INTÉGRAL: Revolutionary Engineering - Softcover

Molly Miller writes about zero energy buildings, Living Buildings, and deep green design and engineering in numerous mediums. Molly comes from Rocky Mountain Institute, where she wrote about built environment practice. She began writing about sustainable design at Mother Earth News, where she was the senior editor. She helped launch Natural Home magazine and served as its executive editor, and has been a staff writer and editor at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Colorado Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council. She has a masters degree in journalism from Columbia College, Chicago.

No matter what you may think you know, you'll find more than one Ah-Ha! moment in Intégral: Revolutionary Engineering. Intégral has been consistently at the bleeding edge of innovation, adding to the technical body of knowledge and providing leadership for the green building movement. This is a fire hose you are going to want to drink from! --Rick Fedrizzi, President and CEO, USGBC

To fully unleash the green cities movement, we need to think bigger and embrace a larger scale of action - holistic planning and project delivery that enables and empowers communities to take bold action and live within the constraints of a planet at risk. This is the challenge of our time and Intégral Group is one of a few next-generation design firms that both understands and embraces the complex challenges facing our leaders. This book provides an intimate look into a firm that gets sustainability - deeply. --Rob Bennett, CEO, EcoDistricts

Communication gaps lead to surprising failures of logic. We know this. And for those advocating the (re)integration of process in the building sector, there are countless examples of these failures. Why else, for instance, would the efficiency of cooling not be matched with good envelope air-tightness? Why would a carefully designed mechanical cooling system be countered by too much external glazing? To integrate is to ask how these (and other) decisions would be made, were the task not subdivided and dished out to experts with conflicting agendas and an inability to talk to each other. The trouble with this question is that the design-construction process does rely on various domains of knowledge and their experts. The act of making is indeed that complicated, much of the time. What Kevin Hydes advocates, and Intégral does, is reconnect the dots. The simplicity and elegance he espouses is hard work and, in a sense, radical in trans-global practice that juggles inputs across disciplines and borders. Their process is driven by goals, and goals driven by imagination. Here, zero energy becomes the norm, not the exception. This book is more than a compilation of thoughtful projects; it wants to change the way you think. --Nirmal Kishnani, Ph.D, M.Arch, Design+Technology+Sustainability, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore