We were lucky enough this week to get a sneak peek of a new project by Andrew Maynard: a residential extension to an existing house in Melbourne. By prioritizing solar exposure and flexible construction, Maynard refreshed the home and designed a complementary adjacent structure to open and increase the space.
Sustainable design and prefabrication are two of our central obsessions here at Inhabitat. So when they come together in one sleek package, we take note. Lest you think we have been ignoring or overlooking innovative LA-based design firm Marmol Radziner, think again. We were just waiting for the right moment…and since Sarah got a chance to see the firm at CA Boom last week, we decided the right moment has finally arrived.
Our friends at Core77 threw the hungry blogging pirhanas a tasty bite from Dalex Designs today — a little tool called a “toothbork” that is both a fork and a toothbrush. But I must say, I was in their camp, finding greater inspiration from Dalex’s Paisley Bench, the minimalist piece of furniture with secret embellishments on its underside.
In the sweltering climate of the Southeastern United States, a cool bit of shade can be a hot commodity. Long ago, before a cold blast of air was as simple as flipping the A/C switch, Southeastern architects developed the Dogtrot house, a log cabin which, when oriented properly, takes advantage of southerly winds through an open side porch, but keeps the shelter protected from rain with overhanging eaves. The classic dogtrot actually consists of two of these cabins, which connect at the side opening, creating a central passageway for natural ventilation.
Once again, we have the great pleasure of presenting a piece from guest contributor Geoff Manaugh, whose work regularly appears at BLDGBLOG and Archinect.
[Image: Erik Gauger].
The first time many people hear the phrase “Los Angeles River,” they seem to think it’s some kind of oxymoron - the Los Angeles what? Yet cutting right through one of the largest cities in the world is an extraordinary riverine landscape, famous for almost anything but its desert water…
PBS thinks so… The company has just announced a new television series about environmentally-friendly architecture called Design: E2, which will be narrated by starchitecture buff Brad Pitt. Inhabitat’s favorite Architect for Humanity, Cameron Sinclair, is also involved with the show. The series will explore “the most complex issues facing our environment: from green architecture to water culture to organic farming to recycled clothes - challenging us to live smarter, greener lives.”… In HD no less!
The show is slated to air in June on PBS.
+ E2: The economies of being environmentally conscious
Watch the trailer >
Risen literally from the dust of a divided Berlin, the Chapel of Reconciliation stands as one of the most compelling examples of contemporary rammed-earth architecture I’ve seen in a long time. Located on a site that had once been a deadly no-man’s-land, the Chapel is Berlin’s first public building, and sole church, constructed of load-bearing earth.
We did the bi-coastal conference thing this weekend at Inhabitat. While our intrepid west-coast Inhabitants were staking out the CABoom conference in Santa Monica, I had the opportunity to check out AIGA’s Grow Conference in New York on Saturday.
Gorillas may not be immediately associated with holistic lifestyles, but at Gorilla Furniture a holistic approach dictates the entire design process. Designers Dan Weber and Steve Wilson founded Santa Barbara-based Gorilla in 2005 with a mission to “encourage healthy lifestyles, environmental and social consciousness, creativity and open mindedness.” How? Through furniture that uses eco-friendly materials and considers our interaction with the built environment.
From what I can tell, it would be limiting to call Rana Creek a “landscape design” firm, as the description would betray the breadth of their work and the depth of their philosophy. But they do deal in the integration of greenery into built environments.
Rana Creek caught everyone’s attention at CA Boom this weekend with their giant metal wall panels (which they custom-designed for the show.) The vertical facades grow succulents and other plants through beautifully cut surfaces. Initially, the panels sit flat to allow the roots to settle with gravity, then gradually get raised to vertical and the plants continue to grow through the openings in the metal. They also function as rainwater catchment systems.
It’s been almost a year since we first fell in love with kirei, the natural fiber board made from discarded sorghum stalks. It’s been spotted most frequently in the media inside Iannone:Sanderson’s eye-catching Mod Coffee Table, but that’s not the only place to find kirei. At CA Boom, I found a line almost entirely dedicated to this distinct material: Organo Natural.
As you might guess, his pieces are made of plywood. The little benches pictured here have a future-mod quality, with a curvilinear top and angled legs, and a little storage slot like an elementary school desk.
What’s most eye-catching about these is the natural texture and pattern of the wood surface - each has stripes of multiple widths and shades (though some are painted a solid color). I’ll take some photos tomorrow and post them to give a better sense of the unique material. Looking forward to what comes next from the fledgling Plywood Office.
