Audubon House: Building the Environmentally Responsible, Energy-Efficient Office by Architects Staff Croxton Collaborative Paperback (1994)

The behind-the-scenes story of the construction of one of the world's most environmentally sound buildings in the heart of New York City -- the headquarters of the Audubon Society. Audubon and the Croxton architects sought to make Audubon House a model for design professionals around the world.
Audubon House is the inspiring story of how the Audubon/Croxton team converted a 19th-century architectural masterpiece into one of the most environmentally advanced buildings ever designed.
Providing a model that can be followed by owners, developers, architects and building professionals, this book demonstrates how environmental criteria, such as sustainable use of resources, energy efficiency, and air quality can be achieved without sacrificing traditional considerations of cost, functionality, and aesthetics. Built at market cost and using only off-the-shelf technology, Audubon House is sixty percent more energy efficient than the conventional approach would have been. It saves its owners a projected $100,000 dollars annually in operating expenses, and supports an extraordinarily practical, healthy, and handsome office environment.
The book is organized into two parts. Part I introduces the project and describes what members of the Audubon team discovered about the environmental impact of buildings and the types of systems that can mitigate this impact. Part II presents four essential systems at Audubon House: lighting, heating and cooling, ventilation and indoor air quality, and recycling.
Particular attention is paid to the way in which these systems work together, each contributing to the performance of the whole. These goals could only be realized through the close cooperation of the architects, interior designers, environmentalists, engineers, research scientists, and contractors who collaborated on the project. The description of this collaborative process is as central to the theme of this book as the building's many design innovations and energy-saving features.
Richly illustrated with professional photographs and architectural drawings, Audubon House is both a guidepost for environmentally sound construction and an inspiring chronicle of hope for all environmentally concerned citizens.

Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World by Alan Weisman Hardcover (1998)

Discover a real-life Utopia on the arid plains of Columbia.  Twenty-seven years ago, a group of South Americans envisioned a society in which limited resources would form the base of a sustainable future. To bring their experiment to life, they chose a site in the sparsely populated and nearly arid plains of eastern Colombia. They called their village "Gaviotas" and went on to create a host of ingenious and relatively affordable technologies. Alan Weisman produced a documentary on Gaviotas for National Public Radio in 1994. After producing his radio documentary, Weisman maintained an avid interest in Gaviotas. He returned to the village several times in the past few years, and updates the Gaviotas story in his new book: "Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World." Weisman, a journalist based in Tucson, AZ, has covered some of the world's worst ecological disasters, but when he needs his faith in the future restored, he always returns to Gaviotas where, he says, "people seem to have gotten it right." This book documents the successful implementation of a self-sufficient, harmonious, ecologically based community that is building a sustainable economy. Gaviotas comes as close as human society can to achieving a real Utopia - and perhaps will serve as a model for a more balanced way of life for all of us.  A reader from Seattle, 1998