Greentainer
An Exposure Architects project to create an eco-sustainable building and to reduce CO2 emissions, the Greentainer uses available resources and a solar panel to power the small housing unit, which could be used on an existing site as an accessory building or as a small cabin space in a remote location.
Use of smartwindow, my project may be influenced on this.
The Song Jiang hotel
This is the one of the best Architecture in China, The Song Jiang hotel. Located near Shanghai, the Song Jiang district has become a very famous sustainable architecture in China because this hotel was designed by the great sustainable hotel design for the green building on it.
The proposed of the hotel that designed by the firm Atkins has create the 400-bed resort that located in a 100 meter deep quarry in province and will consists of restaurants,cafes,sport facilities and even an underwater public area and guestroom of course. The design of the building is meant to reflect the natural landscape of the quarry. With the great location in Shanghai ,I’m sure that you’ll be enjoy your time in this hotel with the other tourists from whole over the world that interest with its natural beauty and sprawling landscapes.
Possible inspiration to the existing cliff in wharf? I think so
recycled Architecture
Glass House
This is a house made with reclaimed glass. I am unaware who built it or when it was built, but according to the flicker description there has been a long struggle to keep this historical work of art standing.
Highway House:
This house was built from dismantled highway pieces. In 2006 Pedini, a civil engineer used steel and concrete left as waste, from a $14.6 billion highway construction project in Boston, to make the "Big Dig House" in just 3 days. The house, which is now on a hill in Lexington, is 4,300-square feet large. The house cost $645,000 to build and kept tons of steel and concrete from ending up in the dump.
Scrap House:
Some save scrap in their garage to build stuff for their homes. Others find scrap at garbage dumps and use it to build a home. This is a 700 sq ft single-family house built for Earth Day 2005from salvaged scrap material. The house has furniture, a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, a deck, and a yard. Watch the video and listen to where some of the scrap comes from and how much it all cost. Check out the funky music in the background too. For more on the scrap house project visit Scrap House .
This is a house made with reclaimed glass. I am unaware who built it or when it was built, but according to the flicker description there has been a long struggle to keep this historical work of art standing.
Highway House:
This house was built from dismantled highway pieces. In 2006 Pedini, a civil engineer used steel and concrete left as waste, from a $14.6 billion highway construction project in Boston, to make the "Big Dig House" in just 3 days. The house, which is now on a hill in Lexington, is 4,300-square feet large. The house cost $645,000 to build and kept tons of steel and concrete from ending up in the dump.
Scrap House:
Some save scrap in their garage to build stuff for their homes. Others find scrap at garbage dumps and use it to build a home. This is a 700 sq ft single-family house built for Earth Day 2005from salvaged scrap material. The house has furniture, a kitchen, a bathroom, two bedrooms, a deck, and a yard. Watch the video and listen to where some of the scrap comes from and how much it all cost. Check out the funky music in the background too. For more on the scrap house project visit Scrap House .
Catherine Mohr builds green
"Sometimes the things you least expect have a bigger effect than any of the other things you are trying to optimise"
"How green can we be?"
Making green modular homes with LA architect Marmol Radziner
'Homes nowadays have to integrate technology'
Redefining the Urban Jungle
Redefining the Urban Jungle
Thanks to French botanist Patrick Blanc, Plant Walls—vertical gardens attached to hotels and museums—are sprouting up in cities worldwide
by Amber Haq
Greenery is the new chic. The latest must-have design element is an indoor (or sometimes outdoor) jungle courtesy of 53-year-old French botanist, designer, and entrepreneur Patrick Blanc. From luxury hoteliers and chi-chi boutique owners to big-name architects such as Renzo Piano and Jean Nouvel, seemingly everyone these days wants one of Blanc's vertical gardens to grace their latest edifices.
Blanc's brainchild, called Le Mur Végétal, or Plant Wall, is a dense sheet of vegetation that can grow against any surface, or even in midair. It works by doing away entirely with dirt, instead growing plants hydroponically in felt pockets attached to a rigid plastic backing. First exhibited in 1994 at the International Garden Festival in Chaumont-sur-Loire, France, the Plant Wall immediately caught the public's attention.
