Greenline | Design / Technology / Sustainability

Baltimore’s first planned LEED Platinum building is on the drawing boards! The building, to be located on the site of a long neglected city park will serve as headquarters for the non-profit Parks & People Foundation, whose mission it is to ‘(help) to improve the physical, social, and environmental quality of neighborhoods through greening activities [...]

 
(above) advanced ecoceramic structural systems
Greenline believes that next generation building systems has the potential to have a profound influence on the sustainability of our built environment. We try to highlight articles we find relevant that lie at the intersection of art, science, technology and architecture and do so with a passion. We take special notice [...]

The world is fascinated by the sight of a beautiful, modern, piece of architecture going up in flames almost instantly. The pictures, videos, tweets, blogs and news flurries are abuzz with raw feeds for the gawking masses to peruse. Thank goodness for connectivity and distributed networks! But who could have imagined the maelstrom of data [...]

A new mixed use facility in Independence Oregon is being called the “world’s greenest building” by it’s developers, Aldeia LLC. The building, scheduled to be completed in early 2010, will house 15 condominiums, retail stores, and multiple offices. The developers foresee that it will receive the highest LEED rating recorded-64 points out of [...]

The Artek Pavillion by Shigeru Ban was built in 2007 as part of an installation at the 2007 Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan. The mobile exhibition space was commissioned by Finnish furniture company, Artek, and forest industry group/paper producer/wood materials manufacturer, UPM. As part of their company philosophies, the two sponsors, beyond just asking [...]

Greg Lynn, creator of the Blobwall and head of Greg Lynn FORM, lectures on how the development of calculus based tools is affecting the architectural field. He presents a quick history of design from the perspective of whole, fraction and now a more fluid calculus based system of describing shape and even shows off a [...]

Echo is a solar energy system that generates both electrical and thermal energy, making it the most efficient solar electric system on the market today. These solar panels create both heat and electricity and can be customized to work in the harshest climates. Heat normally lost in a typical PV system is used [...]

We like to be green and look good too. Check out the new summer line from Matt and Nat. Their eco-conscious line of accessories are made with recycled plastic water bottles and vegan leather.

Phillippe Starck has made a comeback-and in a green way. His newest design is for a personal wind turbine consumers can mount to their rooftops. The windturbine, named Democratic Ecology, was scheduled to hit the market last September and is said to retail for about $700. Photos of the turbine show a [...]

(above) exterior rendering by Karin Adalbert
Villa Åkarp is a positive net energy house (plusenergihus in Swedish) being built outside of Malmo, Sweden. The house, brainchild of doctor of building physics, Karin Adalberth, will generate more energy on an annual basis than it consumes by combining energy conservation, energy recovery and energy generation technologies, an amazing [...]

”to make as effective, perfect, or useful as possible“ -Definition ‘Optimize’
The National Aquatic Center in Beijing achieves sustainability through the optimization and integration of its structure, envelope, and building systems. In doing so it tells the story of how a little known problem of theoretical physics, Kelvin’s Conjecture, influenced the design of a prominent international [...]

“The first step in sustainability is to reuse an existing building.” – Michael Furbish, developer of Lucky’s Warehouse

Lucky’s Warehouse is a sustainable adaptive-reuse of an industrial space built in the Brooklyn / Curtis Bay area of South Baltimore. The warehouse was originally built to house a millwork shop and was later converted into a storage [...]

Sometimes I forget that we live in an ocean of air. I take for granted that the open space in front of me, or filling our buildings, has a profound affect on my very existance. The gasseous medium we swim through affects thermal comfort, energy movement, and air quality through complex molecular interactions described most [...]

Integrated Environmental Solutions Ltd (IES) has developed a building performance simulation plug-in linking ‘Virtual Environment’ to Google’s Sketchup that ‘empowers energy, carbon, daylight and solar analysis, and much more to be undertaken at the touch of a few buttons, right from the earliest stages of the design process, where the maximal difference to sustainable design [...]

Recently the Baltimore Office of Promotion and Arts hosted a Baltimore Infill Survey to track proposals for solutions to the many vacant lots that are scattered across the city. A recent look at the current entries show quite a few focusing on community gardens as a viable solution. And why not?  A garden would [...]

Recently I had the benefit of sitting in on lecture about using plants to treat environmental problems. The lecture was given by Dr. Lee A. Newman, who has been conducting research in the area of phytoremediation for the past 16 years. Her work at the University of South Carolina focuses on using plants [...]

Immanuel Kant, in 1790, described beauty as ’sensory, emotional, and intellectual,’ a synthesis of data which we as humans process when evaluating objects. More recently Abraham Moles, Frieder Nake and Jurgen Schmidhuber, leaders in the field of aesthetics and information theory, described beauty as ‘the option with the shortest description, given the observer’s previous knowledge [...]