Inhabitat

GIFT GUIDE: $50 and under

$50 goes a long way with these green gifts – good for all your loved ones, they’re stylish, sustainable, and will have your recipients thanking you for months to come…

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LIGHT EMITTING TILES

SolarCap Light Emitting Tiles are complete, self-contained illuminating devices designed to be integrated into a variety of paving or masonry applications. Well suited for exterior use, they can add both day and nighttime color to patios, walkways, and other outdoor surfaces without additional wiring.

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GREEN TOWERS IN NEW YORK

Mark your calendars: The Skyscraper Museum will launch a new exhibit in January of next year, highlighting new sustainable skyscrapers. Entitled “Green Towers in New York: from Visionary to Vernacular,” the exhibit will examine both well known buildings such as the New York Times Tower as well as lower profile residential and mixed-use towers which have been designed to meet high standards of green-building.

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MIOCULTURE BENDANT LAMP

When it comes to style, we value individuality. There’s no novelty in mass production any more; instead, a product is desireable when it looks like it was the only one ever made. The BENDANT lamp, by MIOculture, blends the advantages of both mass-production and hand-made craft. The lamp comes to you as a mass-produced template that is ready to be bent into a unique shape, resulting in an absolutely one-of-a-kind creation.

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SIGN UP FOR INHABITAT EMAIL

We’ve just signed up with Feedblitz, a company that allows us to publish our content in email form. If you want to bypass our website and get Inhabitat posts emailed directly to you, give our new email service a try:

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HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

We hope you are all enjoying yourselves, and eating a nice meal, wherever you are.

We here at Inhabitat want to give a big thanks to all our readers for supporting us, commenting and sending us emails and tips, having patience through our occasional feed and server problems, and most importantly, for continuing to come back to read our site week after week. You guys make it all worthwhile.

Thanks again from Inhabitat.

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PHILIPS AIR TREE

Trees are great for many reasons. They help moderate climate, they provide shelter from sun, wind and rain, and they shelter wildlife. Most importantly, they act as air purifiers, removing nasty carbon dioxide, dust, ozone, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide from the air so that we can breathe nice clean oxygen.

We love trees so much that we wish we could keep one in our house for the air-purifying benefits (we’re working on it). However, until that day comes, Philip’s Air Tree is a good stand-in. Conceived as both a decorative item, and an air purifier / humidifier, the Air Tree takes is cue from nature and keeps the home environment fresh by performing much the same function as a biological tree: cleaning the air.

We can’t wait until these come to market. Hopefully by then they’ll be a little less bulky and a little more tree-like as well.

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INSTA-BALCONY

Given how cool and space-efficient Murphy beds are, it’s a wonder there aren’t more home furnishings that fold up and disappear flat against the wall. Hofman Dujardin Architects has come up with a new one, though it’s not so much space-saving as it is space-making.

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GRANCRETE FINALLY AVAILABLE

When I wrote about the sprayable uber-concrete Grancrete last May, we had enormous response from readers – mostly from people wondering where to get the innovative material. The sprayable ceramic is stronger than concrete and can be used to erect a house in a matter of hours, making it an ideal building material to create temporary shelters in areas of natural disaster. Well, I am happy to announce that Grancrete is finally available for purchase online at Grancrete.net.

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ECO-BOUDOIR

We’re always saying, in order for sustainability to be successful, it’s got to be sexy. A lot of good examples have passed across our radar, but Eco-Boudoir takes the cake. The London-based brand is not afraid to market itself as a sustainable product, since there’s no chance it’ll be mistaken for another crunchy company.

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INHABITAT FEEDS

Those of you who subscribe to our RSS feeds might have noticed that we just cut our old feeds back to “excerpts”. Don’t fret loyal RSS readers – we are not abandoning you!

We have a new and improved feed that we have created through Feedburner. Using Feedburner allows us to keep statistics on our traffic as well as advertise a little bit (and thus pay our writers and keep Inhabitat going). So please migrate over to our new feed today. …

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PIECELILLY BAGS & ACCESSORIES

Employing a similar design techniques as our favorite Scrapile – only with fabric – fashion label Piecelilly makes bags, purses and other unique accessories from recycled clothing scraps, fabrics and other found material. Design duo Jennifer Farrington and April Kline have developed a passion for recycling and reusing old materials. They spend their days haunting flea markets and estate sales, looking for that perfect piece of fabric that can be reborn into a unique Piecelilly product.

