I promised myself that I’d blog every single day while I was working in Georgia. It should be fairly obvious that I didn’t. I can’t say that I was super productive while I was in Tbilisi - for a variety of reasons, including particularly dysfunctional co-ordination, but also because of the basic difficulty of getting [...]...
I came across this gorgeous design for a vacation home in northern Portugal this morning, and was absolutely inspired by its display of creativity, efficiency and relative affordability:
The structure, designed by architect Alvaro Leite Size Vieira, is certainly luxurious, with three bedrooms, a small outdoor pool and other amenities. But it also works in harmony with the natural environment, not only aesthetically – reflecting the curve and grade of the hillside – but also practically, optimizing access to natural sunlight with south-facing orientation, and benefiting from natural cooling resulting from its position within the ground.
But as far as luxury homes go, it's not completely inaccessible: According to the bloggers at New York WTF, the house was...
Smart metering is coming. Within a decade, you’ll know exactly how much every flip of a switch or turn of a knob costs in monthly utility charges.
By Adam Stein
The Times profiles two British seaside towns on the forefront of the low-tech energy efficiency revolution. Take, for example, Hove residents Brenda and Jeffrey Marchant, owners of a typical Victorian house. The Marchants were always energy-thrifty, but instant feedback is a uniquely motivating force.
"Turn on a computer and the device — a type of so-called smart meter — goes from 300 watts to 400 watts. Turn off a light and it goes from 299 to 215. At 500, the meter is set to sound an alarm.
'I’ve become like one of Pavlov’s dogs,” Mrs. Marchant said. “Every time it bleeps I think I’m going to take...
Strictly speaking, shelter is outside the remit of this blog. However the article The Exigent City in the New York Times was an excellent piece of reporting, and I urge everybody to read it. (HT: Simmy Ross) The article closes with the following lines:
When I first contacted Cameron Sinclair, who started Architecture for Humanity with [...]...
For me, at least, the term microhomes usually calls to mind the boutique, super-fashionable and somewhat extremist end of sustainable housing. Now two women in Reno, Nevada are making it their business to put the trend to extremely practical use. Pamela Haberman and Kelly Rae of HabeRae Investments Inc. have teamed up to rehab unwanted buildings on existing city lots, and turn them around as beautifully designed, efficient minimalist living spaces.
HabeRae describes SoDo 4, a renovation project involving four single-family homes built for railroad workers in the early 1900s:
The SoDo 4 will leave a small footprint, be energy efficient and will be affordable to a person who wants to experience the changing urbanscape of Center St. The homes will incorporate big city style such...
I'm on the lookout for a new flat in Berlin again and i still have to recover from the discovery that prices have increased fast and implacably, at least in the Prenzlauerberg area. Which brought back to my mind a project i discovered while visiting the Visualizar workshop at Medialab Prado last November (more Visualizar stories).
Casastristes.org, by Mar Canet, Gerald Kogler, Jordi Puig, explores housing problems in Spain. Its objective is to serve as an information and resources exchange platform in line with the Web 2.0 philosophy, through the creation of a reliable public database of empty houses in Spain.
By providing data visualization and a list of references on the website, the project also aims to offer resources likely to help clarify ambiguous concepts and strengthen...
A new product-service company called Daily Dump just launched in Bangalore, India, with the goal of helping citizens achieve zero waste in their homes, offices, recreation facilities and businesses through composting. They've designed a range of beautiful terra cotta pots and containers for different uses, with clear attention to the range of aesthetic preferences customers have and the varying contexts in which they live and work. Once clients have chosen the appropriate vessel for their needs, Daily Dump provides ongoing in-home service to help teach composting, maintain and adjust people's piles, and deal with pests and keep the unit clean. Like a cell phone company, they offer several different service plans depending on how self-sufficient their customers feel, with...
Australian architect, Andrew Maynard has been featured here a couple of times, always amid abundant praise for his inspired, smart, compact shelter designs. His work is always original and elegant, often mobile and usually green. I've just gotten the brief on his newest project and while I'm immediately enamored with it for its levity, visual presentation and complete subversion of building conventions, the verdict's still out on my overall opinion of its livability. Corb V2.0 is a multi-family housing complex that defies the structural limitations which lead to hierarchy and envy amongst residents sharing a many-story building: namely, the units' locations are fluid, rotating regularly from ground level to penthouse. Sound strange? I think so. These may appear to be employing the...
by Worldchanging LA blogger, Foster Kerrison
On December 6th, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pushed a button at a gate on the Los Angeles Aqueduct, returning water to the Owens River for the first time since 1913.
As cataloged in Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, and dramatized in Roman Polanski's Chinatown, the infamous Los Angeles "water grab" in the Owens Valley 200 miles to the north has become legendary. While the debate will never be completely settled, it is generally accepted that LA interests bought off local officials in the Owens Valley, guaranteeing that city engineer William Mulholland would be able to build his 233 mile aqueduct in 1913, siphoning water to the San Fernando Valley, and allowing one of the world's largest megacities to develop.
Last week's staged...