Surrounding nearly every suburban business center and office park are swaths of manicured grass, occasionally interrupted by ornamental landscaping. Unlike green space at schools or residential complexes, it’s rare to see this outdoor space used for recreation or sunbathing. In fact, it isn’t really used for anything. Up Top Acres, an agricultural startup based in
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The front door of Chris Hytha’s 1857 Fishtown-area rowhome opens to face a spotlit shelf cabinet — a “house museum” of artifacts: the house’s old lead water main, a hunk of its original stone foundation and a block of termite-hollowed wood. The artifacts catalogue the house’s history — and the hurdles of Hytha’s now two-year
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At Re:Vision Architecture’s Manayunk headquarters, energy-saving features are everywhere. Exterior walls are carefully sealed and insulated to keep the building warmer in the winter. Windows and skylights admit plenty of sun, reducing the need for artificial lighting. Those same skylights and windows can be opened on warm days to flush hot air up and out
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Philadelphia is changing all around us. Fresh off a tourism season celebrating our city’s colonial history, our building boom is racing to meet a housing crisis and is, in turn, reshaping the very fabric of our neighborhoods. As that transformation pushes forward, developers, designers and community groups are wrestling with what it means to build
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What do you think the Philadelphia Art Commission does? You might correctly guess that it approves works of art purchased by the City or placed on public land, along with some street signs. But anyone who has tuned into a public meeting of the commission will have noticed that the nine-member body does more than
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This month Green Building United (GBU), a regional organization that fosters transformative impact in communities through green building education and advocacy, announced Rich Freeh as the organization’s new executive director. Before taking the position, Freeh spent seven and a half years with the Philadelphia Office of Sustainability working on clean energy planning and sustainability reporting.
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In 2019 then 23-year-old Cashmir Woodward was dissatisfied with the home healthcare sector job she started just out of high school and was certain it would not be her long-term career. So when a friend asked her to join PowerCorpsPHL, she decided to make a move. “I was kind of wanting a different scene,” she
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YouthBuild Charter School has announced that it will relocate to what is planned to be a stellar example of green building. The school will invest $15 million to renovate a former PECO building at 2309 N. Broad Street, with plans to move in July 2024. The new building, designed by Atkins Olshin Schade Architects (AOS),
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When homeowners make the switch from oil to electric home systems it’s not just better for the environment—it also saves them money. But while the money a family saves on their home energy bills—thanks to solar panels, electric heat pumps, and more—can often pay off the switch in just a few years, affording the initial
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