Architecture
If small is beautiful, then the 320 square-foot EDGE house from Wisconsin’s Revelations Architects is absolutely gorgeous. EDGE stands for Experimental Dwelling for a Greener Environment, and true to that acronym, the award-winning little modular home includes Earth-friendly features such as rainwater collection, geothermal heating and cooling, air-to-air heat recovery, passive solar windows, and insulated exterior shutter doors that minimize nighttime heat loss. Making the most of every square inch of interior space, the house has multi-functional transformable furniture, plus two overhead bedrooms. It's also made for easy construction and relocation, to the point that the prototype has been assembled, taken apart and moved three times in six months. Read More
Imagine waking up on a cold winter’s morning to light streaming in through your bedroom window and the smell of fresh coffee. The concrete floor is warm and your favorite music starts to play as you eat your breakfast. As you drive away the house automatically locks, the thermostat reduces and the insulation panels close as the house goes into hibernation until you return. Welcome to LUMENHAUS, the completely solar powered, open plan house that uses computer technology, flexible architectural design and energy efficiency to adapt to its owner’s changing needs as well as environmental conditions... and it recently won the 2010 Solar Decathlon Europe. Read More
James McHugh Construction has officially completed construction on Aqua, the Chicago high-rise that was named 2009 Skyscraper of the Year by international building database Emporis. Aqua beat out over 300 competitors worldwide for the honor, thanks in no small part to its no-two-alike undulating concrete balconies. It turns out, however, that there’s more to the 82-story tower than just good looks. Read More
Aside from the events that take place as part of the Olympics, it seems the competition is also on for each Games to become “greener” than those that have gone before. This year’s Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver boasted a variety of green initiatives, including Canada's biggest "living roof." London looks set to outdo Vancouver in 2012, but Rio is looking to up the ante again and be the first zero-carbon footprint games when it hosts the Summer Olympics in 2016. To help the city achieve this goal Swiss-based RAFAA Architecture and Design has proposed a Solar City Tower which features an eye-catching energy-generating waterfall. Read More
This beautiful architectural proposal from Italian firm StudioDosi is as green as it looks. Submitted in a competition to design a new headquarters for the Province of Parma in Italy's north, the public office space features a double glazed inner skin wrapped in an exoskeleton of "climbing vegetable stripes" which allows natural light to enter the building and boosts ventilation. Read More
With the devastation in Haiti still fresh in our everyone’s minds a team at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) is working on a system to better protect buildings, infrastructure and sensitive equipment from seismic activity. The roll-n-cage (RNC) is an anti-vibration device that is positioned between the building and the ground so that when the ground moves, the supported building doesn’t. Read More
As of July 1st, the city of Denver, Colorado will be lit by two suns. There will be the usual big one that shines throughout the day, but there will also be a smaller one that rises in the evening, climbs up the side of the Minoru Yasui office building throughout the night, then sets in the morning. That’s the plan, at least, for Brooklyn artist Adam Frank’s permanent installation entitled SUNLIGHT. Appropriately enough, the whole thing will be solar-powered. Read More
Developed by Kyosemi Corporation, Sphelar solar cells are one of the most intriguing solar solutions that we have seen in a while. On display at the recent PV Expo 2010 in Tokyo, these tiny spherical cells gave us a glimpse of how windows in buildings might be used to collect solar power in the not-so-distant future. Read More
Vertical Prison leaves criminals up in the air
The idea of tailoring architecture to the requirements of a prison is by no means new - most famously the Panopticon design by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham has been the blueprint for many prisons since the late 1800s. A new Vertical Prison concept is not as draconian in its ambitions with its aim of rehabilitating prisoners by allowing them to remain a part of society and contribute to it, while using height as a wall to keep them physically separated from it. Read More
