Design & Architecture

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

Back in the day, you told the kids to go play outside; the outdoors, the street, the park, they were the rec rooms. When they got to be teenagers, they went and hung out with friends. Some got into trouble; most didn't. Things changed. Even though crime rates have dropped to the lowest level in decades, cities like New York are as clean as Disneyland and bikes are cool again, Architecture professor Dana Cuff can say to the Times:

“There is a rise in home technology, all your friends are online, and there are far fewer safe, interesting public spaces to hang out in,” she said. “All of these things come together, and p...

Finally, after years of criticizing just about everything going on in Dubai, even the so-called green twisting tower that everyone else seems to love, a project that is not, well, dubious. X-Architects have designed Xeritown to be "a novel example of man and nature working in harmony, an entire town is to be built along a north-south axis to take advantage of cool breezes blowing in off the sea." It is sort of like Foster's

Car designed by architect Zaha Hadid is missing a few things, like headlights...

If Cars Were Designed by Architects: (as an architect I think a better title might be, if Cars were built like houses, it's not all the architect's fault)

Your car would be designed based on what kind of road you live next to. This process would take several years, even though there are already many cars on the street you live on. After your car is designed, your town government will have to approve it. Then your...

We love restoration and preservation; we also love a good diner. There is nothing like a classic American diner, except nobody goes to them anymore, McDonalds is so much more convenient. "These were places where Americans dawdled, debated and dated, kibitzing over sliders (sausage patties), sinkers (donuts), and Adam and Eve on a raft (poached eggs on toast)."

But at the Rhode Island Training School, four classic diners are being rebuilt from the ground up by teen offenders. Pam Belluck writes in the New York Times: "The whole poetry behind it is that these are kids who have been pretty much cast away emotionally and criminally, getting a chance to restore beloved ea...

Bamboo House by Kengo Kuma

Architect Kengo Kuma lecturing at the Royal Academy of Arts, being critical of Frank Gehry, mass production and industrialization of architecture:

'Sushi is a good metaphor for my architecture. The importance in sushi is to choose the best material from the place, in season.

'If the journey of the ingredients is too long, the taste of the sushi is compromised. That is a problem that can't be solved by modern technology, and that programme of using local material in season is the secret of good taste, and the secret of my style.' ::Architects' Journal...

Andreas Feininger

Richard Florida writes about the decline of the sprawling exurb toward urban neighbourhoods and inner suburbs, suggesting it isn't just about the price of gas.

"But what's happening here goes a lot deeper than the end of cheap oil. We are now passing through the early development of a wholly new geographic order – what geographers call “the spatial fix” – of which the move back toward the city is just one part.

Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age – the geographic expression of mass production. Low-cost mortgages, massive highway systems and suburban infrastructure projects fuelled the industrial engine of postwar capitalism,...

all images STARP estudi

Here is one way to minimize one's impact on the environment when building on a slope- follow it. H Arquitectes (David Lorente, Josep Ricart, Xavier Ros, Roger Tudó) built this cute little 109 m2 (1179 SF) number in Costa Brava, Spain.

"this project looks to respect the natural environment on this strongly slopped plot with dense Mediterranean vegetation. We tried to modify as little as possible the environment by building the house on a slope, and thus reducing the land movements, foundation and generation of waste products. We also have maintained the vegetation in order to not lose the current shade...

Sutton, UK

Even as the British real estate market crashes with as much of a thud as the American one did, and even though local residents and some environmentalists are against them, the British government is still planning to build up to ten "eco towns" as utopian visions of carbon-neutral 21st century housing. The Guardian looks at three existing prototypes:

Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm

"Homes include rainwater harvesting and solar panels, and there is a vacuum-sorted underground waste removal system. Residents are given colour-coded biodegradable bags for their wast...

Christian Science Monitor has published a totally charming story about how Dr. Frank E. Fish was inspired to "bio-mimic" a fan blade design, upon viewing a Humpback Whale sculpture in a Boston MA gift shop. There are prospective efficiency gains from re-designed wind turbine blades, also, based on this "discovery". Fish, a biology professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, is now using this technology perfected by nature to produce fans with serrated blades that use 20 percent less electricity than traditional models. This finding contradicts conventional designs that strive for the ...

I used to be a strict modernist; my role at TreeHugger was to demonstrate that green design could be wonderful and cool and I filled the site with all kinds of modern houses with some claim, often weak, for being green. Those houses became less common on the site in recent times, as I worried more about house size, the appropriateness of single family dwellings on big suburban lots, and trying to justify my love of clean, modern design with my concern about the use of fossil fuels or building materials that cannot be maintained in a world made by hand.

With some trepidation I recently posted

We were previously appalled at the new Disney Dream Home (read Disney's New Dream Home: Worse Than We Dreamed or go direct to the appalling video on the hideous website with the nauseating music. We concluded that Walt is spinning in his cryogenic cylinder.

Now David Rakoff of the New York Times visits it, and comes to much the same conclusion. "All this is worlds away from Disneyland’s original utopian domicile, the 1957 Monsanto House of the Future, sponsored by that company’s plastics division. Meant to re...

One can plunk a two storey house on a big lot in the Slovenian suburbs, "surrounded by accumulation of anonymous cliché two story individual houses," or you can "define another kind of domestic environment. The house HB is a redefinition of a specific from of traditional house, of low and elongated rural typology."

While we have not shown a lot of big suburban houses on TreeHugger for a while, the HB house by Matija Bevk and Vasa J. Perović of bevk perović arhitekti has some interesting attributes that are worth noting. ...

