From its modular modern design to its shipping container components, Olgga’s student housing complex struck us as a pitch perfect project for prefab friday. The French architecture firm designed the complex to be constructed from 100 repurposed shipping containers. Talk about putting your students in a box!
One of our favorite publications, GOOD magazine, has just joined forces with PRE and Studio X to launch a design competition to rebuild Haiti. The contest comes at a time when Haiti needs it the most, and offers a great opportunity for you to contribute your skills to do some good. They’re asking designers, architects and visionaries to examine the social, economic, governmental and residential areas of Port-au-Prince and come up with strategic, organizational, institutional, and/or architectural solutions for one or all of these institutions.
The winner of this month’s competition will receive half of the pooled entry fees, while the remaining half of the entry fees will be donated to the Haitian relief effort.
Ask most people about Flushing, Queens and they’re likely to either stare blankly or venture “Where the Nanny is from?!” That all might change with the development of a 1.8 million sq. foot, $850 million megacomplex for the area. Dubbed Flushing Commons, the spacious, airy design (which is quite a change from the cramped, cluttered landscape that is the current neighborhood) will feature a landscaped plaza, shops, restaurants and residences and strive for LEED Silver certification. However the area is already a bit of a traffic nightmare (Flushing is home to the 3rd busiest intersection in New York City after Herald Square and Times Square), so the project faces some tough opposition from residents who are afraid of even more congestion.
What is a house, anyways? For the designers of the Veasyble wearable shelter, isolation and intimacy are important. They reflect on “the change in our relationship with the domestic environment, due to the effects of our increasing mobility, and how this has affected our concept of intimacy, creating new demands.” Read on for more innovative concepts that blend the boundaries between clothing and architecture.
South Korea’s Jeju Island is known for its outstanding aesthetic beauty — it’s an area that bears testament to the compelling natural history of our planet. Listed as a UNESCO site, the island will soon be host to a new World Natural Heritage Center. The center is anticipated to become a meeting place set to educate and promote the importance of preserving the island and its heritage for future generations to come.
The Palomar5 “Camp” is an incredible project that brought 30 thinkers under the age of 30 from 30 different disciplines together for six weeks to foster innovation outside of the corporate world. To enhance their idea, Palomar5 called on the innovative minds at 45 Kilo and the ZWEIDREI group to design a completely green live/work space for the event. The environment was constructed inside an old empty factory building in South Berlin. It fostered creativity for six weeks and then was broken down and completely recycled.
Red+Housing Emergency Housing by OBRA Architects
Inhabitat recently wrote about Emergency Shelters and Disaster Relief For The People of Haiti and how Shipping Containers Could Provide Disaster Relief For Haiti, both which reflect the standard thinking among architects and designers for decades: “we have great ideas, and if you just let us get involved we could make a huge difference.” And why not – we can design our way out of any problem. Cameron and Kate of Architecture for Humanity, who are young enough that they shouldn’t know better, take a completely different approach – they think that the last thing we should be doing is dropping in shipping containers and hi-tech architectural solutions.
Fabulous prefab design just became more accessible as LivingHomes has announced that homes by award-winning architect Ray Kappe will be available at lower cost on a national scale. The six Kappe designs now available nationwide come chock-full of all the green features that LivingHomes are known for, delivering high quality design in a sustainable package.
Go into any bookstore or search on words “Stock House Plans” and you will find thousands of them, mostly junk. Perhaps 50% of are stolen and just about all of them get twisted and stretched before they actually get built. But for decades, a few architects have seen them as a way to democratize design, to make good designs available at a lower price to a larger audience. Now, when clients have less money and architects are reliving that joke of a decade ago (What do you say to an architect with a job? “I’ll have fries with that.”), perhaps it’s time for talented architects to take the stock plan business seriously.
Architect Zaigas Gailes Birojs has transformed an abandoned soviet fish factory in Kaltene, Latvia into a beautiful modern residence. Situated on the coast of an island in the Baltic Sea, the industrial-chic home is a stunning example of adaptive reuse that comes complete with a shiny nautilus-inspired bathhouse. The greenest buildings are those that are never …
Recently software manufacturer Adobe Systems Inc. gave a grant to the US Green Building Council (USGBC) to help San Francisco Bay Area schools achieve LEED certification, and the Bessie Carmichael School in the South of Market (SOMA) area was selected to receive an eco-renovation. The original challenge in 2007 was to convert the school’s existing 60-child preschool into a 230 student K-8 school for the Filipino Community. The site had been maintained as a school facility predating the 1906 earthquake and was in serious need of repairs when the San Francisco Unified School District hired Plum Architects to redefine the school structure.
