Inhabitat

SUSTAINABILITY PANEL AT POSTOPOLIS – Send in questions!

Calling all of you who live outside New York who would like to participate in Postopolis!

If you’ve been checking in over the past couple days on Inhabitat, you’ve probably noticed that we keep talking about this Postopolis event at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, which we are participating in over the next 5 days. Many people have written in to us to say that they wish they could make it or at least tune in from other places around the globe — and because of this interest we’ve decided to try to get a bit interactive with our events.

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POSTOPOLIS BEGINS!

Postopolis opened yesterday to a warm reception over at the Storefront For Art and Architecture Gallery on Kenmare street in SoHo. I was thrilled to see all four of our blogs’ names posted in giant lettering on the outside of the store, and the speakers were uniformly excellent and thought-provoking. Now that we’ve warmed up a bit, today promises to be even better with a fabulous line-up of architects and architectural pundits….

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ECOMAGINATION: GE’s Sustainable Initiatives & Partnerships

This past Thursday, GE’s ecomagination celebrated it’s two year anniversary in style at GE’s Universal Studios theme park, relaying the success of the program and announcing 11 new ecomgination products, services, and projects- all based on the ideal that green business is good business. In case you don’t know, Ecomagination is General Electric’s company-wide environmental initiative to decrease pollution from its products and increase research and development on cleaner technologies. Last time we wrote about ecomagination, we sparked an interesting conversation about greenwashing – many readers raised the question as to how effective and/or genuine such a corporate sustainability initiative actually is. We’re still open to discussion, but we’re inclined to support any effort to commit such resources to more responsible products and development.

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FOSTER + PARTNERS’ SPANISH WINERY

These days, it seems like all the rage for famous architects to design wineries in exotic locales, and Foster + Partners has joined the club by with their newly-designed winery 150km from Madrid, near the city of Ribera del Duero. The design, for the Faustino Group, will not only produce wine and tend to grapes, but provide a beautifully integrated and sustainable architectural result.

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POSTOPOLIS STARTS TODAY!

Calling all architecture fans in New York City!

If you’re a New Yorker who likes architecture, we’ve got an exceptional 5 day event starting TODAY at the Storefront For Art and Architecture Gallery. Inhabitat is getting together with BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, Subtopia and Storefront to put on what promises to be a groundbreaking series of events from today, Tuesday, May 29, to Saturday, June 2, 2007 . I will be attempting a pecha-kucha presentation at 6:30 pm, so be sure to come by if you want to see me embarrass myself! The other speakers should be good though – so be sure to come by.

Here’s todays line-up:

Tuesday 29 May

3:00 pm: Robert Krulwich
3:40 pm: Tobias Frere-Jones
5:00 pm: Stanley Greenberg
5:40 pm: Michael Kubo (Actar)
6:30 pm: Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG), Dan Hill (City of Sound), Jill Fehrenbacher (Inhabitat) and Bryan Finoki (Subtopia) in a back-to-back pecha kucha presentation followed by opening reception

POSTOPOLIS!
Tuesday, May 29, to Saturday, June 2, 2007
Storefront For Art and Architecture

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ORGANIC LED LAMP BY MAKOTO TOJIKI

When it comes to innovative lighting, there’s cool, and then there’s just plain brilliant (pun intended). Makoto Tojiki’s “Archimedes Dream” seems to fall into the latter category. The glowing ribbon chandelier is illuminated thanks to organic light emitting diodes, or OLED’s. In case you’re not familiar, OLEDs are a subcategory of LEDs that glow thanks to an electroluminescent layer of organic compounds (think glow-in-the-dark paint, but organic, and fancier). The high technology coupled with the simple, gestural form, made for quite the eye-catching booth at last weekend’s ICFF.

+ Makoto Tojiki

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SALT CRYSTALIZED DOILY BOWL by the Home Project

While grandmother’s doilies may be an anachronism in modern homes today, the UNBLOSSOM salt crystal crocheted bowls represent a very current trend- that is the re-inventing of products from past crafts for modern-day uses. The-Home-Project crystallized doily bowls breathe new life into a lost craft and are anything but nostalgic. Not that we don’t love the handiwork of thousands of needle loops, but the more visually engaging three-dimensional version is easier to appreciate when sustainably recycled into a piece that fits with the new decor.

