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Hide Your Piano In Your Dining Table

TreeHugger — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:33:31 +0000

In yet an other great example of combining functions to take up less space, Georg Bohle builds a piano into a dining table. For that matter, you can have music while you dine. "The pianotable offers a dinner with the accompaniment of a piano. The piano player takes a seat at the dining table."...

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Mast Humidifier Works Without Electricity, Smells Lemony

TreeHugger — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:18:13 +0000

Here is the kind of simple, minimalist, elegant design that just makes me smile. Mast is a humidifier designed by Shin Okada and crafted by Masuya Koubou out of Japanese cypress. "Known for its high-quality timber, rot-resistant qualities and lemony scent, the thinly sliced Hinoki mast absorbs water from the hull and diffuses it, and its intrinsic aroma, into the room." Instead of electricity and a fan, just capillary action....Read the full story on TreeHugger

Interview: Tony Gale, Corporate Architect at Starbucks

TreeHugger — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:49:53 +0000

Via Starbucks

As Jaymi noted in Green Mood Lighting for Starbucks! Switching 8,000 Stores to LEDs, Starbucks is going through a big makeover, and is aiming for LEED certification of all of its stores starting in 2010. With over 16,000 stores worldwide, going green is a big deal. Corporate Architect Tony Gale used to be Chief Architect for the City of Seattle, the kind of job where you do the tough stuff, working with agencies, communities, entrenched interests and NIMBYs on policy, directio...

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Green Roofs Help Fill Buildings: Good for Business As Well as the Environment

TreeHugger — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:23:03 +0000

Image via Plant Fantasies

Green roofs keep buildings cool, reduce heat island effect and provide habitat for insects and birds; they are wonderful whether or not people can see them. But they also are great amenities for people in the buildings. Older, lower buildings are well suited for them, if their structure can be beefed up to support them.

A neat one just opened at 250 Hudson Street in New York that is accessible by the tenants of the building. While green roofs aren't cheap, the developer thinks it's worth the cost....

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Jargon Watch: “Transportation Energy Intensity” of Buildings

TreeHugger — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:36:23 +0000

Image via: Cycling.com A few years ago, Alex Wilson of Green Building Advisor wondered how much energy was being used commuting to offices, versus the actual energy consumed by the offices. After all, we going to all of this effort and expense to make our buildings more energy efficient, but is it meaningful in the face of all the travelling people do to get there? Wilson did the math.

I started by collecting a bunch of data from government sources: the average commuting distance by U.S. workers; the breakdown o... Read the full story on TreeHugger

For Green Design To Be Good Design, It Must Be Beautiful and Functional Today, Tomorrow–and Yesterday

TreeHugger — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:40:21 +0000

Image via Greenpeace Apple remains our culture’s most lauded example of great design. But could it be that the company considered to have reached the pinnacle of design is, in fact, an impostor? The definition of good design is changing. It used to be that design which combined form and function in delightful and unexpected ways was good enough. But in the 21st century, that’s just the price of entry. Good design today has to be beautiful and functional not just today, but tomorrow and yesterday....

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US Buildings Account for 40% of Energy and Materials Use

TreeHugger — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:15:26 +0000

Whilst unearthing stuff for another article I turned over a stone that revealed some rather startling figures about the environmental impact of the built environment. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the guys who manage the LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) rating system, came up the following figures: In the United States alone, buildings account for: • 72% of electricity consumption, • 39% of energy use, • 38% of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, • 40% of raw materials use, • 30% of waste output (136 million tons annually), and • 14% of potable water consumption....

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The Sage House is Almost Off the LEED Scale

TreeHugger — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:10:24 +0000

Images by © Mike Dean Photography via Jetson Green

We don't as many single family houses as we used to; location and scale have to be considered as well. So it is a joy to show Arbor South Architecture, PCs Sage House, designed for USGBC founder David Gottfried. It is green through and through, but it is also a modest 1447 square feet on an infill lot. Jetson Green's Preston, perhaps the world's most popular LEED ac...

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Russia’s Architecture: In Jeopardy

Mark Lamster — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:13:37 +0000

Earlier this week, a crowd of passionate architects and city planners gathered at the Schusev State Architecture Museum, in Moscow, for the release of a new report on the state of architectural preservation in that city, written collaboratively by two advocacy groups, the Moscow Architectural Preservation Society (MAPS) and SAVE Europe’s Heