If you’re in the market for a floating home but not diggin’ the dark, cramped image that the word “houseboat” typically brings to mind, we think the Tafoni Floating Home will really “sway” you (get it – because boats rock back and forth? Okay nevermind.). Designed by Joanna Borek-Clement with the San Francisco Bay Area’s on-the-water community in mind, this spacious and modern version of the houseboat is so beautiful that it’s enough to make any landlubber want to get his or her sealegs.
Glass isn’t usually our first choice for cleaning up household messes, but a company called Absorbent Materials thinks that a new kind of “swelling glass” – glass that swells up like a sponge – could be the key to cleaning up contaminated groundwater. Dubbed Obsorb, the material absorbs volatile molecules in water like fuel oil and solvents without sucking up the water itself.
Vincent Callebaut, visionary behind the Lilypad and Dragonfly, has created a whale-shaped floating garden designed to drift through the world’s rivers while purifying their waters. The Physalia is a self-sufficient ecosystem that generates all the power it needs from the sun and works to reduce water pollution through bio-filtration.
ATTENTION ALL GREEN GADGET GEEKS!
Want to win a tricked out, supercompact, limited edition HP Mini 110 laptop by renowned designer Tord Boontje worth $399?!! In the spirit of the holidays, and to raise awareness for the Summit on the Summit expedition to climb Mt Kilimanjaro to fight the global clean water crisis, we’re giving away one of these gorgeous, eco-conscious HP notebooks to one insanely lucky reader – and it could be you!
TO ENTER THIS AMAZING GIVEAWAY
1. SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER HERE >
(We’ll be announcing the winner in our newsletter, so if you want to find out who the winner is, you need to receive and read our newsletter)
2. Visit www.summitonthesummit.com and tweet a message in support of the climbers right from the Twitter module on the site with an @inhabitat and the hashtag #hpinhabitat by Sunday, December 27th.
3. Get all your friends to retweet your original tweet. The tweet with the most retweets by Sunday, December 27th wins! Make sure your friends include “@yourtwittername” and “#hpinhabitat” in their retweets.
*NOTE: We will not be counting retweets that do not include an @ with the twitter name of the original tweeter and the #hpinhabitat hashtag.
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Deep-Seawater Air Conditioning System to Cool Honolulu
Frigid seawater pumped in from the ocean’s depths will soon help cool more than half of the buildings in Honolulu’s downtown. Honolulu Seawater Air Conditioning LLC, which is undertaking the $240 million project, expects its technology to cut the Hawaiian city’s air conditioning electricity usage by up to 75 percent while slashing carbon emissions and the use of ozone-depleting refrigerants.
Kor Unveils Limited Edition Water Vessels that Give Back
With all the controversy and outrage surrounding the presence of BPA in plastic water bottles, KOR has stood by its commitment to encourage individuals to stop buying disposable bottled water with its smoothly styled BPA-free water vessels. This past week they announced a limited-edition series of “Thirst for Giving” bottles that feature beautiful art and provide sales proceeds to non-profits that are working to preserve the environment.
Europe Launches Satellite Able to Predict Floods and Droughts
Global warming has dramatically increased the unpredictability of weather patterns, but what if we could more accurately pinpoint the future location and intensity of floods and droughts? That might be possible if all goes as planned with the Soil Moisture and Salinity (SMOS) probe, launched today by the European Space Agency. The $460 million probe, launched on a Russian rocket launcher from the Plesestk cosmodrome, will measure soil moisture, plant growth, and ocean salt levels across the globe.
Savior Bud Device Produces Drinking Water from Tree Leaves
Drinking water is all around us — if we know where to look. The Giving Tree-inspired Savior Bud designed by Seol Ah Sun and Kim Hyo Jin is a portable device that attaches to tree leaves and slowly collects water. After four hours, a full cup of water is ready for drinking.
Fountainhead Reposited: Water Island is an Exercise in Filtration
Synch your workout with a little river detox, then rehydrate with a cup of the fresh water you just filtered. This people-powered water purification island, designed by Jakub Szczesny as part of the Synchronicity architecture and art festival in Warsaw, Poland, hooks up basic exercise machines to kinetically pump polluted water through four filters into overhead tanks …
Hanging Bamboo Gardens Make Beautiful Biofilters
If you were at West Coast Green this past weekend you would have surely noticed the elegant bamboo structures along the waterfront surrounded by beautiful native landscaping. What you may not have realized unless you looked closely is that the structure was actually supporting hanging gardens of marsh grass and was a way of preventing and remediating pollution from water runoff. A collaboration of The Natural Builders, Design Ecology, Floating Islands and Bertotti Landscaping, the installation was the talk of the trade show and highlight for us at Inhabitat.
