Living Building Challenge Announced as Winner of 2012 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

By Sian Disson, World Architecture News
June 11, 2012

Each year, the Buckminster Fuller Institute celebrates a holistic initiative that has ‘potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems’ and over this past weekend announced its 2012 winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge: The Living Building Challenge (LBC). Initiated in 2006 by the International Living Future Institute, the LBC is a global eco-programme with stringent rules and regulations which requires each building to demonstrate the effectiveness of its green features over a period of twelve months of continuous occupancy. More … http://backstage.worldarchitecturenews.com/index.php?fuseaction=wanappln.projectview&upload_id=19899.

Vancouver’s Density Debate Pits Sullivanism Versus The Ideas of Jane Jacobs

By Daniel Wood, Georgia Straight
June 7, 2012

From where former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan sits on this blustery April day, the past and the future are equally visible. Across the mouth of False Creek from Kits Point rise the towers of the West End. They are the legacy of Sullivan’s Non-Partisan Association (NPA) and its 1960s developer-cum-mayor, Tom “Terrific” Campbell, who called hippies “scum” back then and those who opposed his plans to densify the West End, Kitsilano, and Kerrisdale “pinkos, commies, and hamburgers”. His nickname was used sarcastically by people who couldn’t abide his fierce high-rise plans. But Sullivan tells me he has just come to a shocking discovery. Considering the fact that suburban sprawl is—with its spacious, energy-consuming homes and requisite commuting—a disaster for the planet, then, to Sullivan’s mind, Campbell was right. Stacking people was right. Towers are good. And all the New Urbanist, low-rise, Jane Jacobs–loving, fuzzy-wuzzy antidevelopment forces were wrong when they brought a halt to the city’s concrete and steel densification in the early 1970s. More … http://www.straight.com/article-702636/vancouver/sullivanism-vs-jane-jacobs.