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Halloween is one of our favorite holidays of the year, and one of the best parts of Halloween is seeing people get creative and resourceful with their costumes. Anyone can buy a plastic / spandex costume at a drugstore, but not only is that boring and generic — it is the opposite of environmentally friendly. We encourage you all to get inspired and resourceful this year and go green with your Halloween costumes! This could mean cobbling together a great DIY idea from items you already have around your house, or picking up some old items at the local charity shop to create your costume (as demonstrated by Managing Editor Emily as Eskimo Pi (3.14159…) and her Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle/Sister).
One of the toughest auto engineering competitions in the world, the World Solar Challenge Competition, has come and gone, and a winner has finally crossed the finishing line! Every two years, teams from all over the world come to Australia to travel across the country on a solar powered vehicle. This year’s winner was the team from Delft University, who have proven, once again that, not only is it possible to create a solar powered vehicle, but that you can cross a continent in it… all in sustainable style.
The Toyota RiN has been unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show as the ultimate healthy living automobile. Instead of stressing the high-performance aspects of the vehicle, Toyota wants RiN drivers to see driving as a relaxing and meditative experience. Plus, it’s compact and green! Literally and figuratively…
Under the premise that “a person’s a person no matter how small”, DucDuc makes beautifully crafted children’s furniture that keeps even tiny ecological footprints to a minimum. The Austin Crib is a prime example of the company’s efforts toward forward thinking design for the newest members of the planet.
We are excited to announce that our fabulous New York writer Abigail has recently given birth to two adorable twin boys. In honor of this happy occasion, Inhabitat is going to be researching green design for babies and kids in the next couple weeks, and we are going to be putting together the ultimate guide to sustainable design for kids. We’re going to call this ‘Inhabitots’ (yes we love our bad puns here), so if there are any children in your life, be sure to keep an eye out for it.
Ever since the Sydney summer games, the Olympics have tried to lead the way in terms of environmental sustainability. So far all newly-constructed Olympic buildings have met stringent green standards, but the flame remained the same- until now. The London organizers have decided that, as they wish to be remembered as the greenest Olympics ever, the flame will be carbon neutral.
To the ladies out there who have been wondering “where can I find cute stylish everyday clothes that are eco-friendly?” — we have your answer: SHE-BIBLE!!!
While perusing Ecofabulous the other day, I made a sustainable style discovery that rocked my world.She-Bible is a San Francisco design duo of Deirdre O’Boyle and Stacy Rodgers, who make gorgeously simple, wearable and stylish organic wardrobe staples such as sweatshirts, skirts, jackets and puffy-sleeved tops that exemplify casual eco-chic, and also won’t break the bank.
The holidays are just around the bend! For all you holiday planners with decorating on the brain, make sure to light up your holiday nights this year with the greenest Christmas lights available – LEDS.
LEDs use 10% the electricity of incandescents, and are 90% more efficient than their old-school tungsten counterparts. They’re perfect for strings of holiday lights, because they don’t get hot, they last forever and when one burns out, it doesn’t take the whole chain with it! You’ll get a full 100,000 hours out of most LEDs, they’re made with less nasty chemicals, and come in all kinds of festive shapes! What more could you ask for? Read on for some suggestions on where to buy…
When Fougeron Architecture was approached to convert a San Francisco concrete warehouse into a home, the client wanted a space that was free of clutter and the visual pollution of everyday banality. But the final design, charmingly named the Tehama Grasshopper residence, is far form sober and grim. From carefully selected materials like ipe wood and Cor-Ten steel green systems like radiant heating and fluorescent lighting, this modern loft is both thoughtful and homey.
Out of a pilot program called the Wild Urbanism design studio at the University of Oregon’s Department of Architecture comes Integrating Habitats, an open design competition focused on the interface between nature and the built environment. In collaboration with the Nature in Neighborhoods initiative of Portland, Oregon, the competition calls for innovative, multi-disciplinary efforts that fuse design excellence, ecological stewardship and economic enterprise to create healthy urban ecosystems.
pieceHomes premiered at Dwell on Design last month with seven modern prefab designs that take full green advantage of factory-built construction. Created by LA-based Davis Studio Architecture + Design, pieceHomes hold the promise of thoughtful integration of materials, technologies, and site considerations with both custom and standardized modular architecture at affordable prices.
