Canadian Sustainable Building Resources

Purpose:
To provide a free source of information for those trying to build responsible buildings.

Organization:
Follows (roughly) the topics of an Integrated Design Charrette or Integrated Design Process (IDP).

Raison d'etre:
I became interested in learning more about 'green', aka 'sustainable' design, as an Architectural Technology student at Sheridan College. The spring of 1999 was when I first started reading about how wasteful/energy hungry buildings and the building industry was as a whole. I was faced with the dilemma of how to proceed with my love of architecture without violating my beliefs in protection of the environment. I started doing research to find resources then and haven't stopped.

I've been astonished and pleased with how much has changed in the industry since then, but while there's a lot of help out there, finding what you need takes a long time so I've created a place where all that I've found is available to help as many as possible. Having used most of these resources myself on the 'green' projects I've worked on myself. It's really a publishing of my bookmarks organized in a way that is hopefully logical and easy to navigate. (Don't forget to look at the "Useful Extras")

How:
I do research to keep this up to date almost every day, from a variety of sources, but can use your help too. If you have a great link or find a dead link on this site, please let me know. As a proud Canadian, I look for Canadian references and resources where possible, but I'm not biased so good information from a lot of different sources will be included too.

This is too important a topic not to be helping everyone trying to make a difference in every way we can.

Good luck!
Thea Browne, Architectural Technologist