Apparently, we're suckers for cute pictures of kids. It's rare for us to cover apparel, but when it's both sustainable and miniature, exceptions must be made. It all began with 
Not content to merely conquer the world of eco-blogging, the Treehugger crew is expanding into product design. Treehugger’s Graham Hill & Petz Scholtus (who are both product designers by trade) have given birth to a new line of Treehuggerware. The first product – appropriately enough � is a cute flatpack pouch that when unfolded bares more than a passing resemblance to the expanding waistline of an expectant mother. The Stuffbump is a wall pocket that hangs flat but expands like an accordion to hold household items like laundry, underwear or stuffed animals. Of course, in typical Treehugger style, the product is not just space-efficient and useful, but is also eco-friendly and is composed of 100% natural wool felt and 100% recycled card stock.
Normally, Fridays are for prefab at Inhabitat, but this set off some bells and whistles. We just about flipped when we discovered H2PIA
H2PIA really does look like an otherworldly utopia, but the designers make a point of having us know that this is not a fantasy. No, we can have a fully sustainable lifestyle, free of addiction to oil, coal and gas, well before the widely projected date of 2050. If all goes well, H2PIA will begin contruction in 2007.
All around the America people are reclaiming the streets from the grasp of the greedy, gas-guzzling automobile. First there was Rebar’s PARK(ing) project, where a rogue bunch of San Francisco activists started turning vacant parking spots into mini-parks. Now we discover P(LOT) – a project by Micheal Rakowitz to reclaim parking spaces and turn them into mini mobile living areas, in the form of tents made from recycled car-covers!
With floods and hurricanes on the brain, we always take note of houses that can float if waters start rising…Flexibility in the face of disaster can be a saving grace. This Bucky-esque dwelling is shaped like a soccer (aka…FOOT)ball.
As many of you know, we switched software last week (from Pivot to Wordpress), and while the transition was mostly smooth, there were a few small expected bumps. One issue is that our image library isn’t totally up-to-date yet, which is why you might be seeing image tags (and no images) in our older posts.
Jane Jacobs, the iconoclastic urban activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) died yesterday in her home in Toronto. Jacobs was a fearless and vocal critic who was one of the was one of the first people to write a compelling argument against the tabula rasa Robert Moses-style “urban renewal” which was fashionable at the time � residential high-rise development, expressways through city hearts, slum clearances, and desolate downtowns (one of the nastier by-products of utopian modernism). New Yorkers should remember her especially fondly, as she almost single-handedly saved Soho, Chinatown and Greenwich village by vigorously fighting Moses’ planned expressway between Manhattan Bridge and the Holland tunnel in the early 1960’s.
Have you ever wondered why all gas stations look exactly the same? Despite the inconvenience of getting in and out of them (especially Arco), the design of gas stations is based on a prototype that hasn’t changed in 60 years. Now finally, inspired by the possibilities of future-forward fuel, architect Alan Eliot Goldberg is trying to change this.
Goldberg has proposed the Advance Refueling Retail Center (ARRC) as a design for a new generation of service stations which will heighten the public’s awareness and acceptance of hydrogen as a clean, safe, renewable energy.
On May 20, the National Building Museum will open a new exhibit, The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design. Inspired by Alanna Stang and Christopher Hawthorne’s 2005 book by the same name, the show will move beyond traditional exhibition format to give visitors tips, information, and a Materials Resource Room, where they can learn to apply sustainable principles to their own homes and lifestyles.
The centerpiece of the show is a full-scale model of Michelle Kaufmann’s acclaimed Glidehouse, where green building techniques can be seen in the context of a modern home.
Guest writer Bryan Finoki of Subtopia and Archinect authored today’s illuminating and in-depth post�Thanks, Bryan!
Remember the typhoon in July of 2000 that hit Quezon City in the Philippines, triggering the avalanche of a mammoth �garbage mountain� that tumbled over the Payatas slum? Well, over 2000 people were buried alive there that day. The landslide not only smothered some 500 shacks that were nestled in to the dump, but it caused a nasty fire to sweep through and burn down any that weren’t already entombed by the violent seas of debris which fell upon them.
Well if you can measure the importance of a holiday by whether Google adorns its logo in the spirit of the day, then Earth Day has truly come into its own.
It’s not surprising to see solar panels and wind turbines on today’s page, but when you think about it, it’s a very auspicious sign of change. What used to be the typical icons that represented Earth Day? Trees? Flowers? “Natural” things? Now what we see are the tools and technologies that are actually pushing progress towards living better on (and with) the Earth.
Guest writer: Jared Silliker
Ballard Library, photographed byMark Svensen
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) selected their this week. These buildings are green in so many ways, showcasing a wide range of sustainable design strategies and applications.
And the winners are…
The more important it becomes to incorporate environmental sustainability into building design, the more we see architecture sharing a seat with the natural sciences. Monitoring weather patterns, UV radiation levels, temperature variances, precipitation, and other climatic conditions factors heavily into the development of a truly sustainable dwelling.