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PHENOMENAL PLYBOO

What material is 100% renewable, stronger than oak, and as pretty as bamboo? If you guessed Plyboo, you win an Inhabitat star. Plyboo, just as it sounds, is laminated bamboo plywood. Stronger and more durable than most hardwoods, yet lightweight and eco-friendly, ply bamboo is an ideal material for flooring, walls, and furniture.

We featured Plyboo on Inhabitat before in Redstr Collective’s Cha Furniture, and in Todd Laby’s Rhubarb Designs. However, we thought the material itself was so cool it deserved its own post.

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GOTHAM GREEN ROOFS

As a quick follow-up to our Green Roofs post from last week, we wanted to call attention to a great article in the Villager about the growing Green Roof movement in NYC.

Although New York City is still lagging far behind Chicago and many European and Asian cities, green roofing is finally started to pick up here. Community arts center ABC No Rio is renovating its dilapidated four-story tenement building in the Lower East Side to include an extensive green roof. The Lower East Side Girls Club is also renovating with plans to build two green roofs, one of which they will use to grow herbs for their cafe. (All this greening in my neighborhood!)

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DESERT LIVING CENTER

If there were a competition for the least sustainable city, Las Vegas would be a tough one to beat. Putting a mecca of lights, fountains and hotels in the middle of a desert is patently unsustainable. Luckily, Vegas has recently been taking some ideas from greener pastures. From tree-planting efforts to greening the Mirage, things are looking up.

In the heart of Vegas, the Springs Preserve occupies 180 acres of historic land. Architecture firm Lucchesi Galati has been working with the valley water district to redesign “Big Springs” with community and conservation in mind.

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SMART GROWTH AWARDS

At Inhabitat, we are often seduced by precious products and elegantly designed dwellings, intoxicated by the cutting edge approach to sustainability. While this technology and beauty is alluring, it?s important to recognize broader progress toward a more livable planet through urban redevelopment and government policies. On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced five communities to win a National Award for Smart Growth Achievement for 2005.

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BLUESKY MOD

For those who’ve dreamed of getting away from the pace of urban life without giving up their platform bed, BlueSky MOD has developed a modern cabin that can be prefabricated, delivered, and erected- in 10 days no less- on your wilderness of choice. The 640 sq-ft prototype has some similar appeals as the Tiny Tumbleweed Houses profiled last month; the cabin is designed to be ecologically responsible, flexible, and modular, all within a relatively small footprint.

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BULB

Paul Cocksedge is a young British designer whose elegant lighting incorporates rarely considered materials and exploits their properties through illumination.

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CARGOTECTURE

I had the great pleasure this past weekend of being invited to a little town outside of Seattle, where I witnessed the work-in-progress prototype of Cargotecture’s Studio 320. Had I arrived by chance in the industrial neighborhood to which my directions guided me, I might not have noticed the faded yellow and orange cargo containers that sat at the back of a large, mostly vacant parking lot. They were barely discernable from the backdrop of discarded industrial material. But closer inspection revealed that something surprising was afoot. These two metal boxes are the seed of an ingenious plan by two Seattle architects to turn old shipping containers into sustainable modular dwellings.

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HONEY, BY HERMAN MILLER

As an interior designer, my friend Victor receives gifts and tokens from the local finish and furniture reps on a daily basis. Usually these items are not terribly distinctive; however, last week I saw a tiny bottle of honey sitting on Victor’s desk. I couldn’t help but notice a tag around the neck that read: Herman Miller. “Surely they don’t make this themselves,” I said aloud. But why was an office furniture company giving honey away?

