By Annie Groer from the Washington Post

In the land of the center-hall Colonial, local architect Mark McInturff is a modernist, committed to soaring open spaces, clean lines, large expanses of glass and buildings that fit into -- rather than fight with -- the land around them. In some cases, that means marrying a traditional home to a contemporary addition....

By Lynn Vannucci From the San Francisco Chronicle

Whimsical. It was the least loaded word I'd heard critics muster for "Old Downtown" Windsor, which is not old in any sense of the word; it is the brand-new brainchild of its developer, Orrin Thiessen, and it has whimsy to spare.

Located 60 miles north of San Francisco off Hwy. 101, Windsor is a town of some 22,000 residents. Its downtown core, which dated from the 1870s, had deteriorated in the last century into a motley collection of scarred buildings riddled with gang activity. "It looked like it belonged in Bosnia," one long time resident told me....

By Peter S. Goodman from the New York Times

Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas.

Just off Singing Hills Road, in one of hundreds of two-story homes dotting a former cattle ranch beyond the southern fringes of Denver, Phil Boyle and his family openly wonder if they will have to move close to town to get some relief....

By Peter Lovenheim from the New York Times

The alarm on my cellphone rang at 5:50 a.m., and I awoke to find myself in a twin bed in a spare room at my neighbor Lou’s house.

Lou was 81. His six children were grown and scattered around the country, and he lived alone, two doors down from me. His wife, Edie, had died five years earlier. “When people learn you’ve lost your wife,” he told me, “they all ask the same question. ‘How long were you married?’ And when you tell them 52 years, they say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful!’ But I tell them no, it isn’t. I was just getting to know her.”......

By Gareth McGrath from the Wilmington Star-News

As an environmental attorney trying to promote smart transportation practices in the South, David Farren often saw his overtures fall on deaf ears. Issues such as worsening air pollution, declining water quality and a drop in quality of life only went so far in persuading people to change development patterns, and they won him few friends in places like sprawl-happy Atlanta.

Then gas prices started to spike. Suddenly, people are knocking on Farren’s door, and they’re willing to listen...

By Nancy Keates of the Wall Street Journal

It might be the most politically correct housing development on the planet.

In Raleigh, where hundreds of old houses have been torn down to make way for bigger, fancier new ones, one neighborhood stands out. Called Barrington Village, it comprises 24 homes that were saved from demolition by a nonprofit group and moved to the wooded, six-acre property. The houses, dating from the 1940s to 1960s, were placed on new foundations and fitted with identical front porches....

By Erica Meltzer of the Arizona Daily Star

When Jeanna Hernandez moved her horse-boarding business to North La Cholla Boulevard five years ago, she could hardly see a house from her property.

Now Southwestern-style ranch homes line the ridge to the north of her stables, and their patios look out over her sparse, metal-roofed stables and hay barn, and the bare dirt of her riding pens.....

By Andy Newman of the New York Times

For $3.1 million in New Canaan, you can get a middling, multi-humped colonial colossus of no great distinction but sufficient grandeur to assuage your distress at not living quite as well as your hedge-fund-managing neighbors who paid twice as much....

By David Biello From Scientific American

If you care about reducing your emissions of greenhouse gases, then you might want to move to Honolulu, Los Angeles or Portland, Ore., according to a new study from The Brookings Institution. These three metropolises boast, respectively, the lowest three per capita levels of world warming pollution (read: carbon dioxide) in the nation's top 100 metro areas...

By Phinjo Gombu of the Toronto Star

European-style piazzas for after-work mingling, towering office and residential towers stacked behind tightly packed street-friendly low-rise buildings, thousands of people streaming out of subways or headed home via a network of bicycle paths....

By Lisa Gray from the Houston Chronicle

How big is too big? When it comes to houses, the city of Houston almost always leaves that question to the property owner — never mind what the rest of the neighborhood thinks of the McMansion rising in its midst...

By Craig Nakano from the Los Angeles Times

Consider all the potential architectural solutions for modern living, and the split-level house hardly seems an obvious candidate -- not to the average person who summons the image of some postwar dwelling that appears half-sunken in quicksand, its tiny basement windows barely poking aboveground, the front door opening to dual sets of stairs and the immediate puzzle: Do I go up? Or do I go down? .......

 This American Life - 355: The Giant Pool of Money

"A special program about the housing crisis produced in a special collaboration with NPR news. We explain it all to you. What does the housing crisis have to do with the turmoil on Wall street? Why did banks make half-million dollar loans to people without jobs or income? And why is everyone talking so much about the 1930s? It all comes back to the Giant Pool of Money."

Listen to the show here.

By David A. Fahrenthold From the Washington Post

The naked suburb.

It has houses, yards and roads, but no large trees to shade them, no oaks to catch the rain. This place may even have a woodsy name -- it may, in fact, sound like a sylvan glade where elves dwell -- but its real-life trees are either scrawny or nonexistent. It looks like houses on a Monopoly square....

Biophilia is a hypothesis that describes humans as emotionally connected to all other living systems. Jonathan Rose, a New York City-based real estate developer, describes how biophilia can guide building design in dense urban environments. In many instances, biophilia shares the same principles as sustainable building design.

More information is available at http://www.pbs.org/e2/ and http://www.e2-series.com/