Design and engineering innovations over the last two decades have had a dramatic impact on our ability to create beautiful, environmentally sensitive structures that help contribute to a more sustainable future. A dramatic example of the confluence of design, technology and environmental sustainability can be seen in the proliferation of innovative bridge designs around the world. We’ve put together a list of five of our favorites. Check them out and let us know what you think!
Daniel Flahiff
Daniel is an artist-designer-filmmaker who loves to laugh and share green ideas! Trained in Los Angeles at the Art Center College of Design (MFA, '90) and the UCLA Writer's Studio, Daniel went on to Seattle to co-found Big Fig Design Group, a multi-disciplinary group of artists, designers and roustabouts who like to make things. Daniel also edits, (incli)NATION, named a top 20 design blog by the East Coast Architecture Review, and a top 25 architecture blog by Eikonographia [for about 48 hours]. He is design lead at The Mighty House, creators of small, DIY, off-grid housing, and is soon launching Sparkler, hand-made home furnishings and textiles for the modern, green home—upcycled, downcycled and otherwise repurposed objects from our already overpopulated world of objects.
November 12, 2009
November 10, 2009
According to the Forest Products Laboratory, a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree. Putting this principle into practice, Whole Tree Architecture is dedicated to building with materials that lumber companies consider scrap – weed trees, also know as ‘managed forest thinnings.’ The resulting projects are beautiful displays of locally sourced and sustainably managed materials.
October 26, 2009
Clothes hangers are clogging our landfills at a rate of nearly 8 billion per year. We’ve recently brought you designers who have been developing brilliant ways to tackle the problem through eco-friendly materials and innovative new designs. Now industrial designers Alex Witko and Courtney Hunt at Organelle Design have hit upon another great idea — Hangeliers, wonderful chandeliers made from off-the-shelf plastic and wood hangers.
October 21, 2009
There are reportedly over 750,000 abandoned concrete bunkers scattered throughout Albania, remnants of Communist dictator Enver Hoxha and his policies of paranoid xenophobia. Now graduate students Gyler Mydyti & Elian Stefa have developed a plan called Concrete Mushrooms that would ‘invert the meaning’ of these structures by turning them into a network of habitable eco-hostels, cafés, gift shops and more.
October 15, 2009
Today is Blog Action Day, and this year’s theme is Climate Change – a topic near and dear to our hearts here at Inhabitat. To kick things off, we took a look back over last the past year’s posts and pulled together a list of our top 5 favorite climate change stories to hit the pages of Inhabitat. The following [completely biased] list is in no particular order. It does, however, attempt to focus on solutions to the problem – because we believe that there is hope for our planet if we act now. Check it out and please, comment copiously. We love a good debate!
October 13, 2009
Now that it’s clear that the flying cars we were promised as youngsters are not going to appear anytime soon, we can perhaps take comfort in the arrival of the brilliant HEPAV 1.1, a human-electric powered amphibious vehicle from the creative mind of Czech designer and inventor David Buchwaldek. Like an eco-superhero’s signature ride, the HEPAV 1.1 can travel the streets in style and drive straight into the water without missing a beat. Sustainable, human-powered locomotion never looked so good.
October 8, 2009
Pedal power is clearly on the rise. Bike sharing programs are spreading throughout the world, David Byrne’s new book Bicycle Diaries is flying off the shelves, and brilliant new designs like this, this and this, are appearing all over the globe. A wonderfully quirky addition to the scene is the Hopworksfiets party bike, a brilliant mash-up of human-powered pizza delivery, brew pub, and portable entertainment system. Created by Portland, OR-based bike builders Metrofiets, the Hopworksfiets is designed to deliver everything you need to get your pedal-powered party rolling.
September 2, 2009
Magically appearing from the trees along Great Ocean Road, Australia is Cocoon, an incredible weekend getaway by the terrific design duo Bellemo & Cat. One part zeppelin, one part finely-crafted yacht, Cocoon was conceived as a “a matchbox inside an egg, a rectangle within an oval.”
August 24, 2009
Buildings account for thirty-eight percent of the CO2 emissions in the U.S., according to the U.S. Green Building Council, and demand for carbon neutral and/or zero footprint buildings is at an all-time high. Now there is a new building material that is not just carbon neutral, but is actually carbon negative. Developed by U.K.-based Lhoist Group, Tradical® Hemcrete® is a bio-composite, thermal walling material made from hemp, lime and water. What makes it carbon negative? There is more CO2 locked-up in the process of growing and harvesting of the hemp than is released in the production of the lime binder. Of course the equation is more complicated than that, but Hemcrete® is still an amazing new technology that could change the building industry.
