We’re interviewing San Francisco mayor GAVIN NEWSOM next Wednesday the 28th at 12pm PST, and we’re inviting YOU to join us next for this live webcast conversation with the country’s greenest mayor! Join us to find out more about groundbreaking energy projects, mandatory composting, and how San Francisco got to be the greenest city in the U.S!
In case you missed it – we’re doing a LIVE INTERVIEW TODAY with Tom Hicks of the USGBC, to discuss a brand new USGBC initiative to test and analyze the performance of ‘green buildings’. This is an extremely exciting BRAND NEW initiative from the USGBC, and Tom is leading the charge on establishing performance accountability for green buildings. For those of you who have ever thought to themselves: “LEED is all fine and good, but what happens to LEED-rated buildings after they are built and get their certification?” – make sure you join us in this Inhabitat Green Chat to find out more about this great new Building Performance Initiative from the USBGC.
If you want to watch the interview and participate in the chat, SIGN UP NOW to join us at 2:00pm EDT/11:00am PDT today.
Hi Inhabitat readers! I’m the founder and editor-in-chief of Inhabitat. I don’t talk a lot about myself on this website, since it isn’t a personal blog, but for those of you who are interested in finding out more about me, I’m happy to announce that the Mighty Girl blog has just posted a funny and in-depth interview of yours truly over on MightyGirl.com, as part of a Gap ad campaign. (I have to say that I love that companies like the Gap are getting so creative and interactive with their ad campaigns these days – more fun for you and me, right?)
Find out more than you probably ever wanted to know about me in this interview here >
Enjoy!
This week the highly anticipated High Line Park in NYC opened to the public for the first time. We were super excited to be on the scene for a sneak peek of the new elevated park, which was built on the remains of an abandoned rail system in New York City. Check out our video of the new High Line, with exclusive interviews with the design team including Lead Designer and Landscape Architect James Corner of James Corner Field Operations and architect Ricardo Scofidio of Diller Scofidio + Renfro who made this stunning new park possible. Enjoy!
+ High Line Park in the Sky
+ The High Line
+ James Corner Field Operations
We love being on hand for the Spring design shows because they offer rare up close and personal access to the designers we mostly admire from afar the rest of the year. This year, we were fortunate enough to score some face time with FUNature creator Hugh Hayden at BKLYN Designs. In between bounces in his whimsical chairs, we listened as Hayden discussed everything from the short lifespan of a tennis ball to how …
It’s hard to capture all of the excitement of this year’s BKLYN Designs in words and photos alone – which is why we’re thrilled to bring you a video tour of our favorite green design picks from the show! Follow Inhabitat founder Jill Fehrenbacher and crew as they scout out hot new products and get exclusive interviews with the designers that created them. For more coverage of the stellar show, be …
In last week’s Energy 101 column, we looked at some of the home energy monitoring devices currently available and explored the ways that they can help us live more efficient, eco-conscious lives. But with smart grid technologies rapidly approaching, a new group of energy-tracking devices is emerging. We had the chance to speak with Drew Clark, Director of Strategy for IBM’s Venture Capital Group, about what the future holds for smart meter technology.
Just yesterday we had the chance to sit down with John Viera, Ford Motor Company’s Director of Sustainable Business Strategies, to talk about how the Big Three manufacturer is going green. Viera touched on a number of topics, but we were most interested in what he had to say about Ford’s future in plug-in hybrid (PHEV) and electric vehicles (EV). Read on for our exclusive interview!
Our good friends at Dwell Magazine recently conducted an excellent interview with director Gary Hustwit (of Helvetica fame) about his upcoming film Objectified. Whether you’re an industrial designer, a design junkie, or just eagerly anticipating the coming film (we are!), their extended conversation offers an insightful look at the nature of good design, the objects we use everyday, and the current state of industrial design.
Check out the …
With Spring finally starting to spring, we are excited to announce that Domino Magazine has just published a feature story on our Inhabitat founder Jill Fehrenbacher. The April issue of Domino – the guide to living with style – is tinged with green as Earth Day approaches and that’s where Inhabitat founder Jill Fehrenbacher makes an appearance in the monthly My Green Life feature. Decked out in sustainable style favorites like Mika Machida and Veja, she talks about living green in NYC and her vision of the perfect way to spend April 22, 2008.
Buildings account for almost half (48%) of all greenhouse-gas emissions annually.
This oft-repeated statistic highlights what many architects and designers have long realized: The building industry has a profound impact on the state of our environment. But is environmental awareness really making enough inroads into the curriculum of design schools, in the places where it could potentially have the most impact on the future of the industry? As a graduate student in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), I am both concerned and optimistic about the changes I see taking place in architecture academia. While environmental design isn’t nearly as entrenched as it should be into the core curriculums of design schools, students seem to be clamoring to learn more about this topic and are demanding new classes and are shaping their own academic paths. Recently I sat down with Mark Wigley, dean of Columbia’s GSAPP, to talk about the changes currently taking place within architecture schools to address the growing concern of sustainability. Read on to hear what Mark Wigley has to say about sustainable design….
