2007 April | Inhabitat

STUDENT DESIGN TURNS HIGHWAYS INTO WIND FARMS

The great thing about collaborative design sites like Archinect is that they allow brilliant student ideas to escape the confines of studio and get the attention they deserve. Case in point is Arizona student Joe who posted this amazing idea on his Archinect school blog for a highway wind turbine would harvest the wind created by fast-moving automobiles to send power back into the grid. If feasible, this wind turbine project could be easily retrofitted to transform most of the world’s highways into endless power sources. Imagine highways being known for their power generation instead of their traffic!

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WIND POWER FROM NEW JERSEY HIGHWAYS

by Jorge Chapa, 04/30/07

Wind, as we all know, can be used to generate electricity. Turbines installed in wind-prone areas have been proven generators of clean, green power. But most of the time, you need open areas and large spaces to locate these. So how do you bring wind power to the city? Mark Oberholzer may have just the solution, designing a system that would generate power from a rather unique place: The New Jersey highway. And he doesn’t propose that we install wind turbines near the highway, but rather, that they be put in the highway, and that they power a light-rail transport system.

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INHABITAT IN VOGUE!

by Emily Pilloton, 04/29/07

If you want to see where the world of green design meets high-fashion, pick up this month’s copy of Vogue. We are excited to announce that Inhabitat is featured in this month’s green issue, as founder Jill Fehrenbacher graces page 134 to talk about sustainable style, her wardrobe, and how to dress green AND glamorously.

+ Inhabitat in Vogue

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SUSTAINABLE STYLE SUNDAY: Fauna Organic Cotton T-shirts

by Jill Danyelle, 04/29/07

These t-shirts have got to be the best I have seen for kids. Not only are they made from organic cotton and locally hand-dyed and silk screened right here in Brooklyn, but they are damn cute. Cute in a cool way, not the saccharine way that most children’s clothing is designed. Made by multi-talented designer Ross Menuez as part of his Fauna series for Areaware, these t-shirts assure your tot will rock the sandbox in style. They also come in onesies for the crib bound set. For us big kids, we will have to settle for the organic cotton pillows and silk screened balsa wood that completes the Fauna line.

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THE STARS OF SUSTAINABILITY AT Symposium C6 in Chicago

The last day of Chicago’s Symposium C6 conference (“The Art World is Flat: Globalism- Crisis and Opportunity”) went out with a bang- the morning’s star-studded panel focused on the theme of “Creating A Sustainable Future.” Panel members and speakers included Natalie Jeremijenko (artist and engineer), Bruce Mau (the man behind the Massive Change exhibition), Jennifer Siegal (one of our favorite prefab pioneers), and Lucy Orta (socially-conscious artist and designer). The caliber of the line-up alone was mind-boggling, and the discussion was even better…

BOOK REVIEW: ECOLOGICAL DESIGN – 10th Anniversary

Every design-minded citizen loves a coffee table book with glossy photography and eye-catching projects. But every now and then, it’s nice to see a book about green design that takes a more in-depth, perhaps even academic approach to the rich, always evolving and ever-exciting field of ecological design. Few people know their stuff like Sim Van Der Ryn, whose initially published Ecological Design in 1996, and has arguably been one of the grandfathers of green design, designing sustainably for the past 35 years. The book argues that in order to create a more sustainable world, our products, buildings, landscapes, and cities, need to be designed with a greater understanding of ecology.

The 10th anniversary of this groundbreaking text is still relevant, celebrating a decade of progress, while delivering new information to the current generation of designers, architects, and environmentalists. With chapter headings such as Nature’s Geometry, Solutions Grow From Place, and Make Nature Visible, along with a thorough Resource Guide for Ecological Design, Van Der Ryn and Cowan provide a both an overview and strategies for more ecologically-informed, environmentally-sensitive designs.

