Northern Built

Foster Lyons Building Science: What building science can learn from a self-cleaning leaf Editor’s note: I recently received several blog posts from building scientist and writer Foster Lyons.

Buying or building a home isn’t just about walls, a roof, and the finishes.

Smoke from Canadian Wildfires on August 1, 2025, blanketing my community.

On Friday, January 31, 2025, I excepted an interim position of editor at Green Building Advisor.

If you’ve been studying the concepts of building science, you’ve probably heard of the four control layers, water, air, vapor, and thermal.

Back in the early 1990’s, before I joined the construction industry, I was in college taking business classes.

As I’m writing this blog post, a very cold air mass typically found at the North Pole has begun to move southward, into more temperate climates.

The first time I used a self-adhered water resistive barrier was in 2019, on my own home.

Missing a detail when working through an unfamiliar assembly can be easy to do.

Testing the air barrier or air control layer of a home has traditionally been done using artificial pressure created by a fan, commonly referred to as a blower door test.