At the recent West Coast Green conference in San Francisco, we were lucky enough to not only get a sneak peek of the new Michelle Kaufmann mkLotus prefab house, but also to speak with the designer herself to get the low-down on the sleekly-designed zero energy home. Check out the video to learn all the details about the energy, water, and materials packed into this compact sustainable home.
Tom Dixon, design pioneer and all around renaissance man, was one of the big hits of the recent HauteGREEN festivities, where he spoke about issues, concerns and contradictions in sustainable design, including materials, production, recycling and economics. Thanks to the video producers of Scribemedia, we have a great video of his conversation with design journalist Julie Taraska, in which he discusses his own work, sustainability, and his brilliant new Second Cycle initiative for Artek.
This video is just a quick snapshot of his thought-provoking talk. For those of you who are interested, watch the entire, unabridged version here at Scribemedia >
The designer behind the One Laptop Per Child Project, Yves Behar is truly a world-class designer, balancing aesthetics, function, and socially-based initiatives. Founder and principal designer of FuseProject, he also happens to be the Chair of the Industrial Design Department at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts. Recently, he facilitated a design studio in which Industrial Design students partnered with South Korean cell phone manufacturer Pantech to design new cell-phone models, taking on the future of mobile communications and addressing the idea of emotional networking. I had a chance to speak to Yves about the studio, sustainability, and more…
Last week, we mentioned Civil Twilight’s lunar-resonant streetlighting, a project that won the top honor from Metropolis Magazine’s Next Generation contest this year. But we were pleased (but not surprised) to discover that this project is just the tip of the iceberg; the Bay Area-based collective has a slew of other equally-engaging projects in the works (including the mycofarmhouse, in which mushrooms break down and recycle wood-frame buildings). They describe their design process as “brilliant simplicity, across scales and media.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Read on for some more info about their winning streetlights, other projects, their approach to sustainability, and the trio of talent that is Civil Twilight:
On sustainability: “While we feel a sense of responsibility, we aren’t motivated by a grudging sense of duty or ideology, but rather by a general sense of wonder in the world. We try to instill that sense of amazement through our projects—the idea that sustainable design could mean a moonlit walk in the park.”
Japanese designer Fumi Masuda, whose Pile Chair was featured this morning, was recently in São Paulo, Brazil to give a lecture about sustainable design. He also conducted workshops involving Brazilian and Japanese design students and some members of Coopamare, a group of people that earn their bread collecting used papers from the street to sell for the recycling industry. I had the chance to talk to Fumi before the lecture. He told me a little bit about his history and offered some interesting perspectives on the sustainable design market…
Our friend Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG recently published this fascinating interview with Columbia’s dean Mark Wigley. In case you aren’t familiar, Mark Wigley is Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University (architecture school of Inhabitat’s Founder, Jill Fehrenbacher). He is also the author of Constant’s New Babylon and The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt, among others, and co-founder of Volume magazine. The interview focuses mostly on Volume, but also touches on sustainability, architectural education, and more. Check it out…
As a follow-up to our previous Toby Long interview, we thought it fitting to highlight one particular (and very exciting) community-based green building project that Toby and Clever Homes have been working on in San Francisco’s Hunter Point neighborhood. Breaking ground within the next few months, the Living Classroom is a community building that will house a variety of programs put forth by LEJ (Literacy for Environmental Justice), a non-profit organization supporting urban environmental education and youth empowerment in the Bayview/Hunters Point area.
A few weeks ago, I sat down with Cameron Sinclair to talk about his recently-launched Open Architecture Network. He describes it as a “gift to the design community” with a simple mission: “to generate design opportunities that will improve living standards for all” by providing an open-source platform through which ANYone can view, post, share, and adapt sustainable, humanitarian-based, scalable solutions. The idea that designs and all associated documents can and should be shared within the decidedly proprietary architectural industry is truly innovative, and could very well aid in the reshaping of the entire architectural profession into a more socially-focused and responsible vocation. Read on for a full transcription of the interview and a video of Cameron at last year’s TED conference.
Our favorite “light-on-the-eath” architect, Shigeru Ban, appears in a DesignBoom video interview discussing his latest venture in sustainable design: the Artek pavillion.
[Image: Ed Mazria, photographed by Doug Hoeschler for Metropolis].
Last year, Ed Mazria and his New Mexico-based non-profit organization, Architecture 2030, released the 2030 Challenge to get the building industry completely carbon neutral by the year 2030.
Buildings are the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, worldwide. As Mazria states in the following interview: “48% of total US energy consumption… can be attributed to the building sector, most of which… can be attributed just to building operations.” By 2030, to prevent “catastrophic” climate change, the building sector must become carbon neutral ‐ reaching that state is the 2030 Challenge. If this sounds impossible, Architecture 2030 reminds us that “these targets are readily achievable.”
At the recent Dwell On Design conference in Palm Springs, I had the opportunity to talk one-on-one with Leo Marmol of Marmol Radziner about prefab architecture and sustainability. I asked him about his trajectory as a designer, and what opportunities he sees for prefab to have a larger impact on a wider, more affordable market. His response was thoughtful and optimistic, and provided some great insight into the mind of a forward-thinking and increasingly green designer.