The International Interior Design Association and Metropolis Magazine announce their first annual Smart Environment Awards recognizing interior environments that integrate design excellence, human wellbeing, and sustainability. While this contest is only open to Interior design and architecture professionals, its announcement precludes the industry’s and public’s growing interest for sustainable design and healthy environments. Winners will be judged in May 2006 and announced at NeoCon World’s Trade Fair in June 2006 in Chicago.
There’s a new contender vying for the title of World’s Most Sustainable Skyscraper: The new headquarters for the CNTC Guangdong Company, a large tobacco company in China, will be a zero-energy building.
The company held an international design competition, and the winning design of the 69-story Pearl River Tower comes from Chicago’s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). According to project architect Gordon Gill, this isn’t just a building, it’s �a high performance instrument shaped by the sun and the wind.”
SOM employed nearly every trick in the zero-energy book: the main fa�ade is south-facing, the windows are made of double-glazed glass, the building is outfitted with wind turbines and solar panels to provide electricity and power the heating and cooling systems, and rainwater collection and grey-water recycling systems reduce water consumption.
Today’s guest post was written by Carissa Bluestone, a freelance editor and hamster-lover who lives in Seattle.
May’s a big month for design conferences in New York. If you’re lucky enough to be in the Big Apple from May 21-23 you can hop between the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) and the first-annual Mobile Living Conference.
Mobile Living, which is being organized by designers David Shearer and Miguel Calvo, will showcase the most innovative designs for mobile homes, prefabs, and temporary housing.
Move out of the way shipping containers… there’s a new kid on the block: airplane fuselages.
New York’s urban architect recyclers, LOT-EK, have recently designed a library in Guadalajara made entirely of refurbished airplane fuselages. Apparently when airplanes are put to rest, most of their parts are easily recycled. However, according to Noticias Arquitectura, the fuselages are the only parts that are rarely reused, because “the cost of its demolition exceeds the profit of aluminum resale.” Because of this, there are a ton of discarded fuselages strewn all over deserts of the western states. Boeing 727 and 737 are the best-selling commercial planes and therefore the most common fuselage types in these graveyards. The fuselages are sold completely stripped, and at a ridicously cheap price – lending themselves to a great building material.
Guest writer Jared Silliker lives in Seattle and works as a senior analyst at The Cadmus Group, an environmental consulting firm. He works with the architectural community to encourage high-performance building designs and also writes about the green building industry.
Bigger green buildings? Sure. More sustainable products? Absolutely. Improved technologies and integrated natural systems? Indeed. More LEED certified buildings? Everywhere you look.
But hold on to your sustainability seats. There are bigger ideas brewing.
I listened to a few architects and engineers talking to developers this week at the Urban Land Institute’s (ULI) Developing Green conference in Seattle.
While one session was actually entitled �The next big thing in green building,� I took away several themes from that session and others. And four words really stuck with me: learn, zero, sell, and people.
Long before green buildings entered popular vocabulary, futuristic eco-architect Paolo Soleri was pioneering his vision of an entire city — or arcology – structured in harmony with nature. Soleri’s unique theoretical and design work is showcased this month at the Boston Architectural Center in Boston’s Back Bay. Soleri will deliver the annual Cascieri 14 Lectureship in Humanities on April 20th and his work is also the subject of a gallery exhibition. The Architecture of Place, The Place of Architecture, at the BAC through the end of the month.
Dear Readers-
You may have noticed we’ve been m.i.a all weekend… This is because we’ve been in the process of switching our software to Wordpress. I’m happy to announce that we have made the transition relatively unscathed, and we are going to be blogging bigger and better than ever in no time. You may notice that many of our images didn’t make it through the transition, sadly, so we are having to go through and manually update the images in all of our archived posts one by one. Please be patient with us while this image upload happens.
On the bright side of things, comments are finally working again, so please comment away!
Hope you enjoy the new software, and please feel free to tell us about any glitches, concerns, or things you like about the new software…
In the recent Design Within Reach newsletter, DWR founder Rob Forbes called trees the “grace notes” of urbanization. It seems paradoxical, since in most cities, trees preceded the buildings and roads. Nevertheless, it’s an elegant characterization; no matter how impressive a great urban building, it’s the trees and landscaping around it that complete our experience there.
For 25 years, the non-profit Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF) has been making sure that San Francisco Bay Area residents have an abundance of healthy trees filling their streets and parks. In celebration of their anniversary, DWR will host a fundraiser this week at their Fillmore studio in San Francisco. FUF Executive Director, Kelly Quirke, will be giving a presentation on the organization’s many successful volunteer programs and environmental improvement efforts.
Although it’s not your typical prefab, we found the level of design and approachable scale of this Canadian cabin to be irresistibly charming. The owners asked Toronto-based architecture firm Taylor-Smyth for a simple little escape, perfect for watching the sun set over Lake Simcoe, and spending evenings when their main house was filled to the brim with family and friends. What they received was a 275 sq-ft glass box delicately wrapped with a cedar plank screen.
In my recent move, the one thing I left behind was my truly awful bookcase, which I knew I’d hang onto if I didn’t abandon it 1,200 miles from my new home. Unfortunately, my dreams of something original and innovative crumbled under the urgency to unpack and I resentfully paid for a generic replacement from Ikea.
