A trendspotter and green marketing strategist, sustainability has been a major part of Cate's career for the past eight years. Her Design and Eco-Design course at Goldsmiths College, University of London involved designing and building an eco coffin, planning a sustainable meal with George Bush, and imagining what would happen if Greenpeace and Tesco joined forces. Since then, she's assisted Nokia's CSR team with their research and strategy, worked on sustainability documents for Unilever and helped a celebrity designer develop an eco-product for Tesco. She can currently be found exploring London town, documenting trends for consultancies around the world.
With a name like ‘No More Gas’, you can bet that this cute little personal electric vehicle is as good to the environment as it is to the user. Its size, weight and fuel make it much better for the planet, while its look and driving experience make it great fun for the driver. Looking like it’s dropped straight out of an episode of The Jetsons, this tiny car can achieve speeds of over 75mph for a cost of $0.02 per mile. All this eco-goodness earned Myers Motors’ NmG vehicle kudos at this year’s Well-Tech Awards exhibit in Milan.
We never thought the Frankenstein approach would work for eco-design, but Dutch designer Jetske de Groot shows that it works beautifully. A refreshing change to all the super-slick design at the Milan Furniture Fair, de Groot’s chairs and tables are as sustainable as they are appealing. The project, entitled ‘Multiple Family’, is driven by a brilliant, simple approach: take two or more broken chairs or tables, and fuse the non-broken bits together to produce a new, functional and completely unique design.
We’ve covered many of our favorite designs from Milan Design Week 2008 this past week, but there was lots of intriguing eco design that we still haven’t touched on yet: Steven Burks’ eco-minded ‘Cappellini Love’ tables, lots of LED oriented lighting, waste-diverting floor coverings made from scrap materials, and innovations for portable functional spaces are just a few of the highlights we don’t want to leave out from our Milan Coverage. From Tuttobene, Satellite and around town, here is a selection of great green designs we spotted while out and about in Milan last week.
One of our favorite stops during Milan Design Week, last week, was at the Well-Tech Exhibition, where we found the Well-Tech organization’s mission in full green design form. Founded to encourage design that focuses on sustainability, inclusiveness and improving quality of life, Well-Tech’s 2008 exhibit featured some of our favorite humanitarian and social design products, such as the Bogo solar light, as well as some innovative new eco-design ideas, like the ‘No More Gas (NmG)’ personal electric vehicle. Read on for our highlights from Well-Tech!
The Greenergy Design exhibition, at Cortili dell’Universita degli Studi di Milano, is just the kind of thing us Inhabitants live for. As the title suggests, all of the designs on display had sustainability at their heart and Greenergy featured awesome designs such as a billowing, constantly changing cloud light, a personal seating garden, and included work from world-renowned designers including Philippe Starck and Marti Guixe. Take a look at our highlights here!
A set of zero-carbon floating buildings has been chosen by RIBA as the winning design for the visitor center at the new Brockholes Wetland and Woodland Nature Reserve in Preston, northern England. Nicknamed ‘A Floating World’ and chosen over five other shortlisted entries, this design from Adam Khan Architects uses buildings made of low embodied energy materials such as thatch, willow and timber, drawing on the heritage of wetland dwellings and embodying a sustainable agenda.
Prince Charles has been invited to open the New Forest Study Centre’s new educational treehouse, a sustainable building that places city kids right in the middle of nature. The Countryside Education Trust (CET) has commissioned two classrooms-on-stilts to be built, enabling 10,000 children a year to learn about rural life and build a connection to nature - an experience that some one million children in the UK have never had. With an eco-minded design and purpose, the treehouse project will be a catalyst for environmental awareness.
It’s still surprising to see how few retail spaces there are dedicated to green products. However, hopefully this is set to change in Britain, with the arrival of Eco Age, a cutting-edge, high-end designer gadgets and interior designs store in the upmarket family district of Chiswick, London. The retail space enables customers to see, touch and smell products before purchase – essential for customers who want to make a considered purchase based on their appreciation of all of these sensory aspects, and crucial for products that want to break from the ‘instant landfill’ norm. It also makes it much easier for good intentions to be turned into green-minded action.
A favorite London, sunny day hang out spot, Potters Field Park, has just gotten even better with the addition of these two stunning pavilions designed by socially and environmentally aware architects DSDHA. The pavilions stand either side of the park, one at the foot of Norman Foster’s City Hall and the other beside Tower Bridge, providing refreshments and fantastic views of the river.
Environmentally conscious visitors to Shanghai who are looking for the luxury experience can stay carbon-free and enjoy green living on the go at URBN Hotels. Designed to attract ‘urban world travelers’, the 28-room full-service hotel fuses Western and Chinese influences and a host of green-minded practices to create an urban eco-oasis for tourist and business travelers. From the building’s design and materials to cleaning products to energy-efficiency, URBN Hotels is an eco-friendly refuge amid the bustle of Shanghai.
