Solar Decathlon 2009: Team Illinois’ Impressive 2nd Place
To the casual observer the 2009 Solar Decathlon looked like a competition between the uber high end and slickly built homes of the Technische Universitat Darmstadt (Germany), the University of California, and the University of Ontario. If anything, the glossy aesthetics gave a sense that these teams spent, or were donated, some serious $$$ [...]
Two Passive Houses Win Welsh Eco-Homes Design Competition
Two Passive Houses have won an eco-homes design competition for a sustainable development at “The Works Ebbw Vale” in Wales. The two entries, one three-bedroom and one two-bedroom house, use up to 85% less energy, emit 80% less carbon dioxide, use the sun as the primary heating source, and have excellent indoor air quality. The designs, by bere:architects [...]
Independence Station-World’s Greenest Building?
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 [...]
A House of Paper: The Artek Pavillion by Shigeru Ban
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 Speaks at TED
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 [...]
Blobwall: The Curse of Customization
Blobwall is a material and form study by Greg Lynn (‘Form’) which explores the definition of modular construction and space separation in the coming century. Design and construction of Blobwall are heavily influenced by Lynn’s work with advanced three dimensional modeling and manufacturing techniques and follow an evolutionary path from his earlier work with biomorphic [...]
greenPIX: The Zero Energy Media Wall
Energy in = energy out. Only the format changes. Now that is sustainable.
greenPIX, ‘the Zero Energy Media Wall,’ uses architecture and technology to absorb, store, amplify, translate, and display data, both natural and manmade, in an organic system that responds dynamically to the local environment. Creative programming adds even more layers to the already rich [...]
Sino-Italian Energy Efficient Building (SIEEB): Covering the Basics First
Sustainability is a simple concept with a varied and challenging means of execution, and it is easy to falter, especially when faced with the myriad of devices, controls and systems designed to make buildings more sustainable. Searching for the latest, most sophisticated strategy for increasing a project’s sustainability does not translate into a sustainable building. [...]
Architecture School: A Documentary Series
Medical interns, fashion designers, criminals, apprentices, lumberjacks, crab fishermen, ice road truck drivers, have-been celebrities, and pet whisperers have all found a place in the bizarre world of reality television. We have followed their lives season after season and can now relate personally and emotionally with their struggles. Why is it that I can now [...]
UMA Active House (Prefab)
The UMA Active House is a modern factory-built volumetric module unit house. “Fixed price, fixed time, quality-guarantee, and modern design” are some of the attractive attributes of the house according to the design team. The house is also unique because it is designed to be nested into communities which share parti-walls. There are currently four [...]
Sustainable Museum: Provincetown Art Association and Museum
Downtown Provincetown, Massachusetts, has a new sustainable art center designed to promote the health of its occupants, art collection and the indoor and exterior environment. The 19,500 sf expansion of the existing Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) building “created new galleries, new storage areas, and an expanded museum school” and accomplished these programmatic goals [...]
Big Dig House
(above) Unused material from the Boston Big Dig
What does 600,000 lbs of recycled materials look like? Pretty good actually.
The Big Dig House by Single Speed Design (SSD) is built with unused or recycled materials from the Boston Big Dig project. All in all, a total of 600,000 lbs of steel, concrete forms, roadway sections, and [...]
Danish Smart House Eco (Prefab) by Valbaek Brorup Architects
All photos by Mikkel Strange
The Danish Smart House Eco is an environmentally friendly housing system which can be optimized in a number of ways to meet the space needs of both individuals and families. Creators Eva Kristine Borup and Stefan Valbaek of Valbaek Borup Architects, designed the system to be flexible to the needs of [...]
House of Sweden in Washington DC
This week I had the good fortune to visit the Swedish Embassy (House of Sweden) in Washington DC. (No, I did not visit the DC IKEA…) What I found was a beautiful piece of modern architecture showing many of the traits people have come to expect from contemporary Scandinavian design. Powerful themes such as water, [...]
The Green vs Preservation Debate: Round One
A recent article in Preservation Online by Wayne Curtis debates the complimentary yet combative relationship of environmental and preservation movements in architecture. The author is writing for Preservation Online so his argument is framed from the perspective of a preservationist, but does present equal and valid points from both sides of the spectrum. The article [...]
Solarsiedlung by Rolf Disch
“Maximizing the use of solar energy and minimizing heat loss” – Rolf Disch
The Solarsiedlung or “solar village” is Europe’s most modern solar housing project. Solarsiedlung is the housing portion of a larger development which also includes an office/housing block called Sonnenschiff (solarship). The project’s goals are to follow both the German Passive House and Plus [...]
Heliotrop by Rolf Disch
The Heliotrop is a house and an office designed to be extremely responsive to the environment. The house’s distinguishing feature is that it is circular and rotates to track the movement of the sun. Even the name is derived from the Greek word meaning “turned towards the sun.” The house also meets the German Plusenergiehaus [...]
