Looking for the perfect holiday present for the design aficionado in your life? Core 77 just launched their annual gift guide: 77 Design Gifts Under $77. From recycled doll feather-dusters to chic bicycle baskets and modern gingerbread houses (”too modern to eat”), they’ve selected a great assortment of gifts that skirt the quirky, cheeky, and delightful side of design.
This Holiday Season you can save a tree (and a box) with a fun, enviro-friendly Cardboard Christmas Tree! With Christmas quickly approaching, many of us would like to engage in the holiday cheer without the use-once-and-toss-in-the-street traditional Christmas tree, and this simple centerpiece may be just the alternative you were looking for.
Eco-savvy ladies should be able to enjoy the finer things in life without having to compromise their environmental ethics. There are plenty of places out there to find glamorous green gifts for that special lady in your life, if you know where to look. Read on for our top picks for green goodies sure to please any discerning eco-chick.
Vivace is a new energy technology that gets its name from a phenomenon that engineers have been battling for 25 years. VIV (vortex induced vibrations) destroyed the Narrows Bridge in Washington State in 1940, and the Ferrybridge power station cooling towers in England in 1965. Ironically it is also the same phenomenon that allows schools of fish to swim as fast as they do. Now Dr. Michael M. Bernitsas and researchers at the University of Michigan are turning this ‘threat’ into a resource. Rather than suppressing VIV, Vivace actually creates and then harvests energy from VIV, and it does it all using slow water currents, a previously untapped source of sustainable energy.
Today San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is meeting to review plans that would combat congested roadways by instituting the United States’ first traffic toll. A congestion pricing plan would most likely create a charge for motorists entering the city via the Bay Bridge or Golden Gate Bridge, encouraging the use of environmentally-friendly modes of transportation. Although the initiative comes at a turbulent economic time, the plan stands to get people out of their cars and empower San Francisco’s public transportation, pedestrian, and bicycle projects while increasing traffic speed and cutting carbon emissions.
Concept vehicles serve the useful purpose of showing us new ideas and charting a path towards the future of transportation. Similar to MIT’s Stackable Car concept, the streamlined Scarab is an ultra-compact electric concept vehicle that is able to transform from a flat shape for speed driving to an inclined state for space-conscious urban travel. Designed by David Miguel Moreira Gonçalves, the Scarab shows how a new type of vehicle could change the systems of transportation that we currently use.
Yesterday we launched our massive Green Holiday Gift Guide, and today we’d like to shine the spotlight on some great green gifts for men. If you’re searching for some inspired sustainable gift ideas for the guys in your life, look no further! Whether you’re shopping for your husband, father, son, or significant other, we’ve selected an assortment of eco-conscious gifts that are sure to be big hits.
With winter well on its way and snow flurries sweeping the nation, we couldn’t contain our excitement for this sleek bio-fueled Concept Ice Vehicle. Designed and developed by Kieron Bradley and polar guide Jason de Carteret, the custom-made vehicle runs on renewable fuel and is intended to assist the Moon-Regan Trans Antarctic Expedition to scout for hidden crevasses and rough terrain. The brave explorers see the CIV as an opportunity to educate the world about the benefits of greener fuels, even in the face of sub-zero temperatures!
A joint project between the Swedes at Nod Landscape Architects and Danes at BIG Architects is set to transform Slussen, Stockholm’s city center, with a massive pedestrian-friendly makeover. Currently Slussen is an interwoven mess of roads with no room for pedestrians or cyclists. The proposed project will transform the area into a multi-layered, multi-use intersection allowing walkers and bikers access to waterfront strolls and gas-free travel. The layered design will also incorporate shops and cafes, reviving Stockholm’s main artery.
This gorgeous crystalline structure is the new home of the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago. Designed by Krueck + Sexton Architects, the building’s layout is focused around the use of natural light, and its contemporary design sets it apart from the surrounding 19th Century masonry buildings. A beautiful multifaceted facade symbolizes the institute’s mission and logo, which features a flame accompanied by the phrase yehi, which means “let there be light”.
Drumroll please! Today is the first day of December, and you know what that means! The gift-giving season is kicking off and Inhabitat is here to help green your holidays with our GREEN HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE >
We’ve got you covered with the greatest Green Gift Guide around! Our busy little elves have been hard at work pulling together an incredible assortment of ways to give green, and with 15 categories and more than 150 gift ideas, this year’s guide is bigger and better than ever before. From sleek gadgety gifts to crafty homemade how-tos and gifts on a budget, from pets, moms and dads, and boys and girls, you’re sure to find a sustainable source of holiday cheer for everyone on your list. Check out our full guide after the jump!
Recently Gensler broke ground on a soaring sustainably skyscraper that is set to become the tallest tower in China. The slender, elegantly spiraling Shanghai Tower will rise 632 meters, making it the latest super-tall to spring up in China’s rapidly developing Luijiazui Finance and Trade Zone. A beacon for a more sustainable future, the skyscraper will feature a high-performance façade that shelters no fewer than nine sky gardens, a rainwater recycling system, and a series of wind turbines perched beneath its parapet.