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RECYCLED BOTTLE CASCADE CHANDELIER

When we spotted Michelle Brand’s gorgeous Cascade Chandelier at HauteGREEN this year, we were drawn to the beautiful design like eco-minded moths around a CFL bulb. When we took a closer look and realized that each of the transparent “flowers” in the cascade was actually just the bottom of a plastic drink bottle, we were surprised and impressed. We never imagined that something so simple, cheap and ordinary such as empty water bottles could be turned into a such a stunning and elegant piece of interior design.

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HauteGREEN BEST IN SHOW: Inhabitat Awards

Given the overwhelming success of the HauteGREEN show this year, and the increasingly large numbers of designers participating, we felt it was time to apply our ‘editors-choice-awards’ model to HauteGREEN and give a shout-out to the designs that really stood out as shining examples of good green design. Given how many designers participated in this year’s HauteGREEN, it’s hard to narrow down all the awesome green designs to just a few worthy of a Best In Show award, but a few do stick out in our mind as truly exceptional.

Here are our Inhabitat-editor-chosen awards for HauteGREEN 2007 Best In Show…

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SUNDANCE CHANNEL’S “THE GREEN” INTERVIEWS SCRAPILE

On Tuesday May 29th at 9 p.m. EST, be sure to catch the Sundance Channel’s “The Green” television programming as tomorrow’s “Big Ideas for a Small Planet” episode focuses on sustainable furniture. The episode, titled “Big Ideas for a Small Planet: Furnish” should be of particular interest to our design-minded crowd, including an appearance by Inhabitat-favorites Bart Bettencourt and Carlos Salgado of Scrapile, who recently participated in our Reclaiming Design panel and are the subjects of this exclusive clip. Read on for more info about the episode, the show, and “The Green.”

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FORM & FAUNA FOOTWEAR

Form and Fauna is a brand new shoe line that respects both the animal kingdom and style in their design process – pleasing vegans, environmentalists, and fashionistas alike. The shoes are handcrafted utilizing ethical materials, such as the best quality Italian synthetics. What does that mean exactly? Apparently no noxious substances remain in the final product, which is biodegradable. For the heels, bamboo and regenerative wood is used. The shoes have recycled fiber insoles and either rubber latex or compressed fermented oak outsoles. Finally, all of these good materials come together with the use of water-based glue resulting in a durable shoe that kicks your vegan style up a notch.

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ALL NEW YORK CABS WILL BE GREEN BY 2012!

Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, announced a few weeks ago his PlanNYC, an sustainability master plan for a greener NYC by 2030. Amongst some of the items involved in his plan was the need to have all NYC taxis to be extremely fuel efficient by 2017 (30 miles to the gallon). Well, in a shocking development, the ten year deadline will no longer apply. Now, every single taxi cab in the city must meet that requirement… by 2012!

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CONVERTING CO2 TO ENERGY: Environmental 2-For-1

Here’s a promising idea that could help alleviate two environmental problems at the same time: potentially decreasing carbon emissions while also generating renewable energy for transportation and electricity. Clifford Kubiak and Aaron Sathrum from the University of San Diego have devised a way to use solar energy to obtain both fuel and electricity from CO2, and have a working prototype to prove it. Talk about killing two birds with one stone! (metaphorically of course).

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SHANGHAI to Build Hydrogen Fuel Cell Infrastructure

Shanghai may become the world’s first city to build an infrastructure to support the use of hydrogen fuel cells. According to the Detroit Free Press, a hydrogen fueling system could be ready in as little as three years. Although less than 1% of Chinese citizens currently own vehicles, auto sales are expected to grow to 10.4 million by 2010 and reach 20 million by 2020. According to Larry Burns, GM’s vice president of research and development and strategic planning, “Shanghai could accommodate 200,000 fuel cell vehicles with just 124 stations.” GM plans to have a fuel cell vehicle available for commercial sale, priced no more than traditional internal-combustion vehicles by 2010. GM revealed the Chevrolet fuel cell Volt (pictured above) at the Shanghai Auto Show this past April.

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PREFAB-IN-PROGRESS: OMD’s Country School Expansion

The latest cutting-edge prefab design from Jennifer Siegal’s Office of Mobile Design is the expansion of Valley Village, California’s Country School, adding a middle school campus to the existing preschool and elementary school. (We’re thrilled to see prefab systems being applied to more public and educational contexts!) While the construction isn’t quite finished, we think this is a great opportunity to show the process and progress of an exceptional prefab project- and one of the best (and first) prefab schools we’ve seen integrate so many green technologies. Check out the renderings and installation photos, courtesy of the Office of Mobile Design, and we’ll be sure to be give you a full report upon completion!

