainable architecture.