The skin's the thing for conserving a building's energy

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:15:50 -0400

It has been estimated that a third of the world's energy is consumed by buildings, a third by transportation, and a third by industry. With gasoline prices rising and electrical blackouts plaguing California and threatening the rest of the country, conserving energy in all areas seems more and more of a necessity. That's why a Harvard professor of design technology and management, Spiro Pollalis, became one of the founders of BuildingEnvelopes.org, a web portal based at Harvard and supported by a worldwide consortium of universities, research centers, and industry professionals. This nonprofit research portal, http://www.buildingenvelopes.org, has been created to serve as a resource for state-of-the-art information about innovative building facades and environmental technologies.

Internet revolutionizing way designers (and others) work

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:07:52 -0400

Professor Spiro Pollalis, who serves as director of the Center for Design Informatics at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, estimates Internet-based project management networks are now being utilized by as many as 10 percent of architectural design firms, and those numbers are expected to mushroom in the years ahead. "We see the Internet as being the unifying part that brings the different organizations together," he says. What is occurring in the design and construction industries, Pollalis believes, is indicative of the expanding role the Internet will play in all business sectors in the not-so-distant future. "We're going to see things happening in a very different way than they happen today," Pollalis explains.

all Spiro N. Pollalis stories

The skin's the thing for conserving a building's energy

Internet revolutionizing way designers (and others) work