by Elizabeth Redmond – December 19, 2007 via SustainaBlog.Org

With the portfolio of commercial and urban green building projects happening across the globe right now, how is it possible to see them all? For those of us who are construction fanatics we like to see them in person but flying to location is definitely not the most or even a sustainable way to do things. Well, as with so most everything these days, there is a solution. To increase our remote access to ongoing and completed green building projects nationwide, Building Green Inc. has teamed up with Google and the Department of Energy to bring us an interactive way to view these projects.

continue reading "Green Building Sketch-Up Models Presented in Google Earth"

by Craig Webb as told to Jade Chang – July 20, 2007 via MetropolisMag.Com

Craig Webb, a partner and project designer at Gehry Partners, discusses several of the challenges and the innovative solutions involved in the creation of New York’s Inter­ActiveCorp headquarters. The full story from our June issue can be found here.
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On most of our buildings we start with a very cut and dry program analysis of the pieces and do relationship diagrams based on those. Most of our buildings are more complex in program; this is an office building—nine floors of typical office space that need to get subdivided and laid out. Because of that, the process was truncated a bit.

continue reading "Anatomy of a Building"

by RH – December 11, 2007 via ReclaimedHome.Com

An old article on Hudson Valley Magazine lead me to singer Peggy Atwood’s site about her monolithic dome in the Catskills. She decided to have it built after nearly losing a house to a tornado in Tennessee and another near miss Upstate due to a forest fire.

Granted, all dome homes are awesome, but when I came across the Solaleya website, I knew I had discovered my latest obsession. These homes, which have the added plus of totally looking like a spaceship, actually rotate with the sun. Need I say more? THE HOUSE ROTATES WITH THE SUN!

continue reading "Attack of the Dome Homes"

by admin – December 17th, 2007 via GreenTechGazette.Com

Phoenix Motorcars may just be the Next Big Thing in electric vehicles. And, these next big things will likely be produced in Mexico according to the latest reports. Last week, I talked about the promise for lithium iron phosphate batteries (LiFePO4) taking over the electric vehicle market.

continue reading "Phoenix Motorcars Titillating Lithium Titinate Batteries"

December 16th, 2007 via dezeen.com

Swedish creative studio Medium has completed a mini art museum for children, contained in a wooden box inside a grown-up art gallery.

continue reading "Barens Konstmuseum by Jacob Dahlgren and Medium"

December 16th, 2007 via dezeen.com

This isn’t exactly new, but the last time we wrote about Alison Brooks Architects the story was very popular… so here’s The Salt House at Maldon in England, which won the RIBA Manser Medal for best new house in the UK back in October.

continue reading "The Salt House by Alison Brooks Architects"

by Rose Etherington – December 14, 2007 via dezeen.com

Forum ‘t Zand in Utrecht by architects VenhoevenCS is one of two projects to be awarded the 2007 Rietveldprijs for architecture.

continue reading "Forum ‘t Zand by VenhoevenCS architects"

by Rose Etherington – December 14, 2007 via dezeen.com

The AA Hijmans van den Bergh medical faculty in Utrecht designed by Erick van Egeraat Associated Architects is the joint winner of the 2007 Rietveldprijs for architecture. The award is shared with Forum ’t Zand by VenhoevenCS architects (see our previous story).

continue reading "AA Hijmans van den Bergh medical faculty by Erick van Egeraat"

by SwissMiss – December 14, 2007 via swissmmiss.typepad.com

Visitors enter the church through a lateral door and first see a scattered group of luminous spheres hovering in the choir. As one approaches the center of the entrance, the spheres form a giant question mark. They become a punctuation mark superposing religious symbols. As one moves through the church, the question mark decomposes. The figure becomes abstracted again in order to echo the figures of hanging cathedral lights. Contrasting the symmetry of the edifice, these luminous suspension points are like a sort of musical notation or holes punctuating the architectural volume. The question (or doubt) is absorbed by the space.

continue reading "Light installation by Robert Stadler"

December 14, 2007 via dezeen.com

Design Miami 07: Tomáš Gabzdil Libertiny of Studio Libertiny presented a project called Paper Vases at Design Miami last week, which involved laminating 700 sheets of paper into a solid block and then turning this into a vase on a lathe.

continue reading "Paper Vases by Studio Libertiny"