Sustainable Building

Madonna Builds Solar-Powered Eco-Academy For Girls in Malawi

Madonna is giving back to the country that gave her David, her son, in a big way by building an eco-friendly academy for girls in Malawi’s capital city, Lilongwe. Through her non-profit organization, Raising Malawi, the pop star has collected funds and donated some of her own in order to build the solar powered, eco-friendly academy, which will accommodate 450 girls when it’s completed in 2012. StudioMDA, out of New York, designed the school and hopes it can become the standard for education and new sustainable construction in the region.

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Recycled Windshield Greenhouse Grows More Glass

by Kevin Gardner, 02/01/10

Recycled windshields are busting out of the woodwork, from French country gardens to swank sub/urban surfaces. The protective pupa shown here (“la serre” is French for “greenhouse”) transforms more motive motives into regenerative ones, à la auto glass gone wild, nailed to firewood beams and each other and slated for a greenhouse roof. “I like the idea of recovery,” says maker Sebastien Ramirez, who created this warm cocoon without a budget.

Via CyberArchi

Photos by Sebastien Ramirez

Nordic Town Gets Green City Center Complete With Modern Castle

by Evelyn Lee, 01/26/10

The historic city of Augustenborg, Denmark may soon provide a new view of its surrounding waters thanks to a revitalized city center complete with a modern castle. Successfully combining old and new, Deve Architects plan to transform the city’s aging industrial buildings into a new downtown area that celebrates the country’s modern yacht culture. The new plans call for ground-source heat pumps, wind turbines, and biogas as well as solar arrays and kinetic plates to generate energy.

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Floating Mega Arcology for Boston’s Harbor

by Bridgette Meinhold, 01/15/10

Get ready Boston, someday you might just have this incredible floating city within a city located in your harbor. The BoA, short for Boston Arcology, is a sustainable mega structure designed by Kevin Schopfer, who also designed the amazing New Orleans Arcology Habitat (NOAH). The BoA will house 15,000 people in hotels, offices, retail spaces, museums, condominiums, and even a new city hall. Built to LEED standards with golden proportions, this amazing building would serve as an expansion of the city without impacting what is already currently built.

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LivingHomes Announces National Availability of Ray Kappe’s Green Prefabs

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.

Soviet Fish Factory Retrofitted Into Beautiful Modern Home

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 …

IS IT GREEN?: Las Vegas CityCenter

The CityCenter mega-resort opened last month to fanfare, press, and a fireworks display fitting of a 67-acre 8.7 billion dollar gamble sitting on the Las Vegas Strip. The project surpassed its original sustainability goal of LEED Silver to score an impressive six LEED Gold Certifications (with another one on its way), and it was the recipient of the US Forest Stewardship Council’s best commercial project of 2009. However Las Vegas is a desert, and in this resource-constrained site we couldn’t help but pull back a bit of the star-crossed blinds and ask how deep does the green really go?

Themes, Memes and Dreams in a Decade of Architecture

The blogs are full of “best of the year” lists, but architecture moves more slowly – it takes a long time for ideas to get built, technologies to evolve and for knowledge to spread. Instead, we look at the themes and memes of the past decade of architecture in TreeHugger. From the rise of modern prefab to the growth of green roofs, read on for the most notable trends in sustainable building.

Green Roofed London Hotel is Buried Underground

This five star hotel is going under – underground that is! Designed by ReardonSmith Architects for a proposed development at Hersham Golf Club in Surrey, London, this new subterranean hotel will pay its ultimate respects to London’s Green Belt by placing all 200+ guest rooms underneath it! The entire scheme is covered with a plush green roof that takes its cue from the surrounding countryside.

San Francisco Launches Sustainable Financing For Green Building Renovations

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.

San Francisco’s Transamerica Building Gets LEED Gold

Just yesterday, one of our favorite mayors, Gavin Newsom in one of our favorite cities, San Francisco, announced that SF’s landmark Transamerica Pyramid Building, will now be classified as one of the greenest in the nation! That’s right, the famous San Francisco landmark was awarded LEED Gold certification yesterday, boosting San Francisco ahead of New York or Los Angeles in terms of cities with the most green buildings. Way to go, San Francisco!

Cherokee Lofts: Renovated Recording Studio Seeks LEED Platinum

We first announced Pugh + Scarpa’s Cherokee Lofts in Los Angeles two years ago, and we’re excited to say that the renovated recording studio debuted last month with a Rock N’Platinum grand opening. Anticipating its LEED Platinum certification, the opening literally rocked thanks to the music of Ben Lee and BlueSkyReality, plus three showcase lofts were stylized to pay tribute to Alice Cooper, 30 Seconds to Mars, and David Bowie. A fitting gala granted the number of gold and platinum records recorded at the location, which housed Cherry Studios prior to its conversion into sleek residential units.

