Building Good

What’s so scary about being the man who speaks up for women at work, especially when courage and accountability are traits that so many of us feel “make a man” in the first place? David G. Smith, PhD…

Planning cities requires a lot of data. That data can be difficult to penetrate, and that’s where synthetic cities come in. Myrna Bittner and RWI Synthetics create complex visual models of cities tha…

Nature has been engineering for billions of years, so why do we think we can do better than her? Biomimicry is taking that ancient evolutionary design process and using it to build buildings and desi…

Building Good is about making the built environment better. We’re a place for the conscientious construction worker, the innovative engineer and the environmentally conscious architect. We’re relaunc…

With a labour shortage that isn’t being solved with only Canadian workers the solution should be obvious: immigration. Canada’s immigration system has values built into it which make it hard to recru…

Our host Tim Coldwell is not OK with the industry standard. There aren’t enough Indigenous partnerships and communities often aren’t involved in decisions around projects that affect them. That’s not…

Why does it matter if a construction project buys from diverse suppliers? If I’m a gay electrician, why should I be open about that? If an architect or carpenter is hiding their sexual orientation or…

Only 17% of construction jobs are going to women, and even those are mostly in off-site roles. Jeanette Southwood wants that to be at least 30%. She’s vice president of corporate affairs and strategi…

Did you know a water fountain is a form of accessible design? It’s not just ramps, automatic doors, and escalators. Thinking about accessibility from the ground up makes the spaces we create easier a…

“Diversity” is not a buzzword. It’s not just the right thing to do. Diversity is the solution to a labour shortage, it’s the key to new insights and perspectives, and it’s a way to make our spaces ea…

Buying carbon offsets when you take a flight or build a building can sound a little bit like cheating. Should it really be as simple as paying your way to net-zero? Do these offsets actually do anyth…

If you want to build a net zero project you need to predict its energy use. That’s where Matt Grace comes in. He’s an expert in creating virtual models of houses, extensions, or even entire communiti…

If it were a country, cement would be responsible for more carbon emissions than the entire European Union. More than four times as much as Canada. Reducing the amount of carbon that concrete product…

A huge chunk of a building’s emissions are baked into the fabric of the building itself. Even if its operations are net zero, the building itself might not be. This is called embodied carbon, and to …

Achieving net zero by 2050 requires us to build differently, but what about the buildings that are already up? We can’t just knock them all down, even if they are inefficient carbon factories. We ret…

Canada has set an ambitious environmental goal: to have net-zero emissions as a country by 2050. One of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses are our buildings, so how does the architecture and c…

When car companies build a new car they don’t reinvent the wheel, and they don’t have engineers assembling each car individually. Pretty much everything in our lives is built out of other smaller com…

Construction is rife with sexism. It’s not just catcalls on building sites, it’s tradeswomen being passed over for contracts. It’s being told you’ll never be as good as a man. It’s bad jokes… and som…

Construction often rubs communities up the wrong way. Architects roll in with a construction firm and big money decides what’s getting built and where. It’s no fun for the people who live there… but …

A lot of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, depend on the weather, making their power output fluctuate. We need to store energy at times of high output. That’s where Annette Verschuren…