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Rothschild Foundation Moves To Greener Windmill Hill

Last month the Rothschild Foundation moved into a renovated dairy building situated on the Estate at Windmill Hill, in Aylesbury, England. The Rothschilds feature prominently on this news site, mostly because the family’s green superstar is involved in a host of environmentally-positive programs. We recently featured an interview with David de Rothschild, and reviewed Plastiki, […]

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Cool Kuwaiti Home Foils Peeping Toms

This beautiful home has loads of secret hiding spots and stays cool in the desert heat. Traditionally, Arabic homes huddle together in order to create shade. This is a great technique to keep desert buildings nice and cool, but it’s not so great for foiling peeping Toms and Tamis. AGi Architects struck the perfect balance […]

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Egypt Starts Over With Two New Cairos

Two city extensions East and West of Cairo are each expected to accommodate 2.5 million people  within the next 10 years. Cairo feels and looks like an apocalypse zone. When I last traveled through the city, small children huddled in dirty doorways, a bloody-faced man groveled on the ground looking for money, and trash piled […]

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Beirut Is Getting Its First Green-Roofed Tower

Foster & Partners broke ground on their first project in Lebanon. This new tower will also be the first in Beirut to have green roofs. The 3Beirut tower in Lebanon will be the first Foster & Partners development in that country. As fans of something a little more earthy, like the mud brick building entrusted […]

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Earth Architecture All The Way To Timbuktu

South African architects chose mud as the main building material for an $8.36 million Islamic Research Institute project in Timbuktu. Using the name Timbuktu in a phrase denotes a sense of something that is far, far away. And it is. Located near the Niger River Delta in Mali, Timbuktu is the gateway to the vast […]

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17 Lost Egyptian Pyramids Found With Infra Red Technology

New infrared technology allows archaeologists to zero in on buried settlements, and 1,000 tombs. Seventeen mud brick pyramids are among the buried buildings revealed by infrared imagery over the past year. Dr. Sarah Parcak from the University of Alabama in Birmingham used satellites that hover 260km above earth to photograph once thriving Egyptian settlements engulfed […]

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Mashrabiya: 12th Century Light & Cooling For Lebanon’s USJ Campus

Contemporary architects in the Middle East revert to ancient techniques to cool and light new buildings. The earliest known Mashrabiya dates to 12th century Baghdad, Iraq. A special architectural feature that provides passive cooling both in and outside of the building, it was particularly popular in Iraq during the 1920s and 1930s. Unfortunately, the Al Rasheed […]

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Foster + Partners Finish Gorgeous Green Building In Morocco

This beautiful dome-building from Foster & Partners is the first building the firm has completed in Africa. We haven’t always loved Foster & Partners developments in the Middle East. Although they are visually spectacular, we often wonder at the true sustainability of buildings that cost millions of dollars to construct. But the first of three […]