The Delta Upsilon house was designed by Albert Kahn.

Fire destroyed a historic 1903 fraternity house at the University of Michigan this morning, The Ann Arbor News reported. No one was injured in the fast-moving blaze.

The Tudor-revival house, built and still occupied by Delta Upsilon, was designed by the noted architect Albert Kahn early in his career. Kahn went on to plan factories, office buildings, and homes for clients like Edsel Ford.

The Delta Upsilon house was added to the National Register of...

A few weeks ago, The Washington Post ran an article about the power of symbolic actions within the environmental movement—and about how those symbolic acts can derail useful, real-world solutions. The author, Shankar Vedantam, points out that if all the people who participated in Earth Hour by turning off their lights had instead switched even one incandescent bulb to a compact fluorescent, the energy savings would have been enormous, perhaps as much as 1,368 times higher.

Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California’s Energy Institute, observes in the same article that it can be hard to persuade people to make...

Norwalk Community College administrators are taking a little heat for a new 55,000-square-foot building because it will not be as green as some students and other sustainability advocates at the college think it should be, according to the Stamford Advocate.

Designers say that the $40-million science center, now in the design and planning stages, would probably get close to a basic certification in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, but they say that striving for certification or for more green features would cost too much and delay construction. The State of Connecticut recently required all state-funded projects to meet a LEED silver standard, but this project was planned before the requirement was put in place and therefore does not have to meet the...

Students at Northland College installed a solar panel near the house of the college’s president, Karen I. Halbersleben. (Northland College image)

Student work: Northland College students enrolled in a course on photovoltaic installation recently put their training to the test on campus. They installed 12 pole-mounted solar panels in a yard near the home of Karen I. Halbersleben, the college’s president. Ms. Halbersleben paid for the project, with help from Wisconsin state energy grants. The panels, which will rotate on the pole to follow the sun, will generate about 3,300 kilowatt hours per year, offsetting 3.1 tons of carbon dioxide, according to the college’s calculations. The power will be used in the president’s house, and...

Lawrence Speck, one of May’s Buildings & Grounds guest bloggers, is professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was dean of architecture from 1992 to 2001. He is also a principal in the architecture firm Page Southerland Page.

Should university buildings be showpieces for the individual style of a particular star architect? Can a fine campus be built of a series of iconic, idiosyncratic buildings that focus attention on themselves, becoming landmarks or even logos? In a world often driven by hype and attention grabbing, should universities join the fray and seek to create buildings that will become controversial and grab media attention?

Top universities...

The new performing-arts center will have a glass wall overlooking the Northridge campus. (HGA image)

Performance gets a new home in Northridge: Construction started early this month on a big, glassy performing-arts center at California State University at Northridge. The 163,000-square-foot complex will house a 1,700-seat concert hall, a 250-seat black-box theater, support spaces, classrooms, a 150-seat lecture hall, and facilities for the university’s public-radio station, KCSN. It was designed by HGA Architects and Engineers, and is expect to cost $125-million, $98-million of which is for the building itself. But an article in the student newspaper, the

New student residences at Emory U.: Don’t drink the blue water. (Ayers Saint Gross image)

Atlanta and Greenville, S.C. — New buildings at both Emory University and Furman University will feature new building technologies — technologies that in some cases defy building conventions.

A new student residence at Emory, which is designed by Ayers Saint Gross and is shooting for a gold rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, has a number of green features. But one that designers and university officials really had to work for was a graywater system that will collect rainwater, store it in a cistern, then pump it through the building as water to flush the toilets.

Such systems have been...

The U. of Tampa will start construction on a chapel this summer. (U. of Tampa image)

Bells and whistles: A $19.5-million project to add a chapel to the University of Tampa campus will get started this summer, according to a university news release. The 12,750-square-foot Sykes Chapel and Center for Faith and Values, designed by Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback and Associates, will have a 250-seat main hall with a peaked, 65-foot-high ceiling. The exterior will be brick and laminated timber, with a prominent zinc roof. An important interior feature will be a 3,184-pipe, mechanical-action organ constructed by

Wind turbines, food miles, biomass, vertical farming, carbon sequestration — the Internet is a textbook study in overstimulation. There’s a lot of information, and a lot of it is depressing. But beneath the techno-speak and the climate predictions run a deeper current and a bigger set of questions.

What are we, the human race, trying to accomplish? Do we have enough time and political will? What does it mean to live off the sun, and why aren’t we doing it yet? Is it possible to transform an oil-based infrastructure, including all the magnificent medical, literary, technological, communications, and human-rights improvements that it has enabled? Does preventing global warming justify the short-term sacrifice of comfort — or...

The Utah Museum of Natural History is due to open in 2011. (U. of Utah image)

After a three-year delay, the University of Utah unveiled a Polshek Partnership Architects design for a new Utah Museum of Natural History last week. The copper-clad, 169,000-square-foot complex is slated for a 17-acre hillside site and is designed to achieve a gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

The bad news, though, is that rising construction prices and changes to the building program have sent the project’s price soaring—from an estimated $65-million in 2005 to $98-million now, according to the university’s student newspaper,