If only I’d been as clever as the designers at Unal and Boler, who created hangers for their books. The suspended stainless steel rectangles each hold only four or five books, but can be hung vertically, one from the next, creating a modular gridwork, made interesting through the addition of your literature.
Constructed with over 600,000lbs of recycled materials, this is the house that Boston’s Big Dig built — or more precisely, a house that engineer, Paul Pedini, built with the design expertise of John Hong from Single Speed Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At a final cost of $150 per square foot, most of the materials for the house were free, minus the expenses to ship the materials (formerly I-93 off-ramps from the heart of the transportation artery through Boston,unofficially known as the “Big Dig”) to Lexington, MA.
At its core, [Design Science Lab] is a new way of seeing the world – one that takes a global, whole systems perspective that incorporates a well-developed sensibility about social justice and environmental sustainability.
Applications are now being accepted for the 2006 Design Science Lab intensive, run by the Buckminster Fuller Institute and Big Picture Small World. Design Science Lab works with students, design professionals and “ordinary citizens” to develop design approaches for meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
There’s been plenty of excitement the last day or so over the news of this year’s Pritzker Prize winner, Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Da Rocha’s work is significant for his poetic use of an utterly simple material — concrete. In 60 years of practice, the architect has created high-rises, stadiums, houses, museums, and even a chapel from concrete.
The divergence of prefab from its original utilitarian intentions has some buyers in a snit – How did prefabrication turn into a fashion show? Prefab was invented to be affordable!
For those of you who have been complaining about prefab being too expensive – this is your lucky day. Lustron Corporation – the manufacturer of 1950s all-steel prefab houses for returning WWII vets, has recently announced that they are giving away 58 of their candy-colored vintage prefabs to whoever wants them…What’s the catch? Prospective Lustron buyers have to arrange to transport the prefabs from the military base in Quantico, Virginia, at no cost to the company. If you want one of these vintage steel houses, you’d better act fast – the deadline is April 12th! That’s this Wed!
We hold a special place in our hearts for green roofs and the economy of modular construction. GreenGrid Roofs brings the best of both worlds together as a modular green roof system. Competitive in cost to built-in-place green roofs, GreenGrid Roofs is made up of preplanted modules composed of recycled plastics that can be sited right on top of an existing roof, as long as the structure will hold. So whether you are ready to canvas your entire roof, a portion, or even bring these modules down to ground level – GreenGrid Roofs works beautifully.
Prefabrication isn’t just for people! Even tiny crustaceans can benefit from the economic efficiency of mass-produced standardized dwelling units. Case in point : Elizabeth Demaray’s fabulous conceptual art / environmental / (architectural?) design project called Hand-Up, which supplies needy hermit crabs with brand new plastic houses.
Good news rumbled out of Washington earlier this week regarding the Katrina Cottages. In an unprecedented step, the senate is considering allowing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide inexpensive, permanent housing to Americans who have lost their homes to a natural disaster. The key word here is “permanent,” which currently prevents funding for the 300ft-sq Katrina Cottages.
Remember the Micro Compact Home? It’s the tiniest of the small homes we’ve talked about. A fusion of Japanese-inspired design and European manufacturing, the mini-minimalist dwelling manages to meet all your basic needs. Now m-ch has taken thirty of their little cubes and stacked them into a Tree Village.
Not everyone thinks that immortality would be a dream come true, but most people strive for a long, healthy life. Seekers of age-enhancing foods and lifestyle choices have often looked to Japan, whose population is known for living well into old-age with full physical and mental capabilities. This has been attributed to green tea, seaweed, tofu…and now, to an apartment design that will keep you agile and alert.
Write on your walls! Crayons, color pencils, and marker pens encouraged. Color by number has taken on an entirely new meaning (and scale) with Wallpaper-By-Numbers . The wonderfully bold prints with their brightly pre-colored background make a unique statement before the official coloring actually begins. The fun designs come with suggested color palettes, but it’s up to you whether or not you want to color a little, a lot, or not at all. Rolls of 20.5″ x 33′ start at $95.00.
If I could be anywhere tomorrow, I’d be at Yale University for the Wearing Social Change conference. From April 5-7, leaders in the apparel and sustainability industry will come together with participants to discuss the growing influence of sustainability on fashion, and how the fashion industry is responding to new conditions and demands.
What we wear speaks volumes about the lifestyle we embrace and the values we embody…From organic cotton to local factories, the apparel industry is witnessing an increasing awareness of the potential …
Since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast last fall, well-meaning architects, designers and planners the world over have been scrambling to submit proposals for rebuilding New Orleans. Surprisingly, however, the discussion has mainly been concentrated around what to rebuild – sidestepping the deeper issues of how and why rebuild in a floodplain at all. It is common knowledge that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen, simply because of the physical geological situation of the area. The city sits below sea-level in an area of former wetlands, surrounded by water in every direction – sandwiched between a giant lake, the Mississippi river and the ocean. Clearly the only acceptable proposals for rebuilding New Orleans are ones that propose a solution to deal with the almost certain likelihood of being flooded again.
LOTS MORE GREAT GREEN DESIGN STORIES HERE... KEEP READING!
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