Brad Pitt | Inhabitat

Brad Pitt Unveils Flood-Surviving Float House for Make It Right Foundation

Brad Pitt has been making waves in the green building world lately, so it’s only appropriate that the newest house completed for his Make It Right Foundation project be a floating one. Being revealed today in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, the Float House by Morphosis Architects, goes beyond sustainable design and construction and is built within the context of its environment – it can float. In case of flooding, the home can literally break away from it’s moorings and rise up up to 12 feet on two guideposts. It won’t float away, but it will act as a raft and provide the family with enough battery power to allow them to survive for up to three days until help arrives.

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Brad Pitt Receives Award From USGBC For Making It Right

If all rich and famous actors used their superpowers for good the way that Brad Pitt does, the world would be a much better place! Last week at the Clinton Global Climate Initiative, the altruistic actor received an award from the USGBC for his commendable efforts to rebuild New Orleans with sustainable housing. Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, a project near and dear to our hearts at Inhabitat, is working to rebuild a section of New Orleans that was badly hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. So far, only 13 houses have been rebuilt, but a total of 150 is planned, and will make a big difference in the lives of those families who move in.

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Balancing Buoy Chair by Evan Dewhirst

This year the Pratt booth at Bklyn Designs showcased an impressive body of creative work by students, making it clear that the budding designers view sustainability as integral to the development of a design, not as an afterthought to be accounted for later. We were particularly impressed with the Evan Dewhirst’s ergonomic Buoy Chair, and we’re excited to announce that it won our Best Student Design Award! The Buoy Chair is made up of a water buoy, an aluminum body and a cork top, all held together by a harness inside the chair, making it free of glues and epoxies. Sitting upon the stool encourages active balance, upright posture, and is a lot of fun!

Make It Right Goes LEED Platinum

Having lost over 14,000 occupants to the floods of Katrina, the lower ninth ward is now tasked not only with rebuilding homes, but rebuilding community. Recently the Make It Right campaign gave an incredible panel at this year’s Net Impact Conference that explored their efforts in rebuilding a growing new community starting with those who were hit hardest by the disaster. We were excited to hear that the foundation has finished construction on 6 homes that are set to receive LEED platinum certification, and that the ninth ward is being steadily shaped into an exemplary role model for a sustainable community!

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Fourth Annual Gorgeous & Green Eco Fashion Show

This week Inhabitat managing editor Mike Chino and writer Piper Kujac attended the Fourth Annual Gorgeous & Green Party to celebrate the extraordinary efforts of the Global Green Organization. Truth be told, we were also in search of the perfect green cocktail and believe we successfully carried out that task as well (it’s the Acai-infused VeeV ‘honey lips’ mixer!). The usual place- fanciful, LEED Certified Bently Reserve in San Francisco, graced a star-studded crowd including actress Kate Bosworth, actor Jason Lewis, architect William McDonough, and so many more.

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Brad Pitt Breaks Ground in Louisiana with ‘Make It Right’

The ground is breaking in New Orleans, and it’s giving the Lower 9th Ward a reason to celebrate. Thanks to the effort and celebrity backing of a familiar face on Inhabitat, Brad Pitt’s Make it Right (MIR) initiative recently began construction on several homes! Contributing to the rebuilding effort following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the Make it Right campaign set a goal of constructing 150 new residences designed by 13 different local, national and international architectural firms. While each design is unique, all the homes are employing sustainable building strategies while taking into consideration the ease of fabrication through replication. Each home is designed to be built within a budget of $150,000, which has been collected primarily by donations pledged through their website.
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Rotating Wind Power Tower to begin construction in Dubai

Dubai has garnered much attention in recent years with a never-ending supply of architectural wonders being built, or proposed, at a head spinning pace. Mostly these towering structures are grand and tall, but some are also green. We’ve covered many an ambitious Dubai skyscraper scheme here at Inhabitat, including David Fisher’s Rotating Tower, but there is new news from Fisher’s Dynamic Architecture firm. This self-sufficient, sun and wind powered design is making headlines once again as the Italian-Israeli architect has just unveiled the latest design for his twirling tower, and construction is set to begin this month!

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UK Eco-house Sold for world record £7.2m!

It’s not all doom and gloom for the UK property market: in the face of the country’s slowing or depreciating prices, Sarah Featherstone’s cutting-edge green home has sold for a record-breaking £7.2million, or $14.2million USD! The building, known as Orchid House, is one of the key homes on Lower Mill Estate, a project to turn a disused gravel pit into a beautiful 450-acre nature reserve.

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CELEBUTECTURE: Brad Pitt to design 5-star Eco Hotel in Dubai

Brad Pitt is once again trading the silver screen for green building, as he recently announced a collaboration with LA-based architecture firm GRAFT to design a 5-star “green resort” in Dubai. We’re not sure if “Dubai” and “green” really belong in the same sentence, and we’re also skeptical about the project oxymoronically being called both “socially-conscious” and “an 800-room luxury hotel and adjoining leisure complex,” but we’ll wait to see how it unfolds. No details or location have been announced yet, but we can only hope that given Brad’s friendship with Frank Gehry and his commitment to Global Green, it’ll be as beautiful and green as the superstar claims.

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ORLANDO BLOOM BUILDS GREEN HOUSE

Joining the ranks of Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom has jumped on the green architecture celebrity bandwagon with the announcement that he is building an environmentally-friendly house in London. The environmentally-conscious ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ star revealed his plans at a pre-Oscar party with the aid of environmental organization Global Green USA.

INTERVIEW: Workshop APD’s Sustainable New Orleans

Back in late August, Global Green and Brad Pitt announced the winners of the Global Green Sustainable Design Competition For New Orleans. The winning proposal, titled GreeNOLA and submitted by Matthew Berman and Andrew Kotchen of Workshop APD, calls for six houses and two multifamily units which employ energy-efficient appliances, solar power, and recycled building materials, as well as providing social services like child care and a community garden. Workshop APD’s proposal is designed to cut pollution and decrease operating energy use by 50-60 percent, compared to traditional homes. The success of the GreeNOLA design is its seemless integration of cutting edge green technology with the traditional building wisdom of the region. This combination creates healthy and affordable new residences for displaced residents of New Orleans. Groundbreaking of the new complex starts this January.

I sat down with the two architects to discuss their winning design proposal for rebuilding in New Orleans….

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SUSTAINABLE HOUSING FOR NEW NEW ORLEANS

We’ve just gone off on a tangent about the politics of celebritecture and Brad Pitt’s involvement in designing housing for New Orleans, but now we’d like to get back to the most important thing about the Global Green archiecture competition: the designs themselves…

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CAN BRAD PITT SAVE THE WORLD? New Orleans will tell…

Hollywood actor Brad Pitt has jumped into the New Orleans rebuilding efforts, unveiling a green housing design for New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. The design was selected from an architectural competition with organization Global Green, that Pitt helped underwrite and jury.
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CAN BRAD PITT SAVE OUR PLANET?

PBS thinks so… The company has just announced a new television series about environmentally-friendly architecture called Design: E2, which will be narrated by starchitecture buff Brad Pitt. Inhabitat’s favorite Architect for Humanity, Cameron Sinclair, is also involved with the show. The series will explore “the most complex issues facing our environment: from green architecture to water culture to organic farming to recycled clothes – challenging us to live smarter, greener lives.”… In HD no less!

The show is slated to air in June on PBS.

+ E2: The economies of being environmentally conscious
Watch the trailer >