It’s hard to believe another year has gone by since we marked Earth Day here at Inhabitat, and yet so much has happened. From the monumental highs of Obama’s election to the equally remarkable lows of the economic downturn, plenty of major factors have influenced the directions of both sustainability and design.

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I have mixed feelings about Earth Day as a holiday. The various gestures and campaigns it incites often seem hastily cast towards a brief window of opportunity during which people care about the environment. Fortunately, it’s more obvious with every passing year that the window doesn’t close on April 23. In fact, since last Earth Day, we’ve become obsessed as a culture with quantifying and comparing our year-round ecological impacts, as well as those of our cities and countries, and the companies to whom we’re loyal. We salute the pursuit of a tiny footprint.

Happy Thanksgiving, Inhabitat readers!

It’s hard to believe a year’s gone by since the last holiday season, but it’s upon us once again. We hope you’re all enjoying delicious food and warm company today and beginning the holiday frenzy by taking some time to give thanks for the good things in your life.

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.

Resolution: 4 Architecture, a pillar in the prefab community, has a new completed project to brag about. It’s called the Swingline- a vacation home in the Hamptons built for a Manhattan-based family with sustainable style on the brain. Though Res4 has been producing prefab concepts for years, from the Dwell Home to their Mountain Retreat, we’ve never been able to see real live photos of real live construction from these architects (save for their brilliant rapid prototype birdhouses) until now, and the Swingline house proves that their prototypes don’t hold empty promises.

Sunlight transport systems are an Inhabitat favorite, as they make it possible to channel actual natural light into dark places and cast it through a fixture. The Subway Light Project is the first we’ve seen that incorporates sunlight transfer in public urban art, to save the city money on energy, and infuse public space with a good mood boost. Parsons student Caroline Pham, who designed the Subway Light Project, won first place in the school’s 2007 Sustainable Design Review. Her concept uses sunlight capture devices and fiber optics cables to channel sunlight into the enclosed corridors of the subway.

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About a year after Hurricane Katrina, we featured architect Carib Daniel Martin’s H.E.L.P. emergency shelter, a modular concept he developed to solve the challenges of widespread and sudden homelessness in the Gulf region. Almost two years later, having shopped the prototype around to manufacturers and found no takers, Martin is producing his prefab shelter himself in a manufacturing facility he built in Illinois. Now dubbed the microHOME (not to be confused with this micro home), Martin’s product has become commercially available for both emergency and non-emergency purposes.

Heavy Trash is at it again. The anonymous crew of Los Angeles-based interventionist artists, architects and urban planners just made a biting public criticism of LA’s waste and waste management problems in the form of a conceptual service company called Forever Landfill. The “company” provides individual plots of landfill for Angelinos to fill to their hearts content, delivering a satirically sharp critique on issues of personal waste production and a consumer-based society.

Next up on the auction block, the Maison Tropicale, a rare midcentury prefab by French designer, Jean Prouvé — one of only three ever built. Shipped all the way from its first home in Congo-Brazzaville, and immaculately restored in Paris, this lightweight steel and aluminum kit-of-parts structure and prefab archetype can be yours for the low, low price of $4 – $6 million! Do we have a bidder?

From Salinas, Kansas to the pages of the New York Times, Edible Estates, has had a big year. The combination of increased awareness around resource conservation, rising concern over food safety, and the gourmet cachet of a homegrown vegetable has gotten more people than ever interested in trading a water-hogging lawn for a productive garden. The first Edible Estates front yard makeover took place in Kansas, followed by one in Los Angeles. Now founder/designer Fritz Haeg has plans to take it to the East Coast with a New York lawn; but he hasn’t yet found the perfect site! Do you have a lawn you want to transform within a short distance of New York City? Do you know someone else who does?
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There are few organizations who’ve been more closely tracking the evolution of green building over the last decade than the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment (AIA/COTE). Each year, they round up the best projects they’ve seen and evaluate them according to a rigorous set of measures and metrics. Ten emerge victorious as the year’s top projects. A couple of this year’s winners will be familiar to Inhabitat readers, as we’ve noted their superior greenness in the past including The EpiCenter, shown above, and others…

Five years ago, if you’d asked a stranger to tell you the significance of April 22, you’d almost certainly have been met with a blank stare. The same would likely have been true four, three, even two years ago. But last year, Earth Day finally had its moment on the main stage. Nearly forty years after its founding, it broke out of do-good environmentalist circles and debuted across the glossy covers of Vanity Fair and Vogue. By the end of 2006, it was agreed that this was the year green went mainstream.