PREFAB FRIDAY: David Adjaye’s East London House

Here’s a recipe for good design: take London-based architect David Adjaye, mix with a prefab timber construction system, drop on a site in the middle of Hackney, a London suburb, shake and mix – and you get a stunning solid timber residence for our Prefab Friday series. Adjaye recently designed this 150 sq. meter abode using Eurban’s solid spruce timber building structures as its main structural component (Eurban claims that each cubic meter of timber saves almost a ton of carbon dioxide emissions compared with a brick or block structure). The actual build time for the structure of the house totaled a mere five days.

INTERVIEW: Designer Fumi Masuda

Japanese designer Fumi Masuda, whose Pile Chair was featured this morning, was recently in São Paulo, Brazil to give a lecture about sustainable design. He also conducted workshops involving Brazilian and Japanese design students and some members of Coopamare, a group of people that earn their bread collecting used papers from the street to sell for the recycling industry. I had the chance to talk to Fumi before the lecture. He told me a little bit about his history and offered some interesting perspectives on the sustainable design market…

PILE CHAIR By Fumi Masuda

For many people, there’s nothing worse than the thought of moving. But now at least you can find some solace in the moving process knowing that any discarded furniture may have a second life as Fumi Masuda’s stunning Pile Chair, which is built out of old and discarded furniture collected by movers. The idea came from a Japanese moving company, Mover, that provides a service to collect discarded furniture (think of all the sofas and chairs you see strewn on the sidewalk). As an alternative to disposal, the company figured that the furniture could be used as raw material for new designs, instead of the end product. Fumi Masuda’s Pile Chair emerged from a collaborative project with students and teachers from the Design Department at Tokyo Zokei University and Mover.

SIGG ECO BOTTLE DESIGN COMPETITION

One of the easiest things you can do to lead a greener life is to say no to disposable plastic water bottles. And one of our favorite companies, SIGG, makes this easy and stylish with their Swiss-designed aluminum, taste-inert, eco-friendly water bottles. And now they’ve announced their ‘What’s Your Eco-Style?’ bottle design competition in celebration of the recently passed Earth Day. The company is looking for YOU to design their next bottle to join their already fabulous and graphically-stunning collection of drinking vessels. Visit their website for more information on the competition, the company, and the unique manufacturing processes in which the bottles are made from a single hockey-puck sized piece of aluminum!

+ SIGG ‘What’s Your Eco-Style’ Competition

WORLD’S SMALLEST WIND TURBINE

This little wind-powered toy brings clean, green energy to the palm of your hand, and is a great little gadget for getting youngsters interested in the beauty of renewable energy. No batteries or charging or nothing – instead just blow on the toy and watch it light up! The wind-powered toy has one green and two blue LED lights which are powered by blowing on the tiny 2.4-inch rotor blade. So you can forget using a lighter or cell phone during that ballad at your next rock concert— illuminate the night with the eco-friendly Blow Light!

£9.99 at Nigel’s Eco Store

BLOCH BUILDING by Steven Holl

Architect Steven Holl is no stranger to remarkably lit gallery spaces, and his latest addition to the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri is a notable display of his talents in using architectural daylighting to create stunning interior spaces. Free to the public, the Bloch Building uses every facet of natural light to a variety of gallery spaces bringing perfectly balanced illumination to both a Noguchi Sculpture exhibit and another gallery with historic pictures that requires a low-light atmosphere. The light in the Bloch building, whose walls consist of large amounts of translucent glass, have been perfectly calibrated along with the use of fluorescents to account for the varying luminosity from season to season, and even from day to night. We were lucky enough to get a private viewing of the museum prior to its June opening to the public.

