Qatar Wants World Cup Action, but the Environmental Price May be Too High. This relatively obscure Middle Eastern country, slightly smaller than Connecticut, is putting itself on the map. Oil and gas revenue, according to the CIA factbook, comprises 50% of the nation’s GDP, but Qatar is diversifying its portfolio. As part of its National […]
The third “Think Green” conference, held in Amman this week, encourages green buildings and sustainable communities. [image of an apartment building in Amman via: Sezgin Aytuna] We heard about Jordanian Queen Rania’s activities earlier this week, and now we will hear what HRH Princess Sumaya Bint El Hassan has been up to. For the past […]
By taking into account embodied energy, Catherine and her husband half the energy required to build their home. In her recent Ted talk, Catherine Mohr encourages us to look at the bigger picture when discussing and analyzing green stories. Whether we weigh the benefits of a LEED certified project against the energy required to ship […]
The king willed it – so it was built…Michael Arndt questions the ‘greenliness’ of KAUST, granted the US Green Building Council’s highest LEED certification possible. The American Institute of Architecture recently hailed The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) as one of its top ten most environmentally responsible building designs. This follows other […]
Near The Dead Sea fault, can Israel’s home synagogues withstand the next big earthquake? The San Francisco Chronicle announced that the Sherith Israel synagogue, completed seven months before the 1906 earthquake that ravaged San Francisco, survived that earthquake with minor bruising. However, this “remnant of Israel” built for Jews who flocked to California during the […]
Tareq Emtairah built this eco-house to prove that energy efficient buildings aren’t always prohibitively expensive. Jordan’s Prince Hassan does not shoulder his environmental concerns alone, nor is the Red-Dead canal project the singular answer to Jordan’s worries. In 2005, Tareq Emtairah, a consultant with the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University in […]
Qatar’s Green Building Council (QGBC) founder and chairman Eng. Issa M. Al Mohannadi will speak at the “Planet and Profit in Partnership” on April 11, 2010, another in a series of conferences that teach Qatari leaders about sustainable building practices. It remains to be seen whether Qataris will pursue development projects like Urjuan that pay […]
Foster+Partners, architect firm, claim projects like Masdar City are sustainable. Are they? Meet Foster + Partners: one thousand employees work in their twenty-two offices scattered around the world. Their employees hail from 50 nations, which diversity they say leads to “creativity, innovation, and motivation.” They are the people behind projects such as Masdar City that […]
Hassan Fathy, an Egyptian architect saw the value of natural building long before it became a fad in the west. Green Prophet has railed against projects like Dubai Burj Tower. We have pounded our chests at the audacity of Masdar City’s “zero” footprint claim, and we have decried the potential consequences of unsustainable approaches to […]
A beautiful, uber-designed kindergarten was recently completed in Ramat Hasharon, a suburb of Tel Aviv in Israel. A collaboration of Sarit Shani Hay (who makes unique toys, children’s furnishings, and textiles) and Lev-Gargir architects, the design philosophy for the space was that “the environment children grow up in strongly reflects how their sensibilities develop and […]
Green Prophet had reported on Rawabi (for Hills), the first “planned” city for Palestinians back in 2007; We are not sure if the Israeli or American urban-style mortgage model is the one to follow for a sustainable community (as Daniella asks in her article about Palestinian malls). Now Felice Friedson editor of The Media Line, […]
Proposed vertical farms like this one in Dubai may be the only way for supplying food to Middle East countries. Dickson D. Despommier is a professor of public health at Columbia University in New York, and if he gets his way, the future will be full of “vertical farms’ (a farm on every floor) in […]
Will The World be saved? UAE attempts to rescue collapsed real estate market in Dubai. The massive world-shaped islands off the coast of Dubai have been an environmentalist’s nightmare. With little regard to marine ecosystems, and the future impact of these buildings, Dubai ‘s building of The World has been brought to a halt due […]
The 2010 World Future Energy Summit (WFES) is less than three months away; and plans are already underway to ensure that this conference will be even more successful than WFES 2009, which drew more than 18,200 visitors from 84 countries. Hosted by Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Future Energy Company, the main themes of the 2010 Summit […]
Israeli architect Zvika Tamari (of TeaM Architects) recently proposed a conceptual plan for a Globe Ecological Hub in Modiin, a city in the center of Israel between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. What is a Globe Ecological Hub? In Tamari’s conception, it is an organically shaped, grass-roofed eco-dome located in the center of the city and […]