Inhabitat

LAST CHANCE to enter our Green Halloween Costume Contest!

LAST DAY TO ENTER OUR HALLOWEEN COSTUME CONTEST!

The fun and frenzy of Halloween are officially over, but you still have one LAST CHANCE to submit your creative homemade costumes in our Green Halloween Costume Contest! We want you to blow us away with your handcrafted, eco-inspired Halloween costumes, so upload your pics TODAY!

The best and most imaginative costumes will win fabulous prizes like a sweet solar-powered Bogo flashlight, an awesome $100 gift …

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REMINDER: Don’t Forget to Enter Our Green Halloween Costume Contest!

CALLING ALL HOMEMADE HALLOWEEN COSTUME CRAFTERS!

The deadline for our annual Green Halloween Costume Photo Contest is approaching so fast that it’s scary! We’ve gotten some awesome submissions so far, but we still want see yours so get your pics in NOW for a chance to win some sweet prizes like a handy solar-powered Bogo flashlight, an awesome $100 gift certificate to the Inhabitatshop or our fabulous Inhabitat t-shirts …

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ANNOUNCING: Our Annual Green Halloween Costume Contest!

CALLING ALL CREATIVE COSTUMERS!
It’s that time of year again when all the boys and ghouls come out to play – Halloween!!! With the big night swiftly approaching and not much time on your hands, it may be tempting to head to your local big box store and pick up a lame, generic costume straight from the shelves – don’t do it! This year, why not get into the creative fun that All Hallow’s …

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SOLAR DECATHLON 2009: Cornell Silo House

Things really heated up this past few days as we inched closer to finding out who the winner of this year’s Solar Decathlon would be, and in the end Team Germany’s surPLUShouse stole the show. We were sad to see that Cornell University’s Silo House did not place in the top 3, but we still love this totally unconventional and clever home which held steadfastly in the ranks as part of the top 10 throughout the week. As a compact modular structure, the Silo House proves that impressive green, energy-efficient things do come in small spaces!

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Win the “Ecouterre”: A $170 Limited-Edition Recycled Chain Necklace!

Want to win this dazzling $170 recycled vintage chain necklace? We’re giving it away to one lucky reader on Ecouterre to celebrate the official launch of our dedicated eco-fashion website, Ecouterre! We wanted to do something extra special for our very first giveaway so we got the talented …

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urbanSHED: Design a Better Sidewalk Shed and Win $10,000!

Heads up all engineers, architects, and designers in NYC! The urbanSHED design competition is looking for a better sidewalk shed, and they’re giving away $25,000 in prizes plus the chance to construct the winning design! Anyone who’s every visited a dense city is likely to be familiar with these unsightly scaffolded spaces – sure, they may protect your head from falling construction debris, but they tend to be plastered with posters, …

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Michael Jackson Lives On In Blinged Out Wind-Powered Memorial

Michael Jackson will live on forever in our hearts through his music, but he also deserves a thriller of a memorial fit for a true king! In the wake of his untimely death, our friends at Bustler held a competition to design the Baddest memorial ever. Live Forever: The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition yielded some impressive designs. Some were gaudy and a little ostentatious, and others even bordered on the line of inappropriate, but our absolute favorite was a blinged-out, gold-plated, and renewable energy-fueled disco dancefloor in a undisclosed remote desert location. What better way to immortalize the King of Pop?!

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Enter the CLEAR VILLAGE Competition and Win €2,500!

Image by Georg Parthen courtesy of HeyHeyShot

Ever dreamed of designing your own eco village? Well, here’s your chance to be an eco-visionary and maybe even win €2,500 in the process! The CLEAR Village Visualization Competition is calling all architects, designers, students and anyone else who can wield a pencil or an artboard to visualize what their ideal sustainable village would look like. Does your village have leaf-shaped solar panels on every rooftop? Shops where customers have to bring their own containers to fill up on goods? A human-powered monorail? Whatever your ideas are, here is your chance to make them a reality. That’s right, the CLEAR Village is actually planning to build a real-life sustainable village, and your design could be a part of it!