CA Boom is abuzz with activity on its first day. There’s lots to see, including the Prefab Zone, sponsored by fabprefab. The Zone includes such Inhabitat faves as Marmol Radziner, 
Clever Homes, LivingHomes, iT house, Kit Haus, EcoContempo by Northern Steel International, Hive Modular, Sander Architects & Michelle Kaufmann Designs. We’ve snuck a peak at a few new and forthcoming designs from various companies which we’ll be featuring in upcoming weeks. Stay tuned here all weekend for more coverage from CA Boom.
Our friends over at Treehugger introduced us to Kieran Timberlake Associates, an award-winning architecture firmed focused on integrating multiple strategies and perspectives into holistic design practices. Formed in 1984, KTA made sustainability part of their design philosophy long before it was the cool thing to do. Their commitment to sustainable design is evident in the completion of their Loblolly House, located in Taylors Island, Maryland. Built completely off-site and elevated on piles, the environmental impact of the house has been significantly minimized. And KTA’s ecological considerations don’t stop there…
While students at Berlin’s Free University are studying hard inside Foster’s glowing domed library, the more leisurly-minded of their fellow citizens might be enjoying another of the City’s radiant new architectural attractions– the Winter Badeschiff on the Spree River.
The eye-catching swimming pool and saunas anchored off the banks of the river in East Berlin are a project conceived by local artist, Susanne Lorenz, to enliven city life along the river neglected river.
The wait is over - the biggest independent design show on the West Coast opens tonight in Los Angeles. CA Boom runs through Sunday at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.
Exhibitors span numerous design categories, including home accessories, contemporary art, landscape, kitchen and bath, and (our obvious pick) prefab. In addition, each day has a different lineup of home and architecture tours around the city. Visitors can take shuttles from Santa Monica Civic to see the featured houses.
As far as flexible furniture goes, the folding chair is as old as they come, the first one dating back literally thousands of years. You don’t expect to see much innovation in such a well-established category, but Dror Benshetrit of Studio Dror has managed to invent something new.
We discovered Loop.ph last week with their beautiful BioWall, and now we can’t get enough of the British design duo. CSM research fellow Rachel Wingfield and artist Mathias Gmachl collaborate to develop new interactive surfaces, utilizing radiant light, photoluminescence, and organic processes in their designs. Their impressive portfolio is filled with items I covet for my house, including the BioWall, light-reactive blinds, electroluminescent wallpaper, a light alarm-clock, and a table that records your movements.
We fell in love with GloFab glowing textiles last week, and this week we are excited to announce a couple new designs that GloFab has just released. The GloBE lantern is composed of GloFab fiber optic cables knotted into a spherical shape, forming a sort of crocheted textile lantern. We don’t know much about it other than what we can see in this photo - the Swedes behind this design don’t waste words. However, the GloBE lamp looks lovely and we are intrigued by these evocative new images.
GloFab also has released some new designs for a stunning glowing curtain. Check it out here >
When we first wrote about the green prefab H-Haus back in January, the innovative design was just a sparkle (i.e. cad rendering) in Aaron Bohrer and Arunas Repecka’s eye. Now a prototype of the Cube 5 model has been completed, and was just recently on display at the Cleveland Home and Garden Show in February. We’ve just been sent photos of the event and the built Cube-5 is looking even better than we anticipated. We can’t wait to get our hands on one of these…
Home and Garden Show via Mocoloco
We’ve covered a lot of fusion tree houses: treehouse meets Jetsons; treehouse meets Modernism; treehouse meets biology experiment. Today, we’ve been introduced to a new pairing from O2 Sustainability: treehouse meets Buckminster Fuller.
Much like the classic treehouse, Bucky’s geodesic dome recalls childhood construction toys and youthful visions of rebuilding the world in a geometric, utopian image. Since both treehouses and geodesic domes smack of idealism and youthful fun - you know that the two were meant to come together at some point or another. It seems only fitting then that O2’s Sustainability Treehouse brings Bucky’s legacy into a living tree to create a high-flying eco-friendly structure.
Have you ever wished you could have your house and eat it, too? Not so practical…unless you are a bird (or Hansel and Gretel). But for our feathered friends, the wish comes true with Atelier Oi’s Edible Birdhouse. This cute and crunchy birdhouse is a great landscaping option for bird watchers, as it is both a bird house and a bird feeder - making it doubly attractive to your fly-in visitors (and suited for birds with Modern sensibilities). Of course, there’s just one problem, if you eat your house, you don’t have it any more. Guess you’ll have to buy a few backups.
