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Moving ahead of Australian Green Star compliance, One Central Park (OCP) by Ar. Jean Nouvel is an innovative and environmentally ambitious landmark project that takes a broader approach to carbon conscious design and exceeds the highest standards of sustainable residential design. Check it out here…

Could a sustainable renovation be the answer to old buildings instead of a redevelopment? Check out this home-cum-studio in Canada and leave us your views…

Quietly working their way up over the last six-seven years, sustainable fabrics are getting increasingly mainstream with several Indian fashion labels going green in novel avatars. Check out a few that we've profiled here…

A small community in the Kumaon Himalayas enjoys a sustainable lifestyle on rainwater for seven months of the year. Check out this true story and leave us your views…

Moulding traditional design into contemporary lifestyle with a discerning play of design elements, The Purple Ink Studio's Bengaluru residence works on their passionate tripartite principle - architecture-landscape-sustainability! Check it out here…

Creative Group weaves a sustainable narrative with the Gems International School at Kochi, pronounced with fluid spaces, carved volumes, percolating environs and panoramic views to the riverfront. Check it out here

Working with natural materials need not mean a compromise with contemporary settings. Check out this upbeat office and give us your views...

Finding oneself in the mayhem of avant garde terminology by rustling up one's roots is part of any intellectually bent probing mindset. Check out this installation by designer Lalit Hira at the LDF 2015 and leave us your views...

Ar. Steven Holl juxtaposes forms and functions in a strong sustainable composition at the new building at Iowa University...

That 'high-rises provide vantage points, otherwise unthinkable of' is beyond debate and when such a point provides an unobstructed view as well, it's definitely a bonanza. It is this distinct advantage that Aedas, the architects of Mongkok Residence, Hong Kong plan to serve to its residents through this towering landmark. Check it out here...

Eco-friendly retirement home by Spark Architects wins best future-experimental project at the 2015 World Architecture Festival

This contemporary house, the 'Tropical Cave' by H&P Architects is idyllic for a humid sub-tropical country like #Vietnam - an ornamentation-free envelope that wraps around spatial experiences and #sustainable principles of #design.

Can Circular Economy be implemented easily in the construction industry that uses the traditional linear model of 'take, make and waste'? @arup-associates present a prototype with 'reuse' at its core. Read here and leave us your thoughts.

Manoj Patel Design Studio designs an exhibition gallery in Vadodara, Gujarat, tuning the space with a bespoke flexi-use display system that is contextually rooted in a local skillset and sustainability. Check out the story and leave us your views…

Working with nature is the key to architectural sustainability. Check out this inward-looking home that builds on this belief. Read here and leave us your views…

What is the shelf-life of a novel idea? Does one have to constantly push the envelope to sustain interest? Check out this theme-based hotel in Italy and leave us your views…

Yesterday's Sunday Times devoted the lead slot of its front page to a long examination of the effects of the web on the attention spans of teenagers. In the tradition (yes, it is now a tradition) of Nick Carr, the piece concludes that, essentially, our smartphones - and our Facebook and our YouTube and our web in general - are robbing kids of their ability to concentrate. Neuroplasticity! "Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people," the piece notes. "The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks - and less able to sustain attention."

December 9th, 02005 - Sam Harris"The View From The End Of The World"This is an audio only presentation. This talk took place in the Conference Center Golden Gate Room, San Francisco. Quote: With gentle demeanor and tight argument, Sam Harris carried an overflow audience into the core of one of the crucial issues of our time: What makes some religions lethal? How do they employ aggressive irrationality to justify threatening and controlling non-believers as well as believers? What should be our response? Harris began with Christianity. In the US, Christians use irrational arguments about a soul in the 150 cells of a 3-day old human embryo to block stem cell research that might alleviate the suffering of millions. In Africa, Catholic doctrine uses tortured logic to actively discourage the use of condoms in countries ravaged by AIDS. "This is genocidal stupidity," Harris said. Faith trumps rational argument. Common-sense ethical intuition is blinded by religious metaphysics. In the US, 22% of the population are CERTAIN that Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years, and another 22% think that it's likely. The good news of Christ's return, though, can only occur following desperately bad news. Mushroom clouds would be welcomed. "End time thinking," Harris said, "is fundamentally hostile to creating a sustainable future." Harris was particularly critical of religious moderates who give cover to the fundamentalists by not challenging them. The moderates say that all is justified because religion gives people meaning in their life. "But what would they say to a guy who believes there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in his backyard? The guy digs out there every Sunday with his family, cherishing the meaningthe quest gives them." "I've read the books," Harris said. "God is not a moderate." The Bible gives strict instructions to kill various kinds of sinners, and their relatives, and on occasion their entire towns. Yet slavery is challenged nowhere in the New or

"You can't sustain a democracy in an oligarchic state. The writers on Athenian democracy understood that 2000 years ago," says Chris Hedges, whose new book The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress explores the problems of a crumbling empire, inside and out. Chris joins Laura in studio for a conversation about the death of Bin Laden and the continuing concern over terrorism, the end of empathy in the U.S., and what avenues are left for progressives to fight back.  "The elites are not going to help us," he warns, "We're going to have to help ourselves."

The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs.  The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap's become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old "War on Drugs" public enemy number one for the nation's oldest civil rights organization? Well here's why:  it's not extraneous - it's central: the war on drugs is the engine of 21st century discrimination - an engine that has brought Jim Crow into the age of Barack Obama.     Author Michelle Alexander lays out the statistics -- and the stories --  of 21st Century Jim Crow in her ought-to-blow-your-socks off book: "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness." I had a chance to sit down with Alexander earlier this summer. We'll be posting the full interview in two parts.     "We have managed decades after the civil rights movement to create something like a caste system in the United States," says Alexander in part one here  "In major urban areas, the majority of African American men are either behind bars, under correctional control or saddled with criminal record and once branded as criminal or a felon, they're trapped for life in 2nd class status."     It's not just about people having a hard time getting ahead and climbing the ladder of success. It's about a rigged system. Sound familiar?  Like the Pew Research Center report on household wealth and the Great Recession -- the NAACP resolution story was a one-day news-blip - despite the fact that it pierces the by-your-bootstraps myth that is at the heart of - you pick it - the deficit, the stimulus, the tax code - every contemporary US economic debate.     White America just maybe ought to pay attention. With more and more Americans falling out of jobs and into debt, criminal records are a whole lot easier to come by than life-sustaining employment.  Contrary to the conventional media version, the "Drug War" story is not a people with problems