KANSAS STATE U TOP PICKS FROM MILAN

During the week of Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile, we put a call out for eco-loving, freelance correspondents to help us out with our coverage. Our plea was met with much enthusiasm from, among others, a design class from Kansas State University, who braved the ruckus of the event to bring us some exciting reports and tips from Salone. Read on for a run-down of some of their favorite and ‘greenest’ finds…

FLAKE BLIND by WOODNOTES

Biomimicry proved to be all the rage at the Salone Internazional del Mobile this year, with designers drawing big-time inspiration from the wonders of the natural world. Though Finnish textile design studio Woodnotes falls in the same category, their apparent love of ecological structures doesn’t render their work any less unique than that of other eco-emulators. An eye-catching aspect of their booth at the Salone was the Flake Blind which hung delicately amidst their designs. As implied by its given moniker, the Flake Blind was inspired by memories of wintertime bliss and the geometric qualities of a snowflake.

STUDIO LIBERTINY’S VASE MADE BY BEES

I’m a self-proclaimed Droog addict, and have touted the “je ne sais quoi” of the always-engaging and wryly humorous Dutch design ad nauseam. And this bee-made vessel by Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny of Studio Libertiny is no exception. Making its debut at Droog’s booth in Milan, the vase was made by 40,000 bees over the course of one week. Studio Libertiny constructed a vase-shaped hive that the bees then colonized, building a hexagonal comb to encompass the existing form. And in the usual dry yet oh-so-clever Dutch manner, Studio Libertiny calls this process “slow prototyping,” a more time-consuming, yet much more poetic alternative to CNC rapid prototyping.

‘THIS TABLE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT’ by STUDIO 1a.m.

An often-overlooked tenet of the green design process is the creation of objects that tell a story, that have a history, and that engage with the user to extend their life span beyond the disposable and ephemeral. Donna Piacenza of Studio 1a.m. (the creative genius behind eco-friendly jewelry like the Cork Cuff and Industrial Bloom) has just produced a new table concept that does just this, flirting with the boundaries of mass production and customization. The table concept, titled ‘This Table Will Self Destruct,’ is a simple, clean-lined design constructed of sorghum and concrete. With each order, a “pixel” is removed from the design, so that each owner receives a different, progressively deconstructed iteration of the original table. After x number of productions, the table will cease to exist. The table raises some interesting questions of sustainability, durability, disposability, and the mass production design market.

SAN FRANCISCO’S CIVIC TOWER: Greenest Of Them All

Recently, we’ve been seeing scads of new projects that make big claims about their sustainable features. Some projects feature elaborate photovoltaic systems, a few wind turbines, or recycled material, while others promise to save water as much as possible. All in all, the competition to become THE sustainable building project is heating up, and now, the City of San Francisco is putting its foot down and letting everyone know that their new Civic Administration Tower, designed by KMD Architects in collaboration with Timmons Design Engineers, will be the greenest of them all.

PROJECT EARTH DAY: Student Eco Fashion Competition

This past Thursday, Inhabitat attended “Project Earth Day”, an eco-friendly fashion show at the Teknion showroom. The event was organized by Emerging Green Builders of New York (EGBNY), the local chapter of USGBC and co-sponsored by o2-NYC, and Green Drinks.

PROJECT EARTH DAY: EGB Eco Fashion Show

Anyone who has been reading Inhabitat for awhile knows that we love our eco-fashion here – almost as much as we love green building. Fashion and architecture don’t often get mentioned in the same breathe, but happily, this past week we were able to see the green architecture and the green fashion worlds come together to celebrate Earth Day in an eco-fashion show put on by the Emerging Green Builders (EGB) Chapter of NYC. “Project Earth Day”, as it was called, was put together to showcase the latest in sustainable apparel and textile designs by up and coming designers.

IT’S EARTH DAY: Do Something

Five years ago, if you’d asked a stranger to tell you the significance of April 22, you’d almost certainly have been met with a blank stare. The same would likely have been true four, three, even two years ago. But last year, Earth Day finally had its moment on the main stage. Nearly forty years after its founding, it broke out of do-good environmentalist circles and debuted across the glossy covers of Vanity Fair and Vogue. By the end of 2006, it was agreed that this was the year green went mainstream.