housing

Solar Leafs for Homes

- Adam Clare

Solar leafsThis is a neat idea that may or may not go with your aesthetic tastes, but should go with your green tastes. Inhabitat says that solar leafs can hang off your house while providing you power. Like leaves on trees, these leafs use the sun to make energy, and unlike trees, these solar shingles also get power from the wind.

Using a series of flexible solar cells as leaves, GROW takes the shape of ivy growing on a building- the leaves are solar cells while the wind that causes them to flutter is harvested as viable energy. Teresita hopes that the modular system would be readily available via the Moma store or Design Within Reach, rather than a commercially out-of-reach system like many traditional solar components. GROW also integrates an energy monitoring system for users to visualize their consumption. The leaves are made of 100% recyclable polyethylene, and are available in a variety of colors and opacities.

Good-Looking Green Roofs

- Adam Clare

WebUrbanist has put together a collection of green roofs and how they look around the world. There is the coolest green roof from Japan and the more mundane, but equally (or maybe more?) useful, green roofs in Scandinavia that have been in use for centuries.

Bizarrely, a bomb shelter has been designed with a green roof.

Take a look!

The Hexayurt Project

- Adam Clare

The Hexayurt Project is looking to house more people more efficiently. This simple housing design maybe able to help the world’s poor.

The Hexayurt is a prize-winning shelter you can build yourself for about $200 (cache). Suitable raw materials include common building materials (insulation boards,) hexacomb cardboard and plastic. You cut six 4′ x 8′ panels in half diagonally to make the roof, and use six more whole panels to form the walls. It takes about two hours. The design (cache) is in the public domain.

A Very Very Green Building

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

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Granted, many many years ago most places humans lived had little impact on their surrounding environment, and today we’re learning how to do that again. This time though, we got style.

Inhabitat has a story on the greenest LEED building ever built.

The building produces 15% more energy than what it consumes by using 198-panel 39.6 kilowatt solar electric system, the second largest in Wisconsin. To save on energy costs, heating and cooling will be done via a radiant system installed within the concrete floors. Proper insulation of the building, use of geothermal energy, good passive design to allow for daylighting and heating during winter and shading during summer, cross ventilation, and operable windows all contribute towards achieving this remarkable goal. Even the design of the site was carefully thought out to properly differentiate between high use and low use areas, thus diminishing the wasted energy required to heat or cool sections of the complex which would not be needed.

Natural Architecture

- Adam Clare

Natural Architecture

Using trees to create shelter is nothing new, but it’s something neat when the trees are grown in a way that provides shelter while the trees can continue to live. Indeed, regular readers may remember that furniture has been made out of growing trees in particular ways. Arborsculpture can also be taken further into actually making large buildings, and this is called natural architecture.

the ‘natural architecture’ movement aims to expand on ‘land art’
by acting as a form of activism rather than protest. this new
form of art aims to capture the harmonious connection we
seek with nature by merging humanity and nature through
architecture. the core concept of the movement is that
mankind can live harmoniously with nature, using it for our
needs while respecting its importance.

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