As the fires in California continue to rage, Architecture for Humanity is already on the move, with architects planning reconstruction, and the local Los Angeles and San Diego chapters helping families and businesses in their times of crisis. The San Diego Chapter, Rebuild, responded earlier this week by volunteering in the evacuation center at Qualcomm Stadium. Architecture for Humanity Los Angeles is also partnering with Rebuild San Diego to mount a regional-wide response including sharing information regarding local municipalities’ relief efforts. In the meantime, AFH needs your support- financial and volunteer aid. Donate directly here, or if you’re in the area, go volunteer!
Social Design Network Design21 announced their latest design competition this week; the challenge – to design the official logo for “Stories from the Field: The United Nations Documentary Film Festival”.
The Prize
$5000
DEADLINE
The deadline for this fabulous competition is November 26th – so get going!
A spate of green skyscrapers have shot up in the last few years, as people learn that buildings account for more CO2 emissions than any other single source. At the same time, we’ve seen a rise in greenwashing by companies recognizing the market value of green and making false claims to fit the category. In an exemplary meeting of these two trends, we have just discovered a building in progress in Mumbai that calls itself the greenest of all the buildings in the Maximum City of 13 million people. If ever there were a literal interpretation of a deceptive green façade, this is it.
A mix of desert climate, high performance goals and the insight of a leader in sustainable design has yielded one of the first LEED Gold-certified straw-bale buildings in the world. Resource- and energy-efficient, the Santa Clarita Transit Maintenance Facility designed by HOK exceeds California Energy Efficiency Standards by more than 40 percent, securing a new standard for straw-bale in high performance building design.
Our streets our littered with used chewing gum, but next time your bubble loses its pop, don’t drop it—recycle it! Anna Bullus’s Bubble Gum Bin is made from Gumnetic, a new biodegradable material she developed made from sterilized used chewing gum and bio resin. The bin keeps chewing gum litter from our sidewalks and shoes and when full, the entire container is recycled to make even more bins. How’s that for cradle-to-cradle?
Eco-minded street artist Edina Tokodi is putting a new spin on green guerilla tactics in the trendy art enclave of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tokodi’s site-specific moss installations of prancing animal figures and camouflage outgrowths are the talk of a local urban neighborhood typically accustomed to gallery hype and commercial real estate take-overs. Unlike the market-driven art featured in sterile, white box galleries, the work of Tokodi is meant to be touched, felt, and in turn touch you in the playful ways that her animated installations call to mind a more familiar, environmentally friendly state in the barren patches of urban existence.
Inspired by London’s heaps of discarded furniture and usable timber, Ryan Frank’s Strata line turns deconstructed old office furniture and FSC wood into new, sleek chairs and tables. Following the success of his other recylcled-chic designs like Inkuku, made from recycled plastic bags, and the Hackney Shelf, Ryan has once again proved that trash can be treasure.
We don’t normally talk much about TV shows here on Inhabitat, but this new documentary which airs tonight looks so compelling – we thought we’d call your attention to it. Tonight, at 9pm, CNN’s Planet in Peril kicks off – using first-hand investigative reporting to provide a better understanding of global warming and the current environmental crisis. Its great to see a news channel covering this issue so thoroughly and we applaud CNN for putting this together. Watch it tonight at 9pm if you can!
Tuesday, Oct. 23, and Wednesday, Oct. 24, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Traveling to work in an old airplane shell powered by renewable energy sound little bonkers to you? Ben Missler from Mass Tram America thinks not, and has applied such principles to the design of a new and very green large-scale transportation system. Instead of your typical mass transit system, he has proposed one which runs entirely on renewable resources, and uses decommissioned airplane fuselages as Tram cars. A lofty goal indeed, but Missler claims it could all be built today with off the shelf technology.
As evidenced by our recent Transportation Tuesday greener car posts, we’re all for the greening of the automobile. But the greenest car is the one that doesn’t exist. That’s the idea behind Carectomy.com, a blog with the goal of “removing cars from people.”
Kites are no longer just for leisurely days at the beach. A promising enviro-enterprise to watch, KiteShip is a wind-power-tech company proposing the use of massive sea kites to reduce the amount of fuel used by commercial freighters. And recently, company executives have announced a potential partnership with four shipping companies to build a $2 million, 13,000-square-foot kite to help haul ships as large as 400 feet long. The huge kite would cut fuel costs drastically, making the gas-guzzling commercial shipping industry a little greener.
Thinking about making some energy-saving upgrades to your house? An EnergyStar washer perhaps? If so, you might want to consider making that purchase before the end of the year. Come December 31st, you will no longer be able to receive the $500 credit from the US Government for purchases on high-efficiency furnaces, water heaters, windows and insulation.