We’re firm believers that humanitarian efforts plus green design equals real solutions that make a difference; and here’s a great example. The American Institute of Architects recently announced the winners of their 2007 Housing Committee Awards, and the “Special Housing” category went to a smart project out of the Auburn University School of Architecture, developed for two Habitat for Humanity homes in Alabama. The DESIGNhabitat 2 house was developed specifically for Habitat for Humanity, and serves as a prime example of thoughtful, innovative green design for a good cause.

In a splendid modern take on a local tradition, Austrian architecture firm, Maaars Architektur, turned a classic alpine “massive wood block” dwelling into a work of inhabitable prefab art. A concrete foundation holds two massive wood fins with all fixtures and fasteners built-in. This house took just 9 days to construct atop the concrete base.

The house is heated with a wood stove and solar panels, and presumably the materials function as thermal mass for storing and buffering accumulated heat. Walls of windows welcome abundant daylight and open up a sprawling vista of the hills all around.

If you’re reading this, then you are probably EPIC. Why are we flattering you so? Because EPIC stands for Ethical, Progressive, Intelligent Consumer. Surely you consider yourself to be all of those things.

EPIC is the newest North American business-to-consumer sustainable living expo, launching its inaugural event in Vancouver in March. Like a new-fangled LOHAS for tech-savvy design-fiending urbanites, EPIC has identified a market segment and they are working to solidify the connections between the producers and the buyers.

Our first encounter with a “living wall” was the giant installation in the atrium of the University of Guelph in Canada. Everyone’s always asking whether they can get a similar wall of greenery for their own home, and now we have an affirmative answer. ELT (Elevated Landscape Technologies) Easy Green has designed a modular indoor/outdoor living wall panel system for residential consumers.

To get the full emotional experience of the potential joy of riding around in a DESEO Caravan, you should really watch their online video, which has the happiest “I’m a European modernist on the road in the summertime” soundtrack you ever did hear. But in case you need a preview…

The Sustain MiniHOME, one of our favorite little manufactured homes, emerged out of Toronto last year and has since made itself known far and wide. Tonight, Sustain’s prefab profile will get another boost on HGTV’s Small Space, Big Style. Designer Andy Thomson will appear on the show to give a guided tour of their process and product. We’ll have some more news soon about the progress Sustain has made in facilitating mass production of their home.

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Ed Mazria is a committed pioneer on the frontier of climate-conscious building. His Architecture 2030 agenda has gained recognition this year as an exemplary model for pushing a rapid and radical shift towards better building strategies. Now, like many people who understand the immediacy of this problem, Mazria is aiming at the target with the greatest potential to turn this misguided ship around: students. Specifically, design students.

The 2010 Imperative Global Emergency Teach-In is a free one-day event scheduled to be webcast on February 20, 2007, from noon to 3:30pm EST. The session aims to reach at least half a million students, faculty, deans and practicing professionals in North and South America, hopefully making one simultaneous splash that will send ripples of reconsideration and activism through the design community.

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A large-scale convergence of public art, renewable energy and sustainable design, Aluna is a “lunar clock” — a giant timepiece that uses tidal-powered (or lunar-powered) LEDs to indicate the phase and position of the moon, and the ebb and flow of ocean tides.

Some of the best new sustainable styles happen to be the most old-fashioned. Take jorg & olif’s Dutch City Bike. No hybrid engine, no hydrogen fuel; just the same two-wheeled contraption it’s always been, but with a modern, urban spin that makes human-powered transit hip.

A few days ago we announced the release of Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, the new book from the Worldchanging crew (of which I am the Managing Editor and Jill F. is a contributing writer). Since then the book’s gotten great reviews in the New York Review of Books and BusinessWeek.

Tomorrow morning, Wednesday November 1, we’re trying to mobilize a grassroots effort to get this thing to #1 on Amazon by asking everyone who is intending to buy a copy (and those who didn’t know they were intending!) to do so at 11:11am Pacific time.
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What the Lazy-Susan has done for efficient dining, the Hanse Rotor House has done for compact living. This spatially smart dwelling is made up of a large open living room surrounding a central core rotating room containing tiny efficient versions of a home’s essential rooms: bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. Using a remote control device, you can rotate the rooms around to bring whatever room you want into view of the main living room. Designed for young professionals who need an efficient, space-saving starter home, the Rotor House is a model of compact living.

Today is all about cargo containers and Canadian pride. The All Terrain Cabin (ATC) comes from BC-based design and local business collective, BARK, who developed the cargo home as a representation of the diversity and possibility in contemporary Canadian design culture.