The deadline to enter is Wednesday, September 23rd 2009 at midnight EST, so read on to find out how to enter!

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Competition Offers $250,000 to Design Pedal-Powered Helicopter

Who knew that pedal-powered flight would have such a sudden resurgence in popularity? Recently we looked at a Dutch teenager who is making waves with his pedal-powered plane made out of balsa wood and foil, and now we’ve learned that the American Helicopter Society is trying to garner even more interest in pedal power with a $250,000 prize.

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LAST CHANCE to Win A Solar Bag in our Back-to-School Contest!

THE DEADLINE FOR OUR AWESOME BACK TO SCHOOL GIVEAWAY IS TONIGHT AT MIDNIGHT!

If you’ve been reading Inhabitat the past couple weeks, hopefully by now you’ve read about our fabulous back-to-school giveaway contest. In case you missed it, we’re giving away an AWESOME NoonSolar school bag stuffed with eco-friendly back to school supplies (worth over $500) and a slew of other great prizes to our readers in the spirit of back-to-school goodness. The contest deadline is tonight at midnight and we’ll be announcing the winner in tomorrow’s weekly newsletter, so if you haven’t entered yet this is your last chance!

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2009 Index: Awards Showcase Designs that Improve Life

Danish design consultancy Index: recently announced the winners of the 2009 Index:Award, an international design competition that highlights the scale of the problems we face globally, while rewarding design work that points the way towards intelligent solutions. The prize is 100,000 euros per winner in five categories: “Body“, “Home“, “Work“, “Play” and “Community“. This year’s prizes have been chosen from more than 700 entries, all of which had to meet the theme: Design to Improve Life.

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BACK TO SCHOOL CONTEST: Win a $500 Solar Bookbag Prize Pack!

Green your back-to-school regime with our eco-friendly giveaway contest!
It’s almost that time of year again when leaves start falling and students everywhere get ready to go back to school. To get into the fall academic spirit and help our readers green their back-to-school regime, we’re running a contest on Inhabitat to give away an AMAZING sun-powered bag by NoonSolar, chock full of eco-friendly back-to-school goodies like recycled paper notebooks, erasers and pencils. Our back-to-school prize pack is worth over $500, and can be all yours, if you enter our contest. It’s easy to enter – here’s how:

1. Sign up for the Inhabitat newsletter >

2. Sign up to follow us on Twitter and Facebook

3. Await instructions, which will be emailed out to all of our subscribers today!

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BACK TO SCHOOL CONTEST: Win An Awesome Solar Book Bag!

Get ready for school with our back-to-school green giveaway contest!
Fall is just around the corner, and students everywhere are getting ready to go back to school. To get into the autumnal school spirit and help our readers green their back-to-school regime, we’re running a contest on this site to give away an AWESOME solar powered bag by NoonSolar, stuffed with eco-friendly back-to-school goodies like recycled paper notebooks, erasers and pencils. Our back-to-school goody bag is worth over $500, and it’s a really sweet prize that can be all yours, if you enter our contest. Here’s how:

1. Sign up for the Inhabitat newsletter >

2. Sign up to follow us on Twitter and Facebook

3. Await instructions, which will be emailed out to all of our subscribers on Wednesday August 26th.

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Showcase Your Front Lawn Veggie Garden in Edible Estates

Head’s up green thumbs and urban gardeners across the states! Do you have an extraordinary edible garden project that you’re dying to share with the world? Well now’s your chance because Fritz Haeg and crew are currently accepting submissions to include in the expanded 2010 edition of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn. They’re looking for examples of “full frontal gardening” from a handful of locations across the US that transform lifeless …

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BACK TO SCHOOL CONTEST: Win An Awesome Solar Book Bag!

Get ready for school with our back-to-school green giveaway contest!
Fall is just around the corner, and students everywhere are getting ready to go back to school. To get into the autumnal school spirit and help our readers green their back-to-school regime, we’re running a contest on this site to give away an AWESOME solar powered bag by NoonSolar, stuffed with eco-friendly back-to-school goodies like recycled paper notebooks, erasers and pencils. Our back-to-school goody bag is worth over $500, and it’s a really sweet prize that can be all yours, if you enter our contest. Here’s how:

1. Sign up for the Inhabitat newsletter >

2. Sign up to follow us on Twitter and Facebook

3. Await instructions, which will be emailed out to all of our subscribers.

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There’s Still Time to Win an Eco-Friendly Cobi Office Chair!

