A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

The Materials Book Ilka Ruby, Andreas Ruby (Editors) Ruby Press, January 2020 Paperback | 6-1/2 x 9 inches | 400 pages | English | ISBN: 978-3944074320 | €38.00 Publisher's Description : With the world’s population growing by 2.6 people per second, by 2050 we will need twice as many homes, highways, streets, and schools–all kinds of built infrastructure—if we are to maintain our standard of living. That will require vast quantities of construction materials and untold emissions of carbon dioxide, both for building new structures and heating, cooling, and maintaining them over the decades. While people in construction have a growing sense of the environmental toll of their business, the shift toward more sustainable standards can seem frustratingly slow. Yet the good news is that the scale of the industry means construction can be both a problem and a solution, as even small changes in the way we build can have an outsize impact on global carbon output. The Materials Boo...

The Economy of Sustainable Construction edited by Ilka and Andreas Ruby, and Nathalie Janson, published by  Ruby Press , 2014. Hardcover, 415 pages. ( Amazon ) [Images courtesy of Ruby Press] Any architect striving to design as green a building as possible has certainly run into resistance from a client who asserts that sustainable construction is too expensive and sustainable design is not profitable. These two positions – one in regards to up-front costs and one about post-construction profits – have decreased in validity over time as green building products have become more mainstream, but according to the editors of this book inspired by the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction’s 2013 Forum, "sustainability's greatest obstacle is financial." While situated primarily within a European context, the contributions to The Economy of Sustainable Construction make strong arguments for rethinking these assumptions all over the world. One of the best recen...