Flood Harvesting Housing Brings Tidal Power to New York City
The concept of harvesting energy from river waves to power New York City just got more enticing. Earlier this year we brought you GRO Architects notable concept, which stood out among the entries for Metropolis Magazine’s 2009 Next Generation Design Competition. Brian Novello, one of the partners in the project, also has a beautiful design to expand these modular docking stations in energy-collecting floating houses, and it looks so cool that we had to spread the news.
Sleek Sink/Toilet Combo is an All-in-One Greywater Recycling System
We spotted this fancy multi-tasking toilet/sink by Roca at the London Design Festival. It’s obviously compact and perfect for any loft space or small apartment, and its sleek design houses a nifty self-contained greywater system that is capable of reducing water use by up to 25% compared to a standard 6/3-litre dual flush toilet. It’s a much trendier and elegant solution to existing sink to toilet greywater systems, and we’re excited that high design has embraced waste-water management.
Discovery of Water on Moon Means that Lunar Service Station is Possible
Many environmentalists argue that it’s important to focus our attention on Earth’s problems before venturing off into space, but the recent discovery of water on the moon means that exploring other planets could be easier than ever. Now that an Indian mission has discovered hydrogen and oxygen molecules on the lunar surface, the planet can be used as an outer space “service station”, prepping astronauts for their journeys into deep space.
Aquaquest Center Teaches Sustainable Living Through Design
Aquaquest is a beautiful addition to the Vancouver Aquarium that was conceived as an education center to teach the surrounding Canadian community the importance of eco-friendly living. True to its nature, the complex demonstrates these principles through an impressive set of sustainable building strategies including a leafy green wall, rainwater harvesting, and a highly efficient heating and cooling system.
Sietch Nevada: Desert Oasis for a Drought-Stricken Future
Sietch Nevada is a futuristic concept city that envisions a dystopian water-hoarding society where drought is a constant state and wars are fought over water. Designed by Matsys Designs, the underground city is situated within a network of tunnels and caverns that offer protection and water storage, creating an oasis in the desert. The dense underground community includes a network of waterways and canals enclosed by residential and commercial cavern structures that form an underground Venice so to speak.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch is Worse Than We Thought
It’s a rumor that we hoped would never be confirmed: at least 1,700 miles of plastic trash is floating in what is commonly known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Up until this point, scientists only had a vague idea of the scope of the trash they would find in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex where four ocean currents meet. Isolated patches have been reported by sailors and fishermen, but now researchers, sailors, journalists, and government officials on a nearly four-week journey through the gyre say that plastic shards and netting abound in a space bigger than the state of Texas.
MIT Develops Robotic Fish to Detect Environmental Pollutants
MIT engineers have developed a cheap, compact robotic fish that can go where no man (or underwater vehicle) has been able to go before. The pint-sized robofish, developed by Kamal Youcuf-Toumi and Pablo Valdivia y Alvarado, could potentially be used to detect underwater environmental pollutants and inspect submerged boats and oil and gas pipes. Another plus is that they don’t smell.
NEWS ALERT: Sigg Water Bottles Contain BPA!
You know those SIGG aluminum water bottles that eco-geeks carry around with them as a protest against plastic bottles? Well apparently, SIGG bottles manufactured before August of last year contain …
NOAH: Mammoth Pyramidal Arcology Designed for New Orleans
All renderings courtesy of Tangram3DS
Arcology may sound like a made up word – probably because it is. A hybrid of architecture and ecology, it is essentially a mega city which packs a ginormous population into one hyperstructure – think Death Star, Zion in The Matrix or the Anthill of Antz fame. Now, a real-life group of ambitious designers has taken their looming pyramidal arcology and placed it smack dab on the Mississippi River as a proposal for the rebuild of New Orleans which is currently in progress. This 30 million square foot beast-building with an array of green features is aptly named NOAH (Get it? Noah and the Arcology?), and is meant to house 40,000 mostly human residents.
McMansion Wetlands: Transforming Foreclosures Into Natural Water Filters
As the housing crisis wreaks havoc and suburbia suffers a critical blow from the credit crunch, what will become of all those foreclosed McMansions? Designer Calvin Chiu has proposed one solution that seeks to reinvent these monuments to excess as micro-wetland ecosystems that filter and provide fresh water to urban centers. One the more interesting top 20 finalists in our Reburbia Competition to redesign the suburbs, Frog’s Dream takes an inspired approach towards preserving the wetlands, solving the water crisis, and ensuring the sustainability of our cities in one fell swoop.
LOTS MORE GREAT GREEN DESIGN STORIES HERE... KEEP READING!
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