August 20, 2009
At Inhabitat we’ve brought you some terrific examples of recycled aircraft here, here, here and here. But Dave Drimmer’s Cosmic Muffin, the iconic ‘plane-boat’ made from Howard Hughes’ prized Boeing B-307, has to be the quintessential example. Deemed un-flyable in 1969, Hughes’ former ‘flying office’ was rescued from the landfill by Fort Lauderdale Realtor and pilot Kenneth W. London who then spent the next four years transforming it into an exotic houseboat that has been featured everywhere from CNN to Ripley’s Believe It or Not! to Jimmy Buffet’s 1996 song “Desdemona’s Building A Rocketship”!
August 11, 2009
In one of the most ambitious examples of speculative architecture of the year, Paris-based OFF Architecture recently unveiled an incredible eco-bridge spanning the Bering Strait from Russia to the United States that would facilitate international trade, protect wildlife, mitigate global warming, and promote peace. Every bit as beautiful and eco-conscious as it is quixotic, the project stole the show at the Bering Strait International Ideas Competition.
August 5, 2009
In answer to the ever-intensifying global water crisis, industrial designer Talia Radford has created the AquaIris, an elegant, portable water purifier for developing countries with tropical climates that is simple to use and requires no electricity! How does it work? Contaminated water enters the AquaIris, passes over a removable/re-usable filter, then travels under a layer of ‘converter crystals’ where germicidal UVC rays purify the water molecules as they pass by.
March 23, 2009
A hot shower is relaxing, but is also a huge waste of energy: we heat our water with massive amounts of natural gas, oil or electricity, then transport the heated water to our tubs for a few seconds of sudsing, before washing it down the drain full of raw, wasted heat and energy! What if we could recapture this untapped source of wasted energy by transferring the heat from that shower waste-water to cold incoming water? The EcoDrain, a simple heat exchange unit, does just that, saving water heater use by up to 40%.
March 19, 2009
After weeks of public outcry , the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to place a hold of at least one year upon the “Greenest Building on the West Coast”. Designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, the 110 Embarcadero project is now under review to determine the historical significance of the site and the proposed 10-story height of the project. Just months ago, the architects had been given the go-ahead to construct the uber-green office building, which was set to become the first commercial building on the West Coast to receive a LEED Platinum rating.
March 10, 2009
On the western outskirts of Shanghai, China, a dragon is coming to life. Constructed of concrete, steel and glass, the new corporate headquarters of Giant Pharmaceutical Corp looks for all the world like something between a sci-fi battleship landing on a highway, and a steampunk dragon frozen in time. L.A.-based architectural firm Morphosis is focusing on the building’s sustainability as much as its aesthetics, with a green roof, generous use of skylights, and advanced insulation materials like cement-fiberboard paneling and a double-layer, fritted-glass curtain wall.
March 5, 2009
Typical “leather” footwear is nearly impossible to dispose of or recycle properly, is constructed using a combination of chromium-tanned leather and bonded, man-made materials and is usually manufactured in a developing country with substandard (or nonexistent) occupational health regulations. Cradle to Cradle authors and Inhabitat favorites William McDonough and Michael Braungart have even gone so far as to call mainstream footwear “hazardous waste” for the feet. Flying in the face of this perception is the Nike Zoom MVP Trash Talk All-Star Game Player Exclusive, a new shoe made from left-over Nike sneaker scraps – a.k.a. trash!
March 5, 2009
Generally associated with plastic and wooden 55 gallon drums covered with slimy moss, rainwater harvesting just doesn’t seem to capture the imagination like an exotic green roof or a gleaming solar array — until now. The CISTA rainwater harvesting system (which we just spotted on Kohler’s new H2OVisions website) is a dramatic, elegant and space-saving solution for the urban environment that conserves water, increases green space and just might finally bring rainwater harvesting the kind of attention it deserves.
February 18, 2009
Living ‘close to the earth’ can mean many things — living in harmony with nature, living in touch with natural processes, or in the case of Casa de los Pinos (House Among the Pines), living on the top of a mountain, smack in the middle of a stand of breathtaking pine. But that is just the beginning of this terrific project by architectural firm XPIRAL. The house showcases a host of sustainable features including the use of rocks from the site for stone-work, vegetation from the grounds remade into construction material, and timber on the site used in the pathways. And to top it all off, the architects replanted the same number of trees on the property that it took to clear the building site!
February 11, 2009
Scholastic architecture doesn’t get much better than these stunning Mode-Gakuen Spiral Towers in Nagoya, Japan. The shimmering towers corkscrew 36 stories [170 m] above the busy streets of Nagoya, Japan, and house educational facilities for three different disciplines in three tapered ‘wings’ – fashion design, computer programming and a medical support. Architectural group Nikken Sekkei included a host of ecological features in the towers including a double-glassed air flow window system and a natural air ventilation system.
February 4, 2009
This year’s Greener Gadgets Competition is loaded with brilliant ideas. One of our favories is the Tweet-a-watt, a fabulous open-source, power monitoring project from ladyada. One part off-the-shelf hardware, two-parts hackware and a dash of environmental consciousness and social networking, Tweet-a-watt monitors and “tweets ” (publish wirelessly) your home’s daily energy use to your Twitter account, all for less than fifty bucks!
