As its name suggests, a vegetated or green roof includes shallow-rooted plant material that can withstand extreme climatic conditions atop buildings. These assemblies offer numerous potential benefits, from absorbing rainwater runoff and providing insulation, to mitigating the urban heat island effect and providing greenspace.

Automated solar shading systems are practical applications used by European architects and building owners for decades to substantially reduce building energy usage and increase natural daylight. Worldwide, many of the most sustainable and greenest buildings (i.e. high-performance and net-zero structures) use automated solar shading.

Based on his experiences investigating failed showers for the past two decades, David Gobis, a forensic consultant in the tile and stone industry, estimates roughly half the showers in the United States are leaking.1 This is a bold statement and, although the percentage of Canadian showers that leak may not be quite as high, the situation in this country is similar.

Brick and stone masonry can create timeless buildings. Although they have been used for centuries for their esthetics, durability, and fire resistance, the full-bed veneer version of these materials requires a fairly robust structure for support. This is not always feasible on modern lightweight structures with smaller footings or lighter floor and roof framing. As stone and brick manufacturing methods improved, lighter thin versions of natural stone and brick—as well as concrete replicates of stone—began entering the market in the 1960s.

Approximately one-third of Canada’s secondary energy use is the operation of commercial and residential buildings, which also account for the same amount of the country’s annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This issue stretches further than North America, and the search for effective policies to decrease global energy demand is ongoing. Improving the energy efficiency in buildings has become a chief goal of policy makers around the world.

In most parts of Canada, commercial building energy efficiency is significantly affected by conductive heat loss. In the winter, resistance to undesirable condensation on interior surfaces is important. New insulating glass and framing options are available to reduce heat loss and air leakage, control solar heat gain when appropriate, and minimize the potential for condensation.

There is a substantial number of heritage commercial and institutional buildings in Canada. Able to provide productive useful space for decades to come, these projects are culturally significant, serving to define the past and present, along with the cultural landscape in which we live and work. There was a time, not so long ago, when many owners and designers would choose demolition over adaptation and repurposing. Fortunately, many have gotten beyond this thinking and made progressive moves toward creatively adapting these structures.

Often specified for commercial and industrial applications, sectional overhead and coiling door systems have long been relatively static as far as the speed of which they open and close. These doors have been able to increase their opening speeds by changing the sprockets in the motors, using wall-mounted jackshafts. This increase amounts to a few more inches-per-second opening speed, maxing out at about 406 mm (16 in.) per second. Conversely, newer ‘high-speed, high-performance’ doors can achieve up to 2540 mm (100 in.) opening speed depending on model, material, and opening size.

One simple approach to helping an educational facility reduce costs and energy consumption, while still meeting the needs of evolving technology, is to enhance the building’s lighting systems. In addition to schools working to improve the learning environment and keep costs to a minimum, classrooms now need to be multi-functional to support an integrated teaching approach.

One of the biggest heating and cooling equipment trends of the green movement over the past 10 years has been the growing popularity of tankless—also known as on-demand—water heaters in new construction and retrofit projects across Canada and the United States. A standard in Europe and Asia for more than 40 years, these space-saving, long-lasting systems provide a constant, on-demand supply of clean, hot water for all appliances and water fixtures simultaneously in high-frequency commercial applications when properly sized.