For the past week we’ve been sharing our picks for the best green design stories of the year, and now we want to showcase YOUR favorites – as measured by traffic and general buzz. From living moss carpets of all shapes and sizes to flexible folding cellphones and spiraling skyscraper farms, your clicks and comments have picked …
from the Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom…
This week in Copenhagen, representatives from nations around the world are debating the best measures to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change. The success of the Copenhagen talks is important as a measure of our collective commitment to tackling the causes and impacts of global climate change. But rather than wait for the deliberations in Copenhagen, it’s even more important that individual cities, states and nations show leadership in the fight against climate change through concrete actions and initiatives.
Acting – not waiting or debating – is exactly what we’re doing in San Francisco this week with the introduction of an innovative new initiative aimed at fueling the next wave of green job creation in San Francisco. The San Francisco Sustainable Financing program will offer residential and commercial building owners access to affordable, city-sponsored financing for energy efficiency, solar and renewable energy projects, and water conservation improvements. The repayment obligation will be attached to the property, rather than the individual, and will be paid back through property taxes over the life of the financing.
We’ve seen plenty of innovative bus shelters before, but Project Bottlestop might just be the most beautiful. Designed by UK College of Design student Aaron Scales, the shelter uses recycled glass Ale-8-One soft drink bottles illuminated by LED lights to create a unique piece of street art. The whole thing is enclosed in safety glass and is completely self-sustaining, with solar panels providing energy for the shelter’s lighting.
One of the sad things about the recent demise of the construction boom in Dubai is that we will no longer have so many wonderful architectural renderings to show. Some come from talented starchitects jumping through architectural hoops; others like the amazing confection that was Falcon City, feature the Eiffel Tower, pyramids and hanging gardens of Babylon. Sigh, so many glories that will never be built.
For cities that are settled below sea level, dealing with copious amounts of rainfall year round can be a destructive challenge. But as the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute predicts, Rotterdam has an even damper outlook – over the next century rainfall in the area is expected to increase by 5% with an increase in intensity of 10%. Rather than pouring heaps of money into expanding the sewer systems, officials have decided to turn to designers Florian Boer and Marco Vermeulen. In a project called “Waterpleinen” the pair have developed a much less costly and uncomplicated alternative that combines a vivid public space with a place for water collection!
Since Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004, its capital city Ljubjana has lead the way in economic and social development. Unlike other nations who have just begun to find wealth and the new construction that comes with it, the Slovenes remain conscious of the urban and social impact of what they are breaking ground for. Designed by Sadar Vuga Architects, the new Sports Park Stozice integrates a football stadium, a multi-purpose sports hall and a big shopping center, all beautifully tucked away into an expansive green landscape.
According to the Forest Products Laboratory, a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree. Putting this principle into practice, Whole Tree Architecture is dedicated to building with materials that lumber companies consider scrap – weed trees, also know as ‘managed forest thinnings.’ The resulting projects are beautiful displays of locally sourced and sustainably managed materials.
The 2009 Solar Decathlon may have come to a close, but we wanted to shine a little more light on one of our favorite projects, Virginia Tech’s LUMENHAUS. Ranked 4th in this year’s Architecture category, the LUMENHAUS is named for its “power of light” attributes and architectural references to the BauHaus movement, and was particularly inspired by Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. Like its historic reference, it is comprised of all glass walls, maximizing exposure to natural daylight. The house features an automated “Eclipse System” of highly insulated translucent panels that filters the light using independent sliding layers, creating an ever-changing pattern throughout the day.
In 1896 the Viennese authorities decided to invest in large-scale gas and electric utilities, so they constructed what became Europe’s largest gas plant. After nearly a century long run the plant was decommissioned, and left behind were four massive gasometers. These incredible structures were cast off, but a recent revitalization project led by Jean Nouvel, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Manfred Wehdorn, and Wilhelm Holzbauer have transformed these four tanks into spectacular and thriving communities.
LOTS MORE GREAT GREEN DESIGN STORIES HERE... KEEP READING!
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