A first commission came from the Paris city council for the capital's Parc Floral. Since then, Blanc has won more than 100 commissions worldwide, from São Paolo to Seoul. His latest and highest-profile: a huge exterior Plant Wall mounted on Paris' new Quai Branly art museum.
"Blanc has single-handedly created a new style of 20th-century garden," says French landscape artist Pascal Cribier, known for his work on the Tuileries gardens west of Paris' Louvre Museum. "He has an incredible understanding of the plant world, as if he were able to communicate with it." Indeed, Blanc's passion for botany is so profound that he has even dyed his hair green.
GREENOVATION.
Born in Paris in 1953, Blanc has dedicated his life to the study of plants. As a child, he was obsessed with aquariums, realizing with surprise that the philodendrons in his fish tank survived without any earth. "The idea that plants need earth to grow is rot," he says with typical excitement. "We've been sold that idea ever since we got thrown out of the Garden of Eden."
At 12, Blanc began experimenting with growing plants sans earth, suspending philodendrons on irrigated fiberglass supports mounted on a wall. By age 19, he was exploring the jungles of Cameron Highlands in Malaysia and Khao Yai in Thailand, studying indigenous vegetation on rocks and tree trunks and under waterfalls, "and generally avoiding tigers."
But it wasn't until 1988, when he trademarked the Plant Wall concept, that Blanc began to make the leap from botany to design. The Plant Wall itself is quite sophisticated, involving layers of plastic, metal, and air to provide a rigid frame, temperature control, and air circulation. The plants grow in small pockets of felt-like plastic that is nonbiodegradable to avoid rotting. They are irrigated through a system of plastic pipes that distribute nutrient solution.
CITY GARDENS.
The choice of plants is different for each project and lies entirely in the hands of Blanc, whose expertise comprises intimate knowledge of plants' growth criteria. "None of my walls resemble each other, as everything depends on location, climate, and aesthetic objectives," he says. In all, it takes about five weeks to create a Plant Wall, at a cost of about €500 per square meter, or $60 per square foot. The walls are designed to last up to 30 years.
Blanc attributes his growing success to a shift in thinking about cities and urban spaces. "We need to reconcile city dwellers' needs and nature's needs," he says. And with space increasingly at a premium in cities, gardens have to go vertical, he says. While high-profile commissions have made Blanc famous, he envisions far more modest applications for Plant Walls: in parking lots, housing projects, train stations, and even underneath bridges.
No doubt, the Musée du Quai Branly has put Blanc into the big time. Conceived by President Jacques Chirac, the newly inaugurated museum features the art and culture of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. The $300 million building was designed by French architect and longtime Blanc collaborator Jean Nouvel. Blanc's south-facing Plant Wall, some 8,600 square feet (800 square meters), contains 15,000 plants from 170 species originating in North America, Europe, Himalaya, China, and Japan.
In the works: an installation for the Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul and a project at the Caixa Forum Museum on Madrid's Avenida del Prado. In 2007, Blanc foresees jobs including an office tower in Qatar and a joint project with interior designer Andrée Putman at the Morgans Hotel in New York.
GROWING HOPE.
Aside from the glamorous world of architecture and interior design, Blanc has a social mission. His latest pet project is to bring Plant Walls to the downtrodden Paris housing projects where youths rioted for weeks in the fall of 2005. Blanc calls these spaces "where man has given up on life," and says he hopes greenery would provide people "an excuse for positive social activity and interaction with each other and nature."
Idealistic, to be sure. But Blanc's success to date suggests that walls of greenery affect people in profound ways. "Whether it's for scientific ends or aesthetic purposes," he says, "nature should be allowed to create surprise where we least expect it."
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art
Kanazawa, Japan
2004
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2006/gb20061004_381966.htm?chan=innovation_architec
Webb Bridge, Melbourne
Designed by Denton Corker Marshall (DCM), very organic.