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MINI DIY DESIGNER BATTERY LAMPS – Designer Emulator Kit

One of our favorite finds from this year’s ICFF is Mark McKenna’s collection of pocket-size do-It-yourself designer battery lights. We’ve seen 9-volt batteries acting as light sources before, as in Richard Lawson’s DIY LED light, but these ‘DEK’ (Designer Emulation Kits) bring iconic design to another (albeit small-scale) level. The kits consist of a series of flat pieces that you remove from the printed circuit board, assemble, and hook up to a 9-volt battery. They come in five models, all representations of some of the most famous designer lamps (Ingo Maurer’s Lucellino, Castiglioni’s Arco and Toio, Sapper’s Tizio, and Philippe Starck’s Miss K). We love the high-design-meets-DIY aspect of these mini-lamps, and at $26 each, they won’t break the bank.

$26 From Mark McKenna

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INHABITAT REPORTS FROM ICFF

Every May in New York City, the flowers bloom, the cold winter weather becomes a distant memory, and thousands of thousands of avid design fans flock to the Javits Center for the tens of thousands of square feet of the newest and coolest from the design world. We attended ICFF expecting the usual whirlwind, but were pleasantly surprised by the amount of thoughtful, green, and engaging items we found. Like anything else, ICFF is a mixture of the good, bad, and the boring, but we found ourselves pleased by the diamonds in the rough that demonstrated a greener, more thoughtful approach to design. Read on for our highlights from ICFF.

To see our full spread of photos from the event, check out our Flickr Feed >

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CORONA SOLAR LIGHT

One of our favorite discoveries at this year’s ICFF (and winner of the ICFF Editor’s Choice Award for Best New Designer), was Emi Fujita and Shane Kohatsu’s brand new Corona Solar Light, an outdoor lighting solution that combines a photovoltaic cell, LEDs, and sunflower-esque form to bring a lovely solar-powered glow to your outdoor spaces. The self powered Corona Lamp can be used indoors and out – attached to a wall, staked and “planted” like a flower, or just placed on a tabletop- all without glues or fasteners.

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DESIGN WEEK PARTY PICS 2007

Aside from all the amazing designs- chairs, products, homewares, and spaces- that make NY Design Week such a wonderful whirlwind, when you get right down to it, it’s a week of parties. The beacons and icons of design come from all corners of the globe to grace the galleries, stores, and trade show booths of New York for one week full of shindigs and soirees, their own presence as important as their designs.

Below are our favorite pics from the parties, for the full set, check our Flickr Feed >

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HAUTE GREEN 2007

xDesign’s fabulous Air-Filter Plant Lamp

All of you NY design fans have probably wondered why we’ve been a bit slow on the Design Week reportage this year… We have been thoroughly attending all the shows and parties of NY Design Week, but since we had a bigger organizational role in HauteGREEN this year, it’s taken us a bit longer to recover and get all our photos downloaded and reports written. Thanks for your patience, and thank you so much to everyone who came down to HauteGREEN this year. The show gets better and better every year, and we were thrilled to be a part of it. If you missed it this year – fear not — we’ll be putting together some videos about the show in general and the different panels. In the interim, read on for our photos from the best and the brightest eco-design show in NYC: HauteGREEN!

For the full set of photos, check out our Flickr Feed >

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KNOEND’S LITE2GO, No Packaging Required

We’re always enamored with flat pack packaging for efficient transport and minimal waste, but here’s a light design that brings a bright idea to packaging by eliminating it all together. Lite2Go’s packaging doubles as the actual lamp shade so there is almost no waste, excluding the label and the instructions for assembly which are printed on recycled paper using environmentally friendly inks.

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THE PHANTOM ECO-HOUSE by Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Amongst the articles featured yesterday on the New York Times Magazine was a proposal for an Eco-house, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (previously seen here at Inhabitat) in conjunction with Atelier Ten, which looked at what a possible house from the future would look like.

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GROWING BUSINESS CARD

How do you make your business card stand out? Make it grow! We’re seeing a lot of clever business cards perfect for your green thumb, and its about time! Jamie Wieck breathes new life into business cards with his Growing Business Card. This little number transforms from a regular business card to miniature house plant, sprouting alfalfa or cress when watered. Who wouldn’t want this on their desk?

