The dirty little secret of LEED certification is that it doesn’t hold its ‘green’ systems accountable in the long run. We’ve heard a growing dissatisfaction with the practice in recent months (advertised by mouthpiece Frank Gehry, among others) not over the program’s ethos, but its execution. Now, one man named Henry Gifford is bringing a $100 million class action lawsuit against the US Building Council over what he claims is LEED’s fradulent activity. [via Treehugger]

You may be familiar with the Mies van der Rohe enclave called Lafayette Park situated right outside of Detroit: the single- and two-story townhouses are a landmark of modern design in a city more often known for its hard-scrabble living and abandoned tracts of land. The Times examines what it’s like to live with Mies in this nifty interactive feature. [via The Opinionator/ New York Times]

Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto designed the gallery installation for a Japanese fashion retrospective at London’s Barbican Gallery: his signature “formless form” is seen in the layered, cross-hatched yet transparent screens guiding visitors throughout the exhibition. [via Building Design Online]

Portugal — with the help of a tech start-up called LivingPlanIT — is planning the first “city with a brain,” in which information technology measuring occupancy, temperature, and energy use streams data into a central nervous system that changes how buildings are used based on real-time information. In other words, Gattaca v. 2015. [via GOOD]

German design firm Akteull has transformed Berlin’s Eichbaum U-Bahn station into a shipping container opera. How do you say “awesome” in German? [via Inhabitat]

Residents of Lafayette Park in Detroit, courtesy of New York Times.

Eichbaum metro opera in Berlin by Akteull.

by Kelsey Keith

posted in daily brew

tagged daily brew, fashion, LEED, mies van der rohe, News, shipping container, sou fujimoto, urban planning

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