The project's centerpiece, the West Conservatory, is an expressed-steel glasshouse with doubly curved members, little repetition and tight tolerances.

Work on the slender tower would not begin for two years, the council was told.

The PAE Living Building is the 35th building in the world to earn full certification from the International Living Future Institute's rigorous sustainability program.

The 58,000-sq-ft PAE Living Building in Portland, Ore., is the first privately developed speculative office building fully certified under the rigorous Living Building Challenge of the International Living Future Institute, and one of only 35 fully certified Living Buildings in the world.

Decarbonization advocates are railing against the International Code Council for removing mandatory greenhouse-gas-reduction readiness provisions.

The Microsoft Thermal Energy Center, a groundbreaking geothermal heating and cooling system that serves the buildings of the tech giant’s 72-acre East Campus Modernization outside Seattle, was truly two exotic jobs wrapped into one.

Rouzbeh Savary became hooked on concrete as a youth in Tehran, when he would frequently tag along to jobsites with his developer-father Davood. Even as a 9-year-old, he was mesmerized by crews casting concrete for his father’s multistory buildings.

Carla Sciara began working in construction as a design drafter for an electrical contractor on its Four Seasons Hotel project in Manhattan—the first hotel designed by the renowned architect I.M. Pei.

The eight-story 160-ft-square cube, open since September, is a subdued backdrop to the 9/11 Memorial’s reflecting pools.

Pei has had an affinity for wood for 20 of his 44 years. “It’s a natural material that is close to art and architecture,” says the associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.