The Smart Grid and all of its energy-saving intelligence is coming to Boulder, Colorado, making this picturesque town at the foot of the Rockies poised to become the nation’s first fully integrated Smart Grid City within the next few years! Chosen by Xcel Energy for its location, ideal size and current infrastructure, Boulder was also chosen because of in-place smart grid initiatives through University of Colorado and several other nearby institutions. Xcel Energy and its Smart Grid Consortium will start research over the next few weeks and the first phase of Smart Grid City could be in place as early as August 2008!
Ever dreamed of owning a completely self-sufficient home that produces its own energy, water, and is completely customizable? New York architect Scott Specht has the answer to all of our zero-energy prefab dreams with the new ZeroHouse™. This completely self-sustaining prefabricated house generates its own power, collects its own water, processes its own waste and is 100% automatic. Versatile, durable and site-sensitive, ZeroHouse can be erected in almost any location in one day with steel frame components and a helical-anchor foundation system that requires no excavation.
The 18-story façade of James Law Cybertecture’s new Pixel Tower in Dubai was inspired by the moving bubbles in a champagne glass and built for the young, techie and trendy. Intended for the Dubai Waterfront, Pixel Tower draws on passive solar techniques and strategic facade geometry to minimize heat gain on the structure’s south side and optimize views out over the Persian Gulf to the north.
The English Cotswolds are well-known around the world for being a place of picturesque natural beauty, and now this tourist-favorite is about to become home to stunning architectural beauty as well, with the development of Lower Mill Estate, a collection of modern eco-homes. Lower Mill Estate in Gloucestershire, England is a development of luxury waterside eco-homes featuring Britain’s biggest collection of architect-designed modern homes. Custom designs by over 22 architects, including Richard Reid, Will Alsop and Sarah Featherstone, 48 houses combine with a beautiful natural setting to create a unique living experience that is connected to nature.
Reminding us that there are many ways to approach sustainable architecture, the original 1950s Mark & Spencer’s headquarters has recently been renovated using all local materials, by British design firm Make. Much of the design within the 55 Baker Street building has been made by local British designers, such as the foyer interior by furniture maker Davison Highley, lifts by Elan, and toilet roll holders by the London-based-ironmonger izé. We’re all for making the old fresh again using local talent and ingenuity.
Despite being the manufacturer of chemical fertilizer (something that is not usually seen as ‘green’), the Belarusian Potash Company (BPC) has managed to incorporate green design features and employee health and well-being into their design for the new headquarters in Minsk, Belarus. Giving new meaning to the term ‘biomimicry’, (chemicalmimicry?) the colorful new fertilizer headquarter building resembles a gigantic crystalline structure.
Just when you thought development in the United Arab Emirates couldn’t get any crazier, here comes a new UAE eco-city to rival Masdar. Intended to be entirely sustainable and cater to residents’ every conceivable whim within its four walls, the new Ras al Khaimah eco city development in the United Arab Emirates, design by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA office, is often likened to that of the zero-carbon, zero-waste Masdar. Cutting-edge solar technology will power the 1.2 million square meter city, built using locally-sourced Arabian materials and aesthetic styles to support the city’s overall ethos of sustainability. Leave it to Rem to design something so grand it could possibly upstage Masdar- we’ll see how it unfolds!
Not settling for mere zero-energy, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill’s Masdar Headquarters are setting new design standards for green building, with their scheme that generates more energy than it consumes. The Masdar Headquarters building outside of Abu Dhabi is also the first building in history to generate power for its own assembly, using a solar roof pier that will be built first to power the rest of the construction.
Why wonder if we’ll ever live on the moon when it’s being built right here on Earth? Heerim Architects are planning to bring Star Wars chic to the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, defining the look with two uber-futuristic buildings to act as markers of the gateway of one of the world’s fastest growing economies.
In an era of globalization and significant rural-urban migration, Israel-based Knafo Klimor Architects offer a new ‘urban and social vision that will address problems of chaotic urbanization’. The Agro-Housing prefab concept is a modern housing solution that integrates green building practices, smart growth principles and traditional values to create sustainable urban communities within China’s growing metropolises.
Palestra, the stunning home of the London Development Agency and the London Climate Change Agency, is due to have new wind turbines installed after a component failure in 2006. Two new types of turbine will be trialled, with the more successful of the two to be installed in full in the first quarter of 2008. We’re also using this news as an excuse to cover the RIBA-award winning building as a whole, which is as gorgeous as it is green.
The term “mile high” isn’t just for airplane action anymore- British firm Popularchitecture has proposed a mile-high eco tower for London that’s sure to be just as exciting. At a full mile tall and housing over 100,000 people, this concept tower really is just that: a cool, uber-green concept. With 500 floors would contain schools and hospitals to shops and pubs, and everything else under the sun. While it will likely never be realized, the design does push our thinking forward.
Perched atop a Spanish cliff sits this gorgeous green home, a privately-owned holiday house that’s as lovely as it is sustainable. Located in Cantabria, Spain, and designed by Madrid-based Nolaster Architects, Casa OS integrates green building techniques to create high-end, low-impact accommodation. The irony is that the original design scheme wasn’t intended to be a green building, but the architects employed many green features for visual impact and practical benefits. We’d just love to live an eco life on that cliff.
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