My writing


Architecture | Green Design | Energy Efficiency 

In addition to my content strategy practice, I work as a freelance journalist covering green building trends, regenerative design, and energy policy for a variety of media outlets, including Green Building Advisor, Fine Homebuilding, Metropolis, Architectural Record, ENTER magazine (AIA Minnesota), and others publications. 

Rethinking Remembrance at Lakewood Cemetery’s Net-Zero Welcome Center

This feature appeared in the 2023 ENTER print annual, available for purchase here. The 250-acre Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis’s Chain of Lakes area hugs stretches of Lake Harriet and Bde Maka Ska. Its rolling hills, adorned with seas of headstones, monuments, and lawn crypts, are home to some 200,000 souls, including local luminaries such as Hubert Humphrey, Bobby Marshall, Lena Olive Smith, and T.B. Walker. Like all great civic landscapes, the cemetery’s grounds are a careful composition of

IoT and Smart Home Technology: Looking at the Matter Standard

A smart home sure seems like a smart idea. Integrated kitchen, laundry, and entertainment appliances are designed for ease of use and peace of mind. Smart home systems like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings provide useful and intuitive command centers for everything from lighting to dishwashers to thermostats, provided the systems and devices in question are compatible and synced. With more smart appliances and competing systems flooding the home market, it can

What is Heating Your Home and What Power Is Producing That Heat?

What type of system is heating your home? For that matter, what is powering that heat? Whether you are purchasing, upgrading, or simply maintaining your home, these and related questions are of critical concern. They are critical, dear reader, because presumably you are keen on having a system that is clean, efficient, durable, right-sized for your home and lifestyle, and finally, efficient both in terms of cost and energy consumption. There are various types of heating systems out there, and

Manufacturers Catch Up on Embodied Carbon

One facet of our built environment where this hasn’t truly taken hold is interiors. So-called “hot spot” products such as furniture, flooring, and ceiling materials, among others, comprise a veritable trove of embodied carbon emissions. Only a small percentage of these products currently disclose their carbon emissions through Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), so even if building owners elect to use one of several innovative carbon trackers like the CARE Tool or EC3 (Embodied Carbon in

A National Definition for Zero Emissions Buildings Is in the Works

There’s an old joke about how standards proliferate. A particular industry (let’s say, for argument’s sake, the one that deals with buildings) gets bogged down by 14 competing standards and definitions of the same thing. The solution is to concoct a universal definition that encompasses all scenarios, one standard to rule them all. The result: the industry now has 15 competing standards. Is this an unfair generalization? Yes. Because the gag’s premise rests of the idea of competition. If varyin

Things to Consider When Upgrading Your Home’s Electrical Panel

Your home’s electrical service panel is the main conduit by which your house receives and distributes power to switches, outlets, and various appliances. Think of it as the home’s heart; so long as it’s beating and the interconnected arteries (electrical wiring) are in good working order, all is well. But like anything in life, things are finite. And while durable and long-lasting, electrical panels aren’t designed to last for more than a few decades (with a lifespan of 25-40 years, on average).

The Importance of Regular Maintenance on Your Home’s HVAC

There is an old idiom that many homeowners will be familiar with, and it goes like this: home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling. This is a touching sentiment. When one makes the enormous investment of purchasing a home, they are not just investing in bricks and beams, so to speak, but in the promise of creating cherished memories and possibly passing down their equity to future generations. But the operative feeling is also palpable; the better the place performs, the more favorable your feelings wi

What Are Refrigerants and What is Their Environmental Impact?

Refrigerants are critical to a great number of common appliances and industrial uses. From air conditioning systems and food storage to the vehicles we use daily, every industrialized society the world over would be in retrograde without them. But like most matters tied to climate action, energy efficiency, and sufficient living, we are still developing a clearer understanding of what comprises the various refrigerants we use, both past and present, as well as their environmental impacts. Diffe

Bowdoin College Unveils Maine’s First Commercial Mass Timber Project

“There’s a beautiful dialogue between eras all around campus. It has that sense of familiarity, but also a quality of something new,” says Nat Madson, a design principal with HGA. True to form, tucked among the pine groves of the east campus stand a new pair of HGA-designed buildings: Barry Mills Hall and the John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies (CAS). Mills Hall, clad in locally sourced red water-struck brick, houses the Digital and Computational Studies and Anthropology departments

Affordable, High-Performance Design Built on a Microgrid

America’s electricity grid is old and inefficient. Organizationally and functionally, it’s become a cat’s cradle gone awry. And in many parts of the country, where renewable wind and solar energy infrastructure is proliferating, the grid is being asked to perform tasks it wasn’t designed to do. In theory, new communities and growing populations should reasonably translate into a bigger, stronger grid (with hardened transmission lines, grid-scale energy storage capacity, and the like), but our ve

28 Countries Sign Buildings Breakthrough Agreement at COP28

There appears to be real momentum in the wake of COP28, the most recent Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, held this year in Dubai. The 28th such conference, which concluded on December 12, is being heralded even by some skeptics as a “turning point” in the global fight against anthropogenic climate change. Case in point, despite Saudi Arabia’s vocal opposition mid-conference to any UN agreement that called for a phaseout of fossil fuels (or even any dea
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Art Criticism | Art History

“Remember That You Will Die: Death Across Cultures” at the Rubin Museum of Art

Memento Mori is the Latin-Christian maxim translated as “Remember that you will die.” It is altogether sobering and, in some perverted sense, comforting; it’s an epitaph for the masses—commoners and kings alike. It is also the subject of the ’s latest offering, of the same name, and although said offering is a modest one, this exhibition is, quite literally, breath-taking.
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