EAMES: The Architect and The Painter
It’s about time somebody made a film about Charles and Ray Eames.
Nice photo set at Inhabitat of the latest addition to NYC’s High Line, a park that follows an old train track through the city.
Great video about rooftop gardening in NYC
The GrowHaus
This post by Ellen Sabina originally appeared on JustMeans, a blog on sustainable business.
Finding healthy sustainable food in the middle of the city can be difficult, particularly in areas that qualify as food deserts. Such is the case in the Elyria-Swansea neighborhood in Denver, Colorado, where the nearest real grocery store is a Walmart supercenter that is three miles away. It’s industrial, it’s low income, it’s primarily Latino. But it also happens to be home to a very large greenhouse taking on a very large sustainable food project.
Tiny apartment
Steve Sauer shows his 182-square-foot Seattle condo.
What I really wanted was one place with exactly what I needed and wanted. Quality is more important than quantity for me, and extra space only a problem.
Plumen lighting
We’ve seen these kinds of designer CFL concepts before, but here’s one that has actually made it to market. The Plumen 001 is currently available in Europe and is coming to America soon. While compact fluorescents will no doubt be replaced by LED bulbs in the near future, these are still a much cooler and more efficient way to light up a space than with traditional incandescents.
The name “Plumen” is derived from plume, “a bird’s show feather, designed to attract attention to a bird’s prowess and beauty.”
(via Creativity)
Passive houses
There’s an interesting piece in The New York Times about passive houses which are designed to use up to 90 percent less heating and cooling energy than a conventional house. That’s kind of a big deal.
America’s drafty building methods account for as much as 40 percent of its primary energy use, 70 percent of its electricity consumption and nearly 40 percent of its carbon-dioxide emissions.
As Alex Steffen points out on Worldchanging, America is woefully behind Europe and Asia in designing efficient homes (not to mention urban development, product design, clean energy and so on). Improving building efficiency standards would go a long way towards addressing our dangerous reliance on fossil fuels.
Infographic details below…
Green roofs
Screw solar panels. For a much greater and more immediate impact on your energy use, you should really take a look at rooftop vegetation. I recently saw the list of benefits at the magnificent Denver Botanic Gardens and haven’t been able to stop thinking about how perfect green roofs are.
Among the many benefits:
- Reduce cooling costs by 50-90%
- Reduce heating costs
- Lower carbon emissions
- Mitigate the “heat island” effect found in urban areas
- Reduce stormwater run-off
- Natural habitat creation
- Filter pollutants out of the air, which lowers diseases such as asthma
- Filter pollutants and heavy metals out of rainwater
- Help to insulate a building for sound
- Agricultural space
- Increase lifespan of the roof
- Increase real estate value
Sure, they take a little maintenance, but the return on that investment would be huge. If anybody out there is looking for a new career path, I would highly suggest getting into green roofs. As global temperatures continue to rise, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be building these on just about every roof in every city in the world.
ThinBike
This is fucking beautiful. The ThinBike was designed by Graham Hill (founder of the excellent TreeHugger.com) so that you can turn the handlebars sideways and the pedals downward for much narrower storage.
Space comes at a premium in cities like New York and given that over 50 percent of the population lives in cities, a number that is rising, it’s important that we develop small space solutions of all kinds.
It’s definitely one of those “Duh, why didn’t I think of that?” kind of ideas. But anyone who lives in a smaller home knows that every inch counts, which makes this a pretty amazing concept.
It is something to be able to paint a lovely picture, or carve a magnificent statue, but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere in which we live.
