Just last week Treehugger joined thousands of designers, builders and architects in Arizona to check out all the latest advances in sustainable building at Greenbuild 2009. By the time we got to Phoenix, we were 28,000 strong, all standing up and cheering for Al Gore’s speech, a new and different one directed at the Greenbuild audience. A conference like this shouldn’t be necessary; every building should be green. But there were stirring speeches, great educational sessions and hundreds of new green products to see.

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I know, it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet, but this year Treehugger is starting early and are taking it slow. Let’s face it: with all that rushing, consuming, and bargain-hunting, the holidays can be darn stressful. So this year, following the best of the methodology pioneered by the revolutionary Slow Food Movement, Treehugger is taking them back. We’re putting the brakes on stress and over consumption and making a return to those idyllic holidays of old with our Slow Gift Guide, consisting of 12 categories and over 100 gifts. Check them all out after the break.

Treehugger 2009 Gift Guide: Have a Slow Holiday >

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Mark Twain had a garden shed; he called it “the loveliest study you ever saw…octagonal with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window…perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lighting flashes behind the hills beyond and the rain beats upon the roof over my head—imagine the luxury of it.”

But in recent times, the humble garden shed has become an outlet for designers to experiment in small spaces that often slide under the radar of zoning bylaws, providing extra room for study, relaxation or just getting away from everyone else.

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Over at TreeHugger we are saps for furniture that can slide under your door; flatpack isn’t just made by IKEA. Designers like Eric Ku are doing it with humor, inventing a flatpack alphabet – his Flatpack Chair is pretty self-explanatory. In Japan, Keiji Ashizawa channels Marcel Breuer with a steel flatpack cantilever chair that slides under the door. Read on for more examples of cutting-edge flatpack furniture.

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The kitchen of the future was going to be so high-tech. Frigidaire’s Dream Kitchen of Tomorrow had it all; an IBM punch card recipe file, automatic dispensing and online TV ordering. And that’s not all – read on as we take a look at several extraordinary retro-futuristic kitchens to see how they’ve withstood the test of time.

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Buildings consume 76% of electricity generated; they create 48% of our greenhouse gases; a quarter of our waste in landfills comes from construction. Yet we continue to tear down perfectly good ones and replace them with new ones that don’t perform as well and don’t last as long. If we understood what old buildings are saying to us, we would be less eager to rip them down, and perhaps might even emulate them in our new buildings. Read on for examples.

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Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant & Butik, photo Luanne Lozier

Green roofs are wonderful things; like a thick blanket, they keep roofs cool in summer and warm in winter. They have been around for centuries in Scandinavia and Iceland, where they moderate the cold winters and sometimes very hot summers. They reduce the “heat island” effect, where the air above and around the old black roofs gets hotter, making them hot properties in cities. Some, like Toronto have made them mandatory; other cities like Chicago give financial assistance to promote them. The provide habitat for birds and insects, even goats.

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