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SHIGERU BAN CURTAIN WALL HOUSE

In architect-speak, a curtain wall refers to any facade- commonly glass- that provides no structural or load-bearing capacity for the building. But leave it to the genius of Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to interpret this term literally, poetically employing an actual curtain as facade wall. The result is not only breathtakingly stunning, but a great example of context-based green design that embraces its natural landscape (talk about passive cooling!). The Curtain Wall House demonstrates a striking amalgamation of simplicity, beauty, old, and new, combining “contemporary materials in new interpretations of traditional Japanese styles.”

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ECO-TECTURE: New York Times Focuses on Green Architecture

New York Times Magazine subscribers woke up on Sunday to find that their beloved magazine had done a full issue on green designers and thinkers. The magazine featured amongst other things interviews with Al Gore, William McDonough, and a slideshow on the most inventive green building ideas so far. Of particular interest to designers? Features on Shigeru Ban, Glenn Murcutt and a feature on the world’s greenest city, Curitiba in Brazil.

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LANDSCAPED BUSINESS CARD by Tur & Partners

With all the business cards we’re being inundated with this week (the downside of trade-shows), its nice to find business cards that stand out from the crowd and add a little greenery to your day. Here’s a clever and useful little business card design that perfectly expresses the mission of the company it represents: landscape architecture firm Tur & Partner. Add a little light and water …

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SEVILLE’S SOLAR POWER TOWER

Rising out of the Andalusian countryside like a gigantic obelisk, a 40 story concrete tower surrounded by fields of photovoltaic panels is is the first stage of Europe’s first commercial solar power station , which recently went into operation in a sunny region outside Seville, Spain. The eye-popping spectacle bears more than a passing resemblance to Sauron’s Mordor Lighthouse in Lord of the Rings – only shiny, happy and sunny, rather than dark and fiery. Dumb analogies aside, there’s no way that our meager words do justice to the sheer awesomeness of the project, so you’ll just have to check out the photos and video below.

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INTERVIEW WITH CIVIL TWILIGHT

Last week, we mentioned Civil Twilight’s lunar-resonant streetlighting, a project that won the top honor from Metropolis Magazine’s Next Generation contest this year. But we were pleased (but not surprised) to discover that this project is just the tip of the iceberg; the Bay Area-based collective has a slew of other equally-engaging projects in the works (including the mycofarmhouse, in which mushrooms break down and recycle wood-frame buildings). They describe their design process as “brilliant simplicity, across scales and media.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Read on for some more info about their winning streetlights, other projects, their approach to sustainability, and the trio of talent that is Civil Twilight:

On sustainability: “While we feel a sense of responsibility, we aren’t motivated by a grudging sense of duty or ideology, but rather by a general sense of wonder in the world. We try to instill that sense of amazement through our projects—the idea that sustainable design could mean a moonlit walk in the park.”

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RECYCLED TEXTILE JEWELRY By Silvina Romero

On my recent trip to Buenos Aires for the Feria Puro Diseño design show, I came across a jewelry designer named Silvina Romero, who makes gorgeous, colorful, and tactile wearable works of art from recycled pieces of fabric and textiles. Silvina started working with discarded textiles about four years ago during the height of the Argentinian economic crisis, gathering scrap fabric, thread, nylon, and more in a neighborhood called Once, where many of fabric dealers and manufacturers set up shop. “Green by necessity,” Silvina turned trash into treasure and has since been recognized for her thoughtfully crafted, truly unique pieces. I bought about seven of her necklaces at a store called Condimentos in Buenos Aires, or you can contact Silvina directly through her website.

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RECLAIMING DESIGN PANEL: Today!

If you’re in New York City this weekend for the ICFF, we’d like to remind you about our Reclaiming Design event at HauteGreen this afternoon. You can’t miss the HauteGREEN show, so why not combine a visit to the exhibition with a visit to our event, which features Dutch design icon Tejo Remy, Dwell Editor Sam Grawe, and Brooklyn designers Carlos Salgado of Scrapile and Matt Gagnon to speak about recycling in design. Reclaiming Design is this afternoon at 5pm, so come by and check it out!

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MARTIN MARGIELA ARTISANAL: Reclaiming (Clothing) Design

In honor of our Inhabitat panel, Reclaiming Design, which takes place at HauteGREEN today, Sustainable Style Sunday serves up a favorite fashion designer that is also fond of reclamation, Martin Margiela. He is a designer we can relate to here at Inhabitat. A visit to the Margiela store feels like taking part in a sophisticated craft lab experiment, white interiors and lab coated salespeople coexist with rough hewn details. This is fitting for a designer who after all is known for serving red wine in white beakers at his presentations.

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