Gazing at this spacecraft of a prefab house, you may be reminded of a certain colony of extra-terrestrial tree houses we wrote about last year. A new design from UK-based Sybarite (whose name alone makes me love them), the Plectrum House is a tiny prefab, measuring only 40m-sq (approx 430ft-sq). Luckily, for those who require a bit more room, the aluminum units can be stacked five high.
Modeled off of the compact, rounded form of a plectrum (that’s a guitar pick, if you didn’t know), the design combats the standard blocky style of so many stackable modular dwellings. When layered, the overall structure has flower-like facets and curves. And while we have our share of reservations about living in a UFO, Sybarite managed to include our most favorite feature - roof gardens - which we are incapable of resisting, no matter what kind of structure they hover over.
Although my sister, the intrepid L.A. street-hiker, stands as proof that some Angelenos do travel on foot, it’s still fair to say that to get from point A to point B in Los Angeles, almost everyone drives. Given the sprawling layout, the subpar public transit system, and the auto-focused infrastructure, combatting car culture in L.A. could be a losing battle. On the other hand, giving those thirsty fuel tanks a new drink of choice may be the best way yet to combat pollution without curbing cars.
Enter Lovecraft Biofuels and the Biodiesel Coop, two fledgling L.A. businesses working hard to get their communities off the petroleum addiction and onto the veggie oil program. With a brand new service station in Silverlake and a mobile fueling site currently parked in the West L.A./Santa Monica area, access to clean fuel is gaining speed.
L.A.’s weekly rag, City Beat, has a great article on the L.A. biofuel scene by Ryder Palmere. Read it here.
Regular Inhabitat readers know all about how sustainability is reshaping the worlds of architecture and product design — but what about the art world?
Beyond Green: Towards a Sustainable Art, on view now through May 7th at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, considers just that question. The exhibition explores how sustainable design philosophy resonates with an emerging generation of international artists. The exhibition includes existing works, commissions, and previously presented work that has been “recycled,” spotlighting ways in which artists are building paths to new forms of practice.
In a world full of deceptive marketing and ambiguous ad campaigns, it’s refreshing to get a straight story; which is why today’s prefab pick has such obvious appeal. Prefabmod is exactly what it says it is: Prefabricated Modernist Housing. With a basic, stackable modular unit measuring 480-sq-ft and priced at just $175 per square foot (conventional homes average around $250), this little dwelling pairs minimalist design with minimal cost. But don’t let the generic name and affordable price set your expectations on bland. Designer Greg Tate’s work is anything but.
Torbjorn Lundell has just launched a new light-emitting textile at the 2006 Stockholm Furniture Fair called
GloFab. This is such a fabulous idea it makes you wonder why this development has taken so long. It has always seemed to me like it should be pretty straightforward to weave fiber-optic cables into textiles, and then pump light through those cables to create a radiant fabric. Apparently, the trick is that fiber optic cables can only be bent so much before light can no longer pass through them. This little rule of physics explains why the knots of GloFab are all so large, giving the textile a beautiful gossamer look which perfectly suits its ethereal glowing quality.
A couple of weeks ago, Jill was interviewed about Inhabitat for the Lazy Environmentalist radio show, “Green Goes Mainstream,” which aired on LIME Radio. Along with Mark Spellun of Plenty Magazine, Jill went on the air to chat with Josh Dorfman about Inhabitat and the growing market for sustainable design. For those of you who missed it, the interview can now be downloaded in podcast form, here >
We love the idea of living walls here at Inhabitat, and if we could turn every surface into a living surface, we would. That’s why we were so struck by Loop.ph’s stunning new BioWall, which was just launched at the NewBritishDesigners exhibition in Amsterdam with Droog Design.
The BioWall is a lace-like, three dimensional fiberglass structure that acts as a sort of modern trellis for growing vine plants. The springy fiberglass rods are bowed into rings and woven into several dodecahedra that in turn are joined together, creating a sturdy yet flexible organic structure that resembles bubbles, living cells and water molecules.
Adam Frank struck a chord last fall with his gorgeous Lumen oil lamp which casts a shadow of a tree on your wall. A couple weeks after the design made the rounds on the blogosphere, the Lumen got featured on Daily Candy and in The New York Times, and Adam quickly sold out of all Lumen for the rest of the holiday season. Now we are thrilled to announce that Adam is back and better than ever with 5 fabulous new Lumen designs