Gabe Dunsmith

When the 10th annual Living Future unConference came to a close just last week, architects, engineers, city planners, and visionaries from around the world left Seattle with the energy and ideas necessary to transform the built environment. The conference opened on Wednesday, May 11th, and was filled with a series of workshops and summits surrounding this year’s theme of Truth…

Reveal, a program run by the International Living Future Institute (ILFI), aims to make commercial buildings’ energy use more transparent and therefore broaden people’s access to information in the corporate sphere. By labeling a particular building’s electricity consumption, Reveal targets an invisible and oft-hidden component of physical structures. The Reveal label brings forward numerics and data in an easily accessible…

The floods that struck São Paulo in early 2015 quickly overwhelmed urban infrastructure, transforming roads into rivers and washing cars away. The region as a whole, however, suffered from severe drought. São Paulo, whose 12 million inhabitants make it the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, was watching its reservoirs dry up. When the storm abided, the reservoirs were still…

The Declare program, developed by the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) in 2012, is an ingredients initiative for building products that is designed to shape a greener, healthier environment for construction workers, business employees, and customers alike. The Declare program operates through a label given to building products that shows a full list of ingredients, thereby exposing components that potential…

Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood neighborhood has suffered in recent decades as American manufacturers have sent operations overseas and shuttered their U.S. factories. Pittsburgh, once known for its steel production, has transformed itself in the 21st century into a mecca for technology companies, with Google, Intel, Apple, and IBM siting facilities in the city—but by and large, Hazelwood has been left behind by…