In case you missed the opening, fear not – you can check it out this weekend on Saturday and Sunday from noon-5pm!

+ Cherokee Lofts

+ Pugh + Scarpa

Photos © Tara Wujcik

Top 5 Most Innovative Green Bridges on the Planet

Design and engineering innovations over the last two decades have had a dramatic impact on our ability to create beautiful, environmentally sensitive structures that help contribute to a more sustainable future. A dramatic example of the confluence of design, technology and environmental sustainability can be seen in the proliferation of innovative bridge designs around the world. We’ve put together a list of five of our favorites. Check them out and let us know what you think!

Elwood Green: 6 Star Sustainably Built Apartment Complex

High Density green living is on the rise in Elwood, Australia with Crosby Architect’s new Elwood Green project. Living up to its name, the high-density apartment building will house 25 units that are expected to receive an average 6-star rating – the highest honor currently available from the Green Building Council of Australia. What comes as a bit of surprise is the lack of active systems assisting in the green rating, which just goes to show that old ingenuity and smart design can create buildings every bit as sustainable as the most high-tech structures.

James Law’s Technosphere is an Eco Deathstar for Dubai

Like an non evil, sustainable version of the Deathstar, the Technosphere by James Law Cybertecture replicates the Earth as a structural concept. Inside the eco-sphere is an entire world which serves as a vehicle to explore the issues of self-sustaining life on a smaller level. Although not nearly as self-sufficient as the Biosphere 2, the Technosphere is meant to reflect the state of our planet in current and future times. Proposed as an iconic building for the Technopark of Dubai, the eco-sphere would be a carbon neutral tourist attraction as well as a place in which to live and work.

Icelandic Prefabricated Home To Remember Summer Days By

As the winter winds begin to blow, we’d thought we say one last goodbye to the things of summer by featuring Icelandic architectural firm Glama-Kim Architects’ modern, modular, eco-friendly summerhouses situated in the Western part of Iceland, in the town of Stykkishólmur. Project architect Olafur Mathiesen led the design, which boasts spectacular views of the surrounding landscape, as well as the use of readily available materials combined with the ease of construction and simplicity of design.

Concrete Mushrooms: Transforming Abandoned Bunkers Into Eco Hostels

There are reportedly over 750,000 abandoned concrete bunkers scattered throughout Albania, remnants of Communist dictator Enver Hoxha and his policies of paranoid xenophobia. Now graduate students Gyler Mydyti & Elian Stefa have developed a plan called Concrete Mushrooms that would ‘invert the meaning’ of these structures by turning them into a network of habitable eco-hostels, cafés, gift shops and more.

Links Roundup of the Week: Solar Decathlon

It’s finally the week of the Solar Decathlon competition! From Thursday, October 8 to Friday, October 16, 20 multi-disciplinary students teams made up of architects, engineers, and designers will participate in 10 contests to determine the winner. You can take a peek at each team’s standing here. Taking place …

SOLAR DECATHLON 2009: Rice University’s $140,000 ZEROW House Keeps Up With the High Rollers

The Solar Decathlon, the super solar architecture competition held in Washington D.C. bi-annually, officially kicked off today, and Rice University’s awesomely affordable ZEROW House is already making waves. The first round of evaluations took place yesterday, and this low-budget underdog placed 4th among the twenty competitors after being recognized in the categories Comfort Zone and Appliances. What is most impressive about this team is that the average budget of the 20 solar decathlon houses at the mall is $490,000, while the ZEROW home was built for only $140,000!!! Even more impressive, the ZEROW House was designed specifically for Houston’s Third Ward Neighborhood as part of Project Row House – an organization that seeks to develop housing for low-to moderate-income families.

Mesa Community College’s Physical Science Buiding Gets LEED Gold

Mesa Community College recently completed work on a stunning physical science building that exceeded LEED expectations when it was awarded LEED-NC Gold. Designed by the award-winning architecture firm, The Smith Group, the building is the first major LEED project to be completed within the Maricopa Country Community College District. The brand new 64,480-square-foot facility houses curriculum for the physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology and engineering departments including classrooms, laboratories, facility offices, an advising center and a 53 seat planetarium. Topping off the new space is an astronomy observation platform.