Now that I’ve spent a bit of time with my Cobi chair, I feel it’s only fair that I tell you all a little about my experience. Long story short, I love it. It’s improved my working posture, comfort, and most importantly, my ability to sit at my desk for the entire workday. Most surprising of all, its balancing mechanisms, which are intended to focus on center of gravity rather than weight, actually work well. The chair comes in just about any color you could want, and SmartFurniture.com’s 3-Minute Design Tool makes it easy to get a little adventurous. Read on to see how you can win a Cobi chair of your own for free!

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PROJECT GREENSEARCH: Be America’s Next Green Supermodel!

CALLING ALL GREEN MODELS AND WANNABE MODELS
“You should be a model.” If anyone has ever said that to you, this could be your chance to actually pursue the dream! The brainchild of green style magazine Lü and online eco-fashion retailer Greenloop, Project Green Search is America’s Next Top Model gone green. They’re looking for a model that can not only strut her stuff on the runway, but also can also be a poster girl for the environment, animal welfare, fair trade, and human rights. Read on to find out more about how you can enter and prove that you deserve the crown of the next eco supermodel and win some fabulous prizes!

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Big Box Agriculture Transforms Grocers Into Growers

Results are in for the ReBurbia competition to re-envision the suburbs, and we’re thrilled to count Forrest Fulton among the top three winners for his Big Box Agriculture proposal! This creative and adaptive design takes advantage of empty big-box retail stores and turns them into suburban organic farms, complete with in-house chefs, restaurants, and renewable energy generation.

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Urban Sprawl Repair Kit Offers Simple Plans to Fix Suburbia

The suburban landscape consists largely of endless expanses of paved parking lots pocked with strip malls, gas stations, chain restaurants, and McMansions. Rather than razing these structures with the aim of greening the suburbs, Galina Tahchieva proposes that we retrofit them to create “a more diverse, cohesive urban fabric within a walkable and identifiable public realm.” The winner of the People’s Choice Award in our Reburbia competition with over 2,300 votes, the Urban Sprawl Repair Kit offers a go-to set of solutions for transforming 5 structures spawned from suburban sprawl into mixed-use models of urban efficiency.

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ANNOUNCING: The Winners of the ReBurbia Competition!

DRUMROLL PLEASE!
After much heated debate and a dramatic week of online voting, we’re thrilled to announce the winners of the Reburbia competition to redesign the suburbs! We received hundreds of incredible entries over the past month and it was quite a challenge to narrow them down to twenty finalists, and four winning entries.

…

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ReBurbia Favorite Notable Mentions

With voting on our top 20 ReBurbia finalists set to close in less than 8 hours, we’d like to take a moment to pause and consider some of incredible submissions that didn’t quite make the list. Greening the suburbs is no easy task, and we were thoroughly impressed with the wealth of varied approaches that our entrants submitted. From elegantly repurposed highway overpasses to scorched-earth end of the world parties, to golf courses-turned energy-generating cemeteries, read on for our notable entries from over 400 submissions!

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LAST DAY TO VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE REBURBIA DESIGN!

Reburbia voting closes tonight at midnight!

Just in case you haven’t already heard about our Reburbia competition to re-design the suburbs, this is your LAST CHANCE to voice your opinion because voting ends tonight at 11:59pm! There has been an epic battle going down on our website between the forces of modest, practical baby-steps on one hand (Urban Sprawl Repair Kit), and pixellated prefab visions on the other …

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Links Roundup of the Week: Reburbia, Reburbia, Reburbia!

Suburban sprawl has become the problem of our generation — that’s why we partnered with Dwell to sponsor, Reburbia, a design competition to re-imagine the suburb. We posted the finalists earlier this week, and we’ve already seen a huge response to the entries. Everyone is voting in on their favorites, so take a peek at what’s hot…and what’s not.