The ATC is a 480-sq-ft cabin, fully equipped for self-sustained, off-grid living. The container has been made ultra-modern with aluminum, wood and glass. It’s a product of what appears to be extensive collaboration, and is now on tour to let the world see what Canada’s got going on.

Rocio Romero is perhaps best known for her LV Home, but her Fish Camp house has been our pet favorite since we first saw it. She talked about Fish Camp at Dwell on Design last month, and in this month’s issue (which is all prefab all the time), there’s a beautiful piece about all of Romero’s true-to-the-tradition prefab series.

Most people associate Resolution: 4 Architecture with prefab — especially their work for Dwell’s custom prefab collection. The last time we saw RES4 was, in fact, at Dwell on Design, but what captivated us was not so much their gorgeous modern architecture as a little accent piece they created recently for a charity event: a birdhouse inspired by the classic urban tennis-shoes-over-the-telephone-wire trick.

If you’re relatively new to Inhabitat, you may not remember when we introduced Lovetann’s LEGO-like prefab-modular home concept. A little more than a year later (and following on the heels of their debut as the 100% Norway headquarters during London Design Week), they’re releasing two new models for homes! They’ve also got some gorgeous photos of the fully constructed original Lovetann show home, which we thought we’d throw in to complement the shiny new renderings.

Our last Prefab Friday article featured Michelle Kaufmann’s latest design, the mkSolaire. That same day, I had a chance to sit down with her at West Coast Green and ask her about her innovative green, modern, modular housing. Michelle has a very deep knowledge of the principles and practices that underlie the green building revolution, and a profound commitment to making green living accessible.

Video clip after the jump!

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For West Coast Green, Inhabitat partnered with Netscape to do some video documentation. Alongside Netscape anchor extraordinaire, Alexia Prichard, we shot a series of interviews, which we’ll be posting during the week. To kick it off, here’s some intro footage from the trade show floor.

Video clip after the jump!

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West Coast Green is abuzz again today. With eight different speaker tracks, it’s impossible to see everything, but they’re doing a great job of recording and documenting to keep everyone fully-informed. Here are some quick shots from the exhibitor floor. We love the YOLO Colorhouse booth — a beautiful design of a great product. Their collection of interior paints exceeds Green Seal environmental standards for VOCs and comes in a lovely, earthy palette.

After the jump are some shots of Green Fusion Design Center and Ecoterric, both supplying goods for home interiors, and of course our forever-fave, Rana Creek.

It’s day one of the huge West Coast Green expo and conference at San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. We’ll be bringing you lots of coverage during and after the event, and most exciting of all - we have our very own booth – full of gorgeous goods generously donated by Branch Home and OHIO Design. This is our first ever trade show booth and we are very excited! If you are here, come stop by and say hi to us…

It’s no secret that buildings account for a tremendous amount of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Between the energy they consume during operations, and the resources and materials necessary to build them, there are fewer culprits more guilty than buildings in the current climate crisis. As a response, the AIA and Architecture2030 made official the 2030 Challenge, with the goal of achieving carbon-neutrality for all new buildings by the year 2030.

Though that date sounds like it’s a ways off, the goal is ambitious and the outcome would be dramatic. But there are numerous committed builders and designers who have made it their business to hit the target much sooner. Kiss + Cathcart Architects, for example, are working on Solar 2, the new visitors’ center for the New York-based sustainability and community hub, Solar One.
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photo: Tristan d’EstrZe Sterk, oframBFRA.com

Much of the talk about future-forward shelter design revolves around changing our perception of habitable spaces from static to dynamic structures. Particularly in prefab, architects are pushing the idea of the home as a large-scale appliance — something that serves and adapts to our changing lives. A recent Wired article brought this idea to light in the context of building design, where the entire envelope of a “smart” skyscraper can be designed to flex with changes in weather, climate and traffic.
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Since prefab is often implicitly about mobility, spatial efficiency and design innovation, Prefab Friday seemed an apt day to feature the Quickup Camper. The lightweight, carbonfiber and foam shell pops open into a mobile dwelling in thirty seconds, and closes down to a compact enough size to fit into a garage. Best of all, unlike so many other campers, it doesn’t cut your miles-per-gallon down to nothing. But to truly appreciate the beauty of the Quickup, you have to understand the sheer brilliance of the man behind the machine…

During the month of September, the city of Copenhagen is hosting Hot Summer of Urban Farming — eight temporary art installations that explore the use (and disuse) of urban spaces. The Oxygen Greenhouse, by Hartmut Stockter, generates fresh air for the O2-starved urbanite. The greenhouse has a tube and a breathing mask attached for the passer by who needs a hit of the pure stuff.