Blogs & Ecology

The American housing industry is a mess, with homebuilding back to 1991 levels, in the last banking and lending crisis. In June, according to the New York Times, house prices were down 15.9% compared to a year ago, and sales were down 35.3%. But one sector is shining: green building is up to between 6% and 10% of the market this year, up from 2% in 2002 . According to an NAHB/ McGraw-Hill study, people buying green are after quality first, then energy savings, then "doing the right thing."
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Designers enrich our lives in a myriad of ways. From furniture to coffee mugs, a designer is part of the production team. The pervasiveness of design gives designers an important role and an opportunity to use design to call attention to important social issues.

Image by:lemoox

Artists, generally, put an enormous amount of time and effort into their works, so when it all disappears within one day, it must be totally heart-wrenching.

Image by: Nele Azevedo

Stairs with integrated storage by Splyce Design/Build

Here's to the man who invented stairs
And taught our feet to soar!
He was the first who ever burst
Into a second floor.
The world would be downstairs to-day
Had he not found the key;
So let his name go down to fame,
Whatever it may be. Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

Leslie Scrivener writes in the Star about the problem of rampant bike theft, and the proper way to protect your bike, including painting it pink, using two expensive and heavy locks, or riding a junker. A commenter pointed out (what appears to be a cliche but new to me):

"All bicycles weigh fifty pounds. A thirty-pound bicycle needs a twenty-pound lock. A forty-pound bicycle needs a ten-pound lock. A fifty-pound bicycle doesn't need a lock at all."

TreeHugger on how to prevent bike theft:
How to Prevent Bike Theft

Architectural writer and teacher does one of his great slide shows of his visit to "Home Delivery," the prefab show at the Museum of Modern Art. He writes, "Prefabricated houses have remained an elusive goal for architects, and the MoMA show is a stylish litany of second-place finishers, also-rans, if-onlys, and downright losers."

Good eye candy at ::Slate

More Home Delivery on TreeHugger
First Pix of Home Delivery Prefabs in New York

We have shown rotating houses before, but this one predates them by decades- Angelo Invernizzi's house has an upper section that rests on a circular track and follows the sun, 1,500 tons powered by two motors with a total of three horsepower. ...

Not just because of safety; Fire Marshals have been demanding that for years. It is probably necessary if we want to build healthy as well as safe houses. Perhaps if houses had sprinklers, then manufacturers would not have to use flame retardants that are showing up in our blood.

TreeHugger loves ideas that think out of the box; Dutch architects Arthur Rottier and Peter Jongman developed the Woonbox as a house for a "temporary stay"- the box opens and unfolds into a bath, shower, kitchen and toilet....

The architectural profession is broken in the single-family house biz; the vast majority of people live in houses that were built by developers from generic plans. The number of houses designed by architects to suit the needs of specific clients is negligible. It is also expensive; a small house can take as much time to design as a very big one, and as much time as a much more profitable commercial job that doesn't require client meetings on evenings and weekends.

Onzo made news a few months ago after they secured 2 milion pounds sterling in financing by cooperating with the UK's Scottish and Southern Energy. SSE plans to find a marketing advantage by giving their customers an Onzo, helping customers to benefit from real-time feedback on energy use, which studies show results in savings of up to 26%. This will also help the energy utility better manage its grid and rely on conservation rather than investment to optimize power infrastructures.

Eichler Bathroom from the sixties- big and bright

Lets face it, our bathrooms are a disaster. They are small, dark, superficially sterile, poorly ventilated with a toxic atmosphere, that suck up water and energy in huge quantities and just throw it away, heat, water and useful resources, down a pipe for someone else to make it go away somewhere else. The modern American bathroom is a monument to poor design, rotten functionality and extravagant waste of resources squeezed into a miserable tiny little package.

Image from Inhabitat

One could almost hear the collective rolling of eyes when Phillipe Starck said "I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary." Harry Wakefield of Mocoloco suggested " "Why don't you devote that substantial talent and media savvy of yours to making stuff that's smarter, more sustainable, and dare we say it, cool, in that gotta have it, materialistic way you know so well."

(Lool82 turns milk crates into handy and hip little seats, perfect for the college dorm).