This bridge is perhaps very relevant and inspiring to the development to by folie
This bridge is perhaps very relevant and inspiring to the development to by folie
Shipping Container Architecture
Temporary and permanent: attainable, recycled, thus ecofriendly architecture
Norman Foster: Building on the green agenda
Architect Norman Foster discusses his own work to show how computers can help architects design buildings that are green, beautiful and "basically pollution-free." He shares projects from throughout his career, from the pioneering roof-gardened Willis Building (1975) to the London Gherkin (2004). He also comments on two upcoming megaprojects: a pipe to bring water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, and the new Beijing airport.
Followup article on this video: http://www.lunchoverip.com/2007/01/dld07_norman_fo.html
Star architect Norman Foster talks about "the green agenda" and the nature of sustainability. Green is the most important item in today's agenda, he says, "and green is cool". All the projects that are inspired by the green agenda are about a celebratory lifestyle, celebrating the places and the spaces which determine quality of life. He quotes Thomas Friedman about the most important thing that happened in 2006: "that living and thinking green hit main street". When did that kind of awareness of the planet first appear? Foster tracks it back to the first "outside" pictures of the Earth, at the end of the 1960s, which effectively gave birth to the environmental movement. Before the collapse of the URSS, Foster says, I was privileged to meet several cosmonauts: they were the first true environmentalists, they were filled with pioneering passion.
The digital revolution is coming to the point where the virtual world finally connects with the physical world. The digital is becoming humanized. It has the friendliness, immediacy, orientation of the real world. How have computers transformed architecture and our approach to cities? A typical energy consumption pattern in industrial societies is 22% industry, 8% transportation of goods, 26% transportation of people, 44% buildings. "This means that 70% of our total energy consumption is influenced by the way our cities and our infrastructure are designed". How are they designed? Take Detroit, very car dependent, the city expands, consuming more and more land and energy. If you compare Detroit with a city like Munich or other European cities, where walking, cycling and public transportation play a bigger role, a city that's only twice as dense is really using only one-tenth of the energy. If you want to generalize you can demonstrate that as the density increases, the energy consumption is dramatically reduced (he shows graphs).
Can computers help design "greener" buildings? In the late 60s-early 70s Foster designed the Willis Building in Ipswich (UK), with a garden on the roof that is at a time an insulating layer and a community space. Since, computers have made it possible to design more celebratory architectures. He runs through examples of his work: the library of the Free University in Berlin (picture above right) also known as "the brain", whose design enables the building to be ventilated to consume radically less energy, "really working with the forces of nature" (one-third of the energy consumption of a typical library); the Chesa Futura, a wooden apartment building in the Swiss Alps (picture above left) that was entirely plotted by computers so that the building components could be cut by machine with a very high precision, "and then we covered them with the oldest technology: hand-cut wood shingles"; the Gerkin in London; etc. "Technology is now available to create buildings so clean that are basically pollution-free".
He closes by pointing at two major projects. The Dead Sea is, well, dying, but there is a project to rescue it by creating a pipe to bring in water from the Red Sea, 170 km away. "What if instead of being only a pipe it was a lifeline, used as the centerpiece of the transformation of the whole region?". Large-scale infrastructure is also inseparable from communication, which, be it virtual or physical, is central to society. China in the next 10 years will build 400 new airports. Foster is working on the new one in Beijing, which will be huge, but he wants it to be "green and compact despite its size": "it will be about the human experience of travel". Foster ends with this line: "Who is going to crack our dependence on fossil fuels? Inspiration is more likely to come from China, India and other emerging countries" than from the US and Europe.
'Organic' Architecture: Fallingwater
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
"...[Wright] sends out free-floating platforms audaciously over a small waterfall and anchors them in the natural rock. Something of the prairie house is here still; and we might also detect a grudging recognition of the International Style in the interlocking geometry of the planes and the flat, textureless surface of the main shelves. But the house is thoroughly fused with its site and, inside, the rough stone walls and the flagged floors are of an elemental ruggedness."
— Spiro Kostof. A History of Architecture, Settings and Rituals. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. p737.
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