In Chicago, it’s possible to buy an old, deteriorating building for one dollar, provided you promise to save it from the wrecking ball and spend your money renovating it instead. Not only do you avoid the need to demolish and start from scratch---wasting energy and resources in the process---but you can revive a venerable old structure and make it more sustainable as well. Two LEED-certified cases in point: the Optimo Hat Co. plant and corporate headquarters in a former south

Two Roaring Twenties-era structures in the Chicago area are meeting that challenge by collecting and conserving stormwater on a grand scale. Dominican University In 2007, while hammering out the blueprints for a new science building, Parmer Hall, Dominican University in suburban River Forest, IL, discovered a perfect source of water for air-conditioning the new structure: a cistern dating back to the 1920’s buried under planks and debris in the basement of the old science bui

The devil is in the details at Chicago’s Hairpin Lofts . Look carefully at the exterior of this majestic, six-story triangular structure, and you’ll see that it’s bedecked with camel insignias. Constructed in 1930, when ladies had pinned-up hairdos, the building originally housed the offices of the Hump Hair Pin company, helmed by Sol Goldberg, the Chicago millionaire and once mayoral candidate who invented the dromedary-shaped hairpin and who commissioned what locals dubbed

Guest blogger: Landon Bone Baker Architects. Landon Bone Baker Architects were the lead architects for both SRO projects. Residential hotels constructed in Chicago between 1880 and 1930 served as an indispensable component of the city’s housing stock, offering an affordable housing option in prime locations. These single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels served a critical role in housing a large segment of the city’s middle- and working-class residents, and many continue to do so

Take a grand old city library with a domed exterior and palatial marble rotunda inside. In the mid-1950’s, expand the landmark with an addition behind the 1898 building. Then, in 2010, top off the addition’s sturdy roof deck with the icing on the cake: a 33,000-square-foot green roof plus an array of 132 solar panels. Result: a big bang for your energy-savings buck. The Central Library is one of Milwaukee’s showcase buildings for green infrastructure. Its green roof is an in

Chicago’s West Town has been experiencing a boom. Not only are humans moving in, but bees are as well. This spring, for example, saw the installation of five active beehives on the roof of the building that the company The Roof Crop calls home. The solid 1928 two-story, industrial structure, originally meant to house taxicabs, is one of the first in the city to be topped by an urban farm. The Roof Crop crew moved in in 2015, after tearing out the original roof and installing

Colorful. Comfortable. Inviting. Not adjectives that describe your typical vocational school building. What was originally a nondescript brick hardware equipment factory built in 1908 on Chicago’s southwest side was gutted, cleaned up, and transformed into a modern training center. The goal of Chicago Center for Arts and Technology (CHICAT ) , which opened in 2017, is to connect technology, art, and the community. To get to class, CHICAT students – low-income adults and teena

Acrophobes and the faint of heart need not apply. All others will be delighted to discover that the alpha male of skyscrapers, the Empire State Building, has reinvented itself as a supergreen structure. A top-to-bottom, four-year renovation of the historic landmark began in 2009, with the chief goal of maximizing energy savings. Like King Kong, construction workers clambered around the storied 102-story building, barely noticed by the stream of office workers and visitors tha

School’s been out for the summer, but now college students are descending on two historic buildings in Milwaukee’s old Pabst Brewery complex, abandoned in 1996 but slowly coming back to life. Like the Brewhouse Inn down the street ( see previous article ) and the Best Place banquet hall around the corner, the two buildings--a student residence known as Eleven25 and the Zilber School of Public Health -- are both classic examples of how to shed new light (literally) on a shutt

Cream City. Brew City. Beertown. Miltown. Call it by any name, but Milwaukee is outfitting its grand old buildings with a new set of clothes at a prodigious rate. Nowhere is this trend more evident than on the city’s west side, at the 20-acre site of the former Pabst Brewery that operated there for about 150 years. An empty ghost town after the last batch of beer was churned out in 1996, the brewery complex is now being resurrected. And in a sustainable way, with specific go