architecture
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Clip a garden onto your apartment with the ‘Plant Room’
If the earth's population is going to keep skyrocketing as fast as cities are popping up skyscrapers, I suppose we'll be needing mini-parks that attach to the sides of apartment buildings. Good thing these New Zealand design students are already way ahead of us.
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This building is so great it doesn’t fall down
“I don’t think sustainability is a design aesthetic, any more than having electricity in your building, or telephones, or anything else … In 10 years we’re not going to talk about sustainability anymore, because it’s going to be built into the core processes of architecture.” Advertising sustainability will be like an architect getting up in […]
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Eco-bricks made from pee take number one
This kid is pissing all over a good idea.Clav via Creative CommonsSometimes it feels like climate change has us all up against a brick wall. Then some innovator pisses all over those fears by cooking up a formula for eco-bricks that don’t need cooking — thus, saving millions of tons of CO2 each year. And […]
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Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr
Art: Nat Damm Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr Founders, Architecture for Humanity Sausalito, Calif. Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr, both 36, founded Architecture for Humanity in 1999 to promote architectural and design solutions to social and humanitarian crises. Their motto: “Design like you give a damn.” (That’s also the name of their book.) Since its […]
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Weird and wonderful places to live
The New York Times Magazine did a photo spread of some rather extreme conversions of churches, shipping containers, water towers, and even caves. We do our own roundup of TreeHugger favorites: A chapel converted to residence by ZECC Architects. Churches ZECC Architects, beloved of their conversion of a water tower into a residence, are at […]
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McMansion modular
Remember when modular homes were going to be part of the “green” future? In the post-Dwell, post-postmodern architecture era, pre-fab was going to be cheap, green, hot and hip. Yes, finally, an antidote to McMansions and an affordable alternative to ballooning home prices. As if that were not enough, these stylish boxes were set to […]
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Modern modular done right
Photo: Treehugger A lot of lessons have been learned over the last decade as architects and manufacturers try to make modern green prefab affordable and accessible to a wider audience. A new entry into the market is Challenger, a modern architect-designed line of houses from Manitoba, Canada’s Conquest Manufacturing. They recently displayed a new model, […]
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Oh, those sexy building codes: More powerful than 100 nuclear plants
Building energy codes are the key.Are 100 new nuclear plants the solution to our climate troubles? I asked that question in a post last week. The answer lies buried deep within the 1,428-page Waxman-Markey climate bill (H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act), passed by the House and now under consideration in the […]
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Recession redirects a green-building pioneer
Back around 2006, when the American Dream of home ownership was still intact and green building was officially transferred from the domain of hippies to yuppies, folks got very excited about prefab. Here in New York City, my friends and I felt our second-home prayers had been answered (not that we could afford a first […]