Fast Company asks us to think about the modest and realistic solutions rather than the futuristic stuff that …

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VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE REBURBIA ENTRY TODAY!

In July, we partnered with Dwell to launch Reburbia, a competition to imagine how the suburbs could be re-structured to be more sustainable. Asking participants to create  five images to portray their idea, we said “The wilder, the better!” — and indeed many of the solutions proposed are a little bit zany, while many others inspired us with their agrarian dreams. There are several very good ideas, however, …

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Futuristic Designs Protect SF Bay From Rising Tides

In the San Francisco Bay, water levels may rise 55 inches over the next 100 years. That doesn’t sound like much initially, but around the coastline, that makes a huge impact. High water levels are a liability. The challenge for the entrants of the recent Rising Tides competition was to take this liability and make it an asset. The winning proposals include inflatable dikes, laser levels, water recycling, habitat restoration, and bioswale street systems.

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ENTREPRENEURBIA: Rezoning the suburbs for a sustainable future

They say that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, and nowhere is this more true than in the world of design. Oftentimes it doesn’t matter how brilliant an idea is, if it can’t be visualized effectively it is often hard to convince people of its merit. Readers who are familiar with Inhabitat will know that we are guilty of this visual bias as much as anyone: we are suckers for sleek, glossy, eye-candy renderings. Imagine our surprise then, when we realized that some of the best ideas submitted to our Reburbia Design Competition were the ideas with the least visual punch. In fact, one of the most powerful (and certainly the most workable and cost-effective) idea submitted to the Reburbia Competition isn’t a design proposal at all, but instead a policy proposal — called Entrepreneurbia — to get rid of the idiotic zoning laws which led to most of the major problems in suburbia in the first place. Makes a lot of sense, right?

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VOTE IN THE REBURBIA COMPETITION – TODAY!

If you’ve been perusing Inhabitat lately, you hopefully know about our fabulous Reburbia Design Competition – the contest we’ve been running to come up with some radical new ideas as to how turn the bleak future of the suburbs around. Our  announcement this past Monday of the Top 20 Finalists prompted thousands of votes and comments to come spilling into the Reburbia website, and …

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Inter Estates: Freeways Turned Cash Making Farm Neighborhoods

What if we could take our huge chunks of boring, bland freeway shoulder and turn them into energy, food and big bucks? That’s what this finalist in our Reburbia Competition to redesign the suburbs proposes in his ambitious and financially-focused vision of the future: Inter Estates. These super-modern homes are vertically perched way atop highway-lining vertical neighborhoods that could be the wave of the future.

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Mobile Mecha-Towers Take Suburbia by Storm

While several of the finalists in our ReBurbia design competition tended towards the surreal, a few futuristic entries took an approach that was downright dystopian. In Radial Erect-Urbia Michael Hughes and Damon Wake envision a future where the suburbs are besieged by 3,000 foot-tall mobile crane towers. Once the massive mechanizations have toddled into place they drill deep into the earth’s crust and unfurl their tripod legs out in a 2,000 foot radius, at which point they proceed to rip nearby homes from their plots and stack them into vertical towers!

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PuRE Turns Swimming Pools into Water Treatment Plants

Once a status symbol of wealth and affluence, the iconic topaz swimming pool has, in more recent times, been tainted as a wasteful pit of water and energy. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Designed by Craig England, the ingenious puRE water filtration system (not to be mistaken for that other system with no “E”) rehabilitates resource-greedy pools into productive designs for society by giving them new jobs as mini wastewater treatment plants! The forward-thinking design is one of 20 finalists in our ReBurbia competition to redesign our suburbs.

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REBURBIA TOP 20 FINALISTS ANNOUNCED!

If you’ve been reading Inhabitat at all over the past month, you’ve hopefully seen our countless announcements and banners about the Reburbia Design Competition – the contest we’ve been running to come up with some big, bold new ideas as to how to fix the suburbs. We received a ton of interest and submissions to our Reburbia competition, and we’re thrilled to announce that we …

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