Upon further investigation, I found that Herman Miller does indeed make honey. The story goes something like this:

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RE:FORM ENERGY CURTAIN

Though guilt is a common and effective remedy for changing wasteful behavior, it’s certainly nobody’s favorite. In order for sustainable ideas to catch on, they need to be pleasurable and desirable. Not many products consist of equal parts ecological responsibility and innovative design, but Re:Form has struck the balance. Their Energy Curtain is a window shade woven with solar-collecting and light-emitting materials that store sunlight during the day and emit it at night. By choosing how much sunlight to collect and how much to use, the curtain “acts to stimulate reflection on the trade-offs of a local, sustainable system and [help the user] evolve a relationship with their own energy behaviors over time.”

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GREEN ROOFS

American cities have a surprising amount of wasted open space. Even in densely packed urban areas like New York City, the prime real estate atop roofs is given much less consideration than one would expect from a populace that values each square foot of space so highly. This oversight is a real shame, because there is so much that can be done to improve the local environment and quality of life, simply by fixing up a roof.

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CONCRETE BLOND WALLED PAPER

For those of you who have a hard time choosing between the minimalist aesthetic of unadorned concrete, and the warm, decorative aesthetic of wallpaper – your heart need be torn no longer. Concrete Blond’s Walled Paper allows brutalists to indulge their inner rocoquette, by transforming concrete into a lavish landscape of patterns and textures.

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FUTURE DESIGN DAYS

If I could be anywhere next week, I’d be at Future Design Days in Stockholm, Sweden. On November 14 and 15, designers and design-lovers will converge for a celebration and exploration of the current and future state of the industry that defines how we make things. Highlighted subcategories include industrial design, new media, architecture and interior design, and fashion.

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PREBUILT

What makes the Prebuilt different from other prefabs? For one thing, it’s truly affordable. The four design variations range from $43,000 to $109,000USD, the more costly of which gets you a two-story, three-bedroom home. Not bad. For another thing, the house can be folded up and transported on a single standard truck, and constructed in a matter of days, including interior installations and fixtures.

The Prebuilt has a galvanized steel frame with a choice of several claddings and window treatments. The entire structure can be elevated to accomodate site conditions, and can be folded up and relocated quickly and easily.

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FARM21

While “modern” & “rural” are rarely used descriptively in the same sentence, Sasha Sykes has found a way to merge these two design ideals. The contemporary furniture and art pieces of farm21 exemplify this aesthetic simplicity. The signature piece- a plexiglas cube stuffed with straw- originated as a birthday gift, but has since been reinterpreted in several variations.

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NOT A CORNFIELD

Say what you will about the sprawling urbanism of Los Angeles, there are some phenomenally cool projects coming straight out of the city’s smoggy heart. From the prodigious Treepeople to the irreverent Fallen Fruit, Angelinos are not only embracing the natural world, they are proving that it can thrive in the middle of a concrete jungle.

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THE WILLOW SCHOOL

Looking for alternatives to the typical education available for their own kindergarten child, Mark and Gretchen Biedron established the Willow School, the first independent school in the U.S. to achieve a LEED Gold certification. Founded on the precepts of hands-on learning, respect for one another, and respect for the outdoors, it comes as no surprise that ecological responsibility and sustainability were huge factors in creating both the curriculum as well as the campus buildings.

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2005 GREENBUILD

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) will be holding its 4th official GreenBuild International Conference & Expo in Atlanta this week. This annual conference brings together professionals from the building and construction industry to learn about the latest methods in green building design, construction and management.

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SIERRA CLUB TABLEWARE

Branching out to mainstream consumers, the Sierra Club has teamed up with the Parsons Design Lab to develop collections of dinnerware and glassware. The Parsons students were inspired by the Sierra Club’s mission of environmental protection and preservation, and designed patterns through an examination of natural elements and textures. Simple, clean, and modern, the collections evoke an abstract reference to the purity of nature.

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MODABODE

Out of Australia, another little prefab with an eco-friendly slant. The Modabode is a modular structure created for flexibility in size, shape and location. The single-module prototype, called e-Bode, measures just 3.6m x 14.4m, with an internal floor area of 50 sq-m, making it small enough for a beach hut, and versatile enough to be used in customizing a family residence. Modabode offers rainwater catchment systems and solar water heating, as well as energy-efficient appliances and an extra-large cantilevered roof that shades and protects the interior.

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