Photo via Philips
We talk a lot about the breakthroughs in LED lighting. Well, take note that the new technology is getting put to good use.
Boston’s first official skyscraper, the Marriott Custom House Tower, was in need of a makeover, and it received one in the form of replacing its incandescent fixtures with LED fixtures, beautifying the building while using one third the energy. ...
Sixty miles down a dirt road in the Alaskan Wilderness, sits a cutting-edge green building nestled in the mountains.
An educational landmark for visitors and a starting point and shelter for backcountry hikers, the LEED platinum Eielson Center in Alaska's Denali National Park sports some of the greenest features yet produced by federal funds.
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Photo: Orca Yapı Sistemleri
In Turkish, the word for a slum is gecekondu, meaning "settled overnight." A prefabricated house doesn't go up quite that quickly, but mass production can make homes--of both the conventional and ecofriendly type--available to more people at varying income levels.
The house-in-a-greenhouse probably wouldn't play very well in say, Arizona, where enclosing your house in glass shell would be folly. But Bengt Warne, a Swedish architect, starting designing what he called the Naturhus (Nature House) in 1976 to work with Scandinavian nature. Warne put up his own Naturhus before he died in 2006, but two other Swedish families have now designed their own versions of an enclosed house.
Greenhouse on the outside, energy-efficiency on the inside
Building on couple of topics which are perennial TreeHugger favorites (cool roofs and thin-film solar photovoltaics)... Fremont, California-based Solyndra has announced the launch of a new type of rooftop solar array which the company says could revolutionize the market for commercial rooftop solar arrays. This is what it’s all about:...
Jimmy Stamp at Life Without Buildings compares current shipping container architecture proposals from LOT-EK, Adam Kalkin and others to Icelandic designer "B. Börkur Eiríksson’s dark vision of a smoggy dystopic future where we’re all crammed into mile-high towers by colossal mobile crane systems."
Extraordinary image follows:...
Dwight Doerkson has developed "an affordable eco friendly building that’s transportable and doesn’t need to be hooked up to the grid"- out of shipping containers. He cuts out an entire wall and hinges it, so when you want to leave your ecopod you simply flip a switch and a solar powered winch pulls up the deck and closes up the box. ...
No, it's not a new IKEA store, (the base would be blue) it is the expanded Brooklyn Children's Museum by Rafael Vinoly that opens on September 20. According to Nicholas Tamarin at Interior Design, it is the "city's first LEED Silver-certified museum."...
Photo chad_k @ flickr
It only takes five minutes in the city of Copenhagen (especially when arriving by train) to wonder why all cities aren't developing in this same mold - plenty of open streets with wide pedestrian and bike lanes, bikes to easily rent at a number of venues, and a wealth of organic food at the corner stores.
Density defying?
Shaun from Deputy Dog has reavealed the lengths some people will go to to get a suntan. In an attempt to have sunlight 24/7, Italian ship engineer, Angelo Invernizzi, from Marcellise, and his architect friend Ettore Fagiouli created a house that rotates to face the sun all year-round.
Sporting a 43 meter tower and weighing a whopping 1,500 tons the wedged shaped building rotates on a circular track at a speed of 4mm per second, which means the building would take just over 9 hours to make a complete rotation.
Built between 1929 and 1935, this amazing feat of architectural brilliance was way ahead of its time.
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