Sarah Rich is a writer and editor working where sustainability intersects with design, architecture, art, food, urbanism, branding and consumer culture.
Sarah received her BA from Stanford University in Cultural and Social Anthropology, after which time she dabbled in careers as a chef, singer, and fashion designer, before turning to journalism and stumbling into the vast terrain of online media. She continues to publish print work occasionally in such magazines as Dwell, I.D., BusinessWeek, Creative Review, ReadyMade, Innovative Home, and others.
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.
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.
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?
When Alysia Reiner and David Alan Basche went searching for a home in Manhattan, they had no idea they’d end up rescuing an abandoned crack house and turn it into a green dream home - all in front of the rolling cameras of Dwell TV. Now, a year and a half after the project began, the Green Harlem House, designed by Brooklyn architect Hannah Purdy, is almost complete and is getting ready to open to the public this coming weekend on May 20th. We highly encourage any New Yorkers who are interested in exploring the idea of green home renovation to come and check out the Harlem House this Sunday at 1pm. (128th Street at 5th Ave, see here for further details). For those of you who are not in New York, but are interested in watching the drama unfold in video, check out the Dwell Harlem House Series >
Inhabitat stopped by the house last week to meet the owners and get a tour before the opening this coming weekend. Read on to see our photos and find out more about the house below.
+ Dwell Magazine + Hannah Purdy
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? READ MORE >
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… READ MORE >
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.
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.
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. READ MORE >
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. READ MORE >
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. READ MORE >
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. READ MORE >
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