Click on the image above to watch the interview or read below for the full interview transcription.
We love the work of Jennifer Siegal’s Office of Mobile Design, and at this past weekend’s Dwell On Design conference in Palm Springs, I had the opportunity to talk to her in person about green architecture and her prefab designs. The recent completion of her ShowHouse serves as a great example of efficiently and effectively executed prefab construction combined with a seamless integration of green materials and technologies.
Watch the video here or read on for the interview transcription.
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….
As a follow up to this summer’s Green Building 101 series, we thought we’d take a look at ways to locate green homes that have already been built. We’ve covered lots of strategies that go into sustainable home design and construction, but how can you find a green home in your area? And how can we raise the demand for these properties?
Our last Prefab Friday article featured Michelle Kaufmann’s latest design, the mkSolaire. That same day, I had a chance to sit down with her at West Coast Green and ask her about her innovative green, modern, modular housing. Michelle has a very deep knowledge of the principles and practices that underlie the green building revolution, and a profound commitment to making green living accessible.
Cyclers of the world unite! Designer Andrew Lang has come out with an innovative new bicycle storage device, called the Cycloc, which allows you to hang and lock your bike to a wall. Not only does it free up your hallway space (who wants to try to trip through a bunch of bikes in the middle of the night), but its also extremely secure and stylish to boot.
To wrap up our disaster-resistant design theme this week, we would like to conclude with an interview of an exceptional architect who is paving the way in designing for a future water world. Koen Olthuis of Waterstudio.nl says that despite our civilization’s history of trying to drain and fight against wet landscapes for the past thousand years, our best move for the future would be to “let water in and even make friends with the water”.
Best known for their Tetris-inspired shelves, Nikki Frazier, Sam Kragiel, Jesse James Arnold make up the Brooklyn-based group Brave Space Design. Here at Inhabitat, we’ve been keeping an eye on them since May 2005, when their design sparked a frenzy in the blogosphere with Tetris fans who loved the design but wanted the shelves to be much cheaper.
However, outside of gaming circles, the Brooklyn design trio is probably best known for producing gorgeous, modern, environmentally-friendly furniture using FSC woods, bamboo and water-based finishes. I sat down with the Brave Space trio at their shop in Brooklyn to ask a few questions about how they went from art school in Florida to designing cult-worthy furniture and influencing the evolution of good, green, affordable design.
I recently got back from a short trip to the Netherlands, and what Dutch-design tour would be complete without a check-in with Holland’s design-blogger extraordinare Joost Van Brug? Joost is the man behind Reluct - an excellent design blog that has been uncovering cutting edge design since 2003. Although Joost is squarely a part of the Dutch design scene and frequently writes about Dutch designers, his focus is international and his audience reflects this. Unlike many Dutch blogs, Reluct is published in English – and the majority of Joost’s readers are in the US.
I sat down with Joost in Amsterdam to chat about Dutch design, design-blogging and sustainability in design. Here’s what he had to say…
As far as green roof designers go, you can’t get much more committed or accomplished than the team at Rana Creek. While their name often gets partially eclipsed by the names of their starchitect collaborators, such as William McDonough and Renzo Piano, it’s Rana Creek’s genius that yields such massive marvels as the rooftops of the Gap corporate headquarters and the California Academy of Sciences.
I discovered Rana Creek in March, when I attended CA Boom, the West Coast annual design show. Across a huge exhibition floor, I was drawn to Rana Creek’s living wall display, which they’d custom designed for the occasion as an example of a climate-appropriate botanical rain catchment system. Of course, the technical functions of the wall weren’t the main attractor; rather, it was the incredible artistry of the sculptural bent metal, through which succulents were penetrating by what seems like the sheer force of a plant’s irrepressible will to thrive.
A couple of weeks ago, Jill was interviewed about Inhabitat for the Lazy Environmentalist radio show, “Green Goes Mainstream,” which aired on LIME Radio. Along with Mark Spellun of Plenty Magazine, Jill went on the air to chat with Josh Dorfman about Inhabitat and the growing market for sustainable design. For those of you who missed it, the interview can now be downloaded in podcast form, here >
If you haven’t yet heard of OHIO, it’s time. Founded by David Pierce, the San Francisco-based design studio is turning out some of the most stunning, innovative and diverse modern furnishings anywhere. From a starkly minimalist steel and wood bench to a printed bedframe so seductive it was too sexy for an SF magazine’s sex issue, David Pierce tries everything. And succeeds.
I have been enamored with environmentally conscious furniture company Scrapile ever since I came across their line of recycled wood furniture during New York Design week last spring.
Brooklyn-based designers Carlos Salgado and Bart Bettencourt have created a beautiful, cutting-edge line of furniture by collecting wood scraps from various lumber mills, and recycling those scraps (which would otherwise be headed for landfill) into their stunning minimalist pieces. At this point, the Scrapile line includes tables, benches, stool, shelving, crates and lamps, all made out of their signature striated material. Recently I had a chance to sit down with the up-and-coming design duo at their shop in Williamsburg to learn how it all began >
LOTS MORE GREAT GREEN DESIGN STORIES HERE... KEEP READING!
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