We have prattled on about how new technologies will change mass production into mass customization, and how Unto this Last, a store/factory in London, is a prototype of things to come: Instead of driving the minivan off to IKEA, you walk down the street to your neighbourhood CNC equipped shop, choose the design that suits your needs, choose your plywood and size, and they cut them out on the spot.

Roy from Ponoko visited the London shop, and describes it:

"The beauty is the production is entirely visible from the shop - I stood watching for a while captured by that peculiarly mesmerising qualit...

If you’re a college student or recent grad out hunting for a green job or internship there’s a new online community launched by Experience, a career-advice and job search services provider, that’s aimed just at you. In fact, it hopes to help various organizations nationwide hire interns for positions that help support environmental protection and the development of clean energy sources as well.

...

It was the competition to end all competitions; take some food, add some architecture, with a dash of fun and here's what you get. Over 100 top architects worldwide submitted proposals for this jelly mould competition that ends up with the top ten entrants being cast in....jello. Part of the London Festival of Architecture, it's all for a good cause--Article 25,a disaster relief and design charity--and it challenged the architectural soul and notion of structure and technology. Said one (Will Alsop) : "I loved doing this, I had to mental...

As Mairi Beautyman pointed out not too long ago, The New School in NYC has been taking significant steps in a greener direction by offering degrees for students in environmental programs taking a holistic approach to design through the Tishman Environment and Design Center.

But now there’s word that they’ve begun a new environmental studies program focused on New York City and the urban environment in a bid to help students prepare to tackle the challenges posed by the reality that experts predict that a majority of the world’s population will live, work and play in large ...

Every summer we rant about the retailers who leave the doors of their air conditioned stores open to attract customers in, while the units work overtime to cool the sidewalk. We might just rant, but over at Racked, they are doing something about it; they have started a section of their website called This Store Blows, where readers are invited to send in submissions of photos of stores egregiously wasting energy and creating greenhouse gases for no purpose at all. These are all in New York, but if you have any examples from where you live, put them up on Flickr tagged treehuggerstorefront and let us know in comments, or

Image via Sparking Tech

We're looking for a full-time blogger who can cover the latest, hippest, greenest gadgets and electronics. We are looking for someone who has in-depth knowledge and passion about this topic, can identify and explore current and emerging trends, un...

Victorian houses in Toronto

It's all very nice to talk about green, energy efficient housing from the ground up, but what do you do if you live in an old Victorian house with solid brick walls? As Louise Bloom of the South East England Regional Assembly told the Guardian, 'Eco design is very sexy, but it's good to see what ordinary householders can do. The majority of our housing is old, so it's important to put across the message that a lot can be done to improve it.'

One Brighton area family spent eight months insulating floors and walls, adding solar hot water and radiant heating to cut C...

Vacant Lot is an exploration of land use in inner city areas. As part of the London Festival of Architecture some abandoned and derelict patches of land in deepest east end London have been turned into a beautiful oasis of green (vegetables). Forget about allotments--so far away and hard to get to. Instead, seventy individual bags containing in all a half ton of soil have been distributed to form this instant garden. Working with local residents in a subsidised housing project, the architectural firm

The new HSBC headquarters is over half a million square feet of green goodness, with rainwater collection, drought resistant landscaping, renewable energy, paper-free cafeteria all topped off with a green roof and going for LEED Gold certification. What could be wrong with that?

For one thing, 3,000 employees formerly working in Chicago are now commuting to " Mettawa, once predominantly a horse farm, chosen in part because of its open space and rural setting. The village, with only 500 people and an area of about five square miles, is so small that it does not have a village hall."

...

After last year’s seemingly endless summer of toxic toy revelations, it’s been awhile since we made a whole lot of neat toy recommendations here at TreeHugger. But it seems there’s a great set of 3D Puzzles from ImagiPlay that just may be able to help entertain your little one this summer between trips to the beach and time spent outdoors rediscovering nature itself.

With a Rocking Horse, Lion, Elephant & Calf, Clown Car, Train, Tugboat and Cow and Calf available, these ImagiPLAY toys are fair trade, sustainable, and non-toxic so you won’t have to worry a bit about how they were produced, where they ca...

Image from angus_mac_123

We've all seen the length to which China has gone in order to burnish its environmental credentials ahead of the Olympics. Whether it be building sparkling new sustainable facilities for the Games or "forcing" good weather through unconventional means, China has been doing its utmost to ensure it not be perceived as eco-insensitive. The big question, however, remains: Will it stay green?

Tom Bolton discovered the first black hole using the 75 inch reflector at the David Dunlap Observatory just north of Toronto; how sad to see him sitting on the steps, crying, as the University of Toronto kicks him out and shuts it down, as they sell this green oasis to developers. The university says you can't do good work there anymore because of light pollution; they will take the hundred million or so dollars and invest it in the astronomy program. Bolton disagrees, telling the National Post: “If [the university] had talked to me, I would have told them how we could be doing world-class research,” he said. With a modest investment, the university could have...

David Brussat of the Providence Journal reviews Jim Kunstler's World Made By Hand more coherently than I did, and concludes with a lovely description of how buildings should be designed for a world without oil.

" We must start to think about an architecture that makes environmental sense, or someday we will indeed be forced to make our houses by hand. Architects must embrace new buildings with windows that open and close, rooms arrayed around courtyards, designed to take advantage of natural air and natural light. They should use natural materials that take less energy to make and transport to building...