Sustainability is everywhere these days. Just browse through the ads in Architectural Record and you'll be amazed how every single building materials producer finds something green in their product - no matter how energy intensive it was to produce. There is also an onslaught of "sustainability" events around us. Earth Day had just passed when I received a conference announcement flyer that mentioned three "sustainable" conferences on one page:

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If you liked Demeter, then you'll like this one. The Department of Energy has just released a plugin for SketchUp (works with both the free and full version) that allows for an EnergyPlus analysis to be run on a SketchUp building model from within the familiar SketchUp interface. The geometry of a building can be modeled (and modified) easily this way and several parameters can be set for the run.

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As reported by the BBC, a 52-year-old software engineer in Scotland has built a wood and straw-bale house for a total of UK£ 4,000 (equals 8,054 US-$). Talk about affordable housing. You can see a break-down of all costs on the BBC website. Somehow reminds me of another guy from Massachusetts. He got it done with 28.12½ US-$, though.

It seems like this is the year for industry consolidations in the technology field. After Microsoft's bid for Yahoo and their purchase of Caligari it is now time for Green Building Studio to be acquired by a much larger company, Autodesk in this case. In an announcement that just fluttered into my inbox, GBS acknowledges the acquisition and pledges their commitment to easy-to-use and efficient BIM-based energy evaluation of building designs.

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Greenbuildingstudio.com, the green-design web-extension for your cad software online service has just announced their third overhaul (i.e. v. 3.0). With more and more architecture and engineering offices embracing parametric building design (catchword: BIM = "Building Information Modeling"), this is a great tool to run a quick industry-standard (DOE-2) energy check on a virtual building and to incorporate green design into the planning process. The service then offers ideas for improvements that can be incorporated into design revisions later.

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