Timbuk2 built its base among the bike messenger set, where their bags are revered for their tough-as-nails construction, cycle-friendly ergonomics, and and on-the-go ease of use. We’re excited to announce that the San Francisco-based company recently updated their lineup with a variety of sustainable and eco-friendly fabrics, and we had a chance to try out their custom Bag Builder first hand! Read on for our first-hand impressions as we run a Lex Pack through the ringer.
Christiane Diehl is a multi-faceted designer with one foot in jewelry, one in landscaping and (err…) one more in photography. Her unique line of jewelry features necklaces, bracelets and rings– all made from recycled rubber from bicycle tubes and air mattresses. From her Hanover, Germany studio, Christiane cuts tiny shapes out of these reclaimed materials and strings them together in to create these multi-dimensional and dynamic wonders.
It appears that global warming has finally created its own version of the Wounded Veteran. Sitting in a puddle of himself in Buenos Aires’ Plaza Francia, a young man from Red Cross Argentina issued pleas to passers-by: not for spare change, but for action against climate change.
Talk about subliminal advertising. HSBC Bank hired advertising agency Oglivy & Mather in Mumbai to create a campaign for their website, www.globalwarmingsolutions.co.in, designed to call the public’s attention to the reality of global warming. The campaign entailed placing a bird’s eye view of New York City’s skyline at the bottom of a pool located in India’s financial capital, Mumbai. Aimed to capture the attention of unsuspecting swimmers, the stunt is an elegantly simple idea of what climate change could mean for some of the world’s coastal cities.
Enterprising young artists in the London scene are usually presented with the dilemma of having to rent extremely expensive studio space in order to be able to work. This led furniture designer Auro Foxcroft to a rather ingenious and environmentally conscious solution. What was it? Take old subway cars, mount them on a rooftop, and use them for office space! A bit sparse? Sure! But these recycled subway cars are sure to inspire other green-minded, socially conscious artistic efforts.
Emergency shelters have rightly become a fad in the design world. In the aftermath of the hurricanes and other natural disasters in the last few years, it became clear we had a ways to go in providing safe and sturdy emergency shelters for victims. We’ve covered Paul Villinski’s Emergency Response Studio– a traveling artist studio that became a model for emergency shelters. And now, Michael Daniel, a Senior Designer at Frog Design’s Austin Studio, has designed, Reaction Housing, a line of dependable shelters that can be quickly and easily deployed and built– ready in time for the emergency.
Thanksgiving is a great holiday - and not only because of the delicious food and the chance to catch up with loved ones. We love it when November rolls around, because Thanksgiving reminds us of the importance of gratitude and appreciation for our lives. Despite volatile times and some bad economic news recently, we have a lot to be thankful for this year. Read on for Inhabitat’s Top Ten Things to be Thankful for in 2008!
Photographer Matthew Carden’s incredible “Small World” food photography offer an entirely new perspective one the foods we consume, interspersing tiny figures amid towering broccoli treetops, massive mushroom forests, and colossal candied yams. His work aims to “make viewers more aware of what they eat, and to think about food as an integral part of our world.” Each edible landscape is a provocative close-up investigation of the foods that sustain us. With the Thanksgiving holiday and all the gluttony that it entails now upon us, Carden’s work feels especially relevant. Before you dive into your turkey and sweet potatoes, take a fresh look at food and the way we consume it with Matthew Carden’s innovative art.
The Biomimicry Institute recently teamed up with Autodesk to launch AskNature.org, an incredible source of information for the growing community of professionals researching and applying the principles of biomimicry. The solutions that animals and nature have come up with have been tried and tested for millions of years (certainly longer than humans have been designing), so why reinvent the wheel? Why not learn from nature to make our designs more efficient, elegant, and sustainable?
A former North Carolina mailman was recently fined $3,000 and ordered to do 500 hours of community service for cutting out the junk mail. For over seven years, no one on Steven Padgett’s route received a single pizza flyer, ‘Current Resident’ catalog or sweepstakes entry - now that’s something to be thankful for. Unfortunately, this mailman couldn’t put an end to the production of junk mail, leaving much of it in his backyard or garage, but you can. 100 million trees are chopped, processed, glossed and stuffed into US mailboxes every year. Fight back with one of the many opt out services below!
Appearing for all the world like a habitable version of Chicago’s Cloud Gate, Lovegrove Studios‘ futuristic Alpine Capsule is designed to blend in with nature, reflecting and complementing its immediate environment. Powered by solar panels and a vertical axis wind turbine, the off-grid alpine retreat features a shimmering glass skin with a reflective coating that allows individuals to sleep under the stars while admiring a 360 degree panorama of the beautiful landscape.
Here at Inhabitat we love wind powered vehicles for their inspired approaches towards sustainable transportation - after all what could be simpler than sailing along on a breeze? Designed by Tsun-Ho Wang, Min-Gyu Jung, and Sung-Je Do, this futuristic Wind Light Vehicle is an electric concept car that can deploy a wing-like device to propel it along like a windsurfing board or even a kite!
Kids grow up quickly, which often leaves parents scurrying to find storage space for outgrown cradles, high chairs, and other children’s items. This chic convertible stroller by Kid Kustoms runs laps around your standard baby buggy by converting into a tricycle as your child grows. The result is an inspired transportation option for tots that saves space, material and money with an extended product life-cycle. It also doesn’t hurt that these slick strollers feature streamlined detailing reminiscent of classic cars.
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