The fabulous Solar Decathlon just wrapped up on this weekend, and was home to many a shining example in high-tech solar design. The University of Texas at Austin’s Bloom House took 10th place in the solar design competition, but really stood out to us as a paragon of beautiful zero-energy design. The team successfully brought a bit of “don’t mess with Texas” attitude to design, combining a large open plan with a Texas-sized kitchen, the greenest technologies, and warm local materials.
Image by John MacNeill, commissioned by Solix Biofuels
If you think algae is just that green grime that dirties up your pool, think again: it’s also a surprisingly viable source for biofuel. The LiveFuels Alliance, funded by LiveFuels Inc based in Menlo Park, CA, is tapping into the oil producing potential of algae with an ambitious initiative to replace millions of gallons of fossil fuels with algae-based biocrude by 2010.
Calling all San Franciscans!!!! Today’s the day- October 20th- turn off all non-essential lights from 8-9pm, Pacific Time!
You might be wondering what a difference an hour of darkness can really make, but Lights Out San Francisco estimates that as much as 15 percent of the energy consumed on an average Saturday night will be saved by turning out lights for merely an hour.
The second place winner of this year’s Solar Decathlon is the University of Maryland’s Leaf House, which is, as the name would imply, green, naturally inspired, and modular to boot. When designing the zero energy home, the student team drew inspiration from the simple, yet vastly complex leaf. The abode boasts every sustainable system from the obvious high-tech solar panels to a liquid desiccant waterfall to control humidity, grey water recycling, green wall, and even a plug to charge an electric car.
Drumroll please……..
It has just been announced that the German University, Technische Universität Darmstadt is the winner of this years Solar Decathlon competition! In order to win this prestigious design competition, the German team had to beat out a whole slew of American universities on U.S. turf (the National Mall in Washington DC). Frankly, however, we’re not surprised to see a winning design emerge from the land of high-quality engineering. And the Darmstadt Solar Decathlon house was a worthy winner of the coveted prize. The stunning solar house was simple, elegant, and extremely innovative in its use of solar shutters and fold-up interior space.
We came, we saw, and we were won-over by the ingenious designs and architectural talent on display at this years Solar Decathlon on the Mall in Washington DC. As if it weren’t enough of a feat to design and build a zero-energy house which is ENTIRELY POWERED BY THE SUN, many of the student teams at this year’s Solar Decathlon went above and beyond the mere zero-energy requirements of the competition to produce architecturally stunning houses that are as beautiful and livable as they are energy efficient.
Combining the manufacturing expertise of Volkswagen with a beautiful modern design sensibility, the Technische Universität Darmstadt’s wowed the crowds this week at the 2007 Solar Decathlon with their gorgeously innovative Solar Decathlon home. The Darmstadt home combines both high-tech active solar and low-tech passive solar components into smart operable building envelope of movable photovoltaic shutters. This clever solar shutter system bears more than a passing resemblance to old school German wooden shutters — only writ large, spanning every exterior surface of house and covered with photovolaic panels that generate electricity while they simultaneously shade the house from the sun.
One of the biggest highlights from the 2007 Solar Decathlon comes from reigning victor University of Colorado- and the design is proving once again that the team has what it takes to be solar design champions. Committed to defending their 2002 and 2005 titles, the 2007 CU Solar Decathlon team has brought a versatile, modular design that integrates “shining” examples of solar technology, recycled shipping containers, and a super cool aesthetic.
The recent building boom in the Middle East has given rise to some of the world’s most extravagant and innovative buildings. The latest proposed tower to sprout up among the ever-changing skyline is the Burj Al-Taqa Energy Tower for the Middle East. Designed by Eckhard Gerber and cutting a 322 meter high silhouette, this commercial high rise will produce zero emissions and use sun, wind and water to create all of its own energy.
Neocon’s East Coast installment starts tomorrow, Wednesday the 17th, and Inhabitat’s own Jill Fehrenbacher will be there as keynote speaker of the Student Series. As both Founder of Inhabitat and Columbia University graduate architecture student, she’ll be talking about “The Future of Design- Think Green” at 9 a.m. so if you’re in the Baltimore area, come on down! The rest of Neocon’s events should be inspiring for fans of sustainable design, with tomorrow and Thursday’s events showcasing the best materials, ideas, and technologies in commercial design. The Student Series allows design students to engage with a growing community of forward-thinking commercial designers.
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