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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Post tags: allan chochinov, compostmodern, earth day, green design, industrial design, sustainable design

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.

Read the rest of Earth Day, China, and the Trouble with Leading by Example

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Post tags: earth day, Earth Day Flag, Inhabitat celebrate Earth Day

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.


Read the rest of Happy Thanksgiving from Inhabitat!

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Post tags: Inhabitat vegan thanksgiving, Lol Cats Tofurkey Turkey, LOL Turkeh, LOL Turkey, Thankful Turkey, thanksgiving

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.

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Post tags: green skyscraper, green tower, India green building, Mukesh Ambani, Mumbai Green Skyscraper, mumbai sustainable building, SITE architecture, sustainable tower

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.

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Post tags: Green Building, prefab construction, prefab home, prefab house, Prefab Housing, Res4 Architecture, Resolution4 Architecture, Swingline, Swingline prefab

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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Post tags: Caroline Pham, eco-art, Subway Light Project, Sunlight Transport System, Sustainable Design Review

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.


Read the rest of PREFAB FRIDAY: Mfinity Releases microSYSTEM

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Post tags: Emergency housing, HELP, Housing Every Last Person, Hurricane Katrina housing, MicroHOME, New Orleans prefab, prefab architecture, Prefab Housing

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.

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Post tags: Forever Landfill, green design art, Heavy Trash, Los Angeles art collaborative, Los Angeles waste project

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?

Read the rest of PREFAB FRIDAY: Jean Prouve’s Maison Tropicale For Sale!

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Post tags: Jean Prouve, Maison Tropicale, modern prefab, prefab home, prefab house, prefabricated house, prefabrication

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 the rest of EDIBLE ESTATES Needs A Home In NYC!

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Post tags: Edible Estate, edible estates, fritz haeg, Fritz Haeg Edible Estates, urban farm

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…

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Post tags: AIA top ten, AIA/COTE, EpiCenter, Green Building

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.


Read the rest of IT’S EARTH DAY: Do Something

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Post tags: earth day

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.

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Post tags: 2007 Housing Committee Awards, Auburn School of Architecture, DESIGNhabitat 2 House, Habitat for Humanity 4, modular housing

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.

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Post tags: Haus Schnitzer Bruch, Maaars Architektur, prefab house, Prefab Housing

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.


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Post tags: EPIC Sustainable Living Conference in Vancouver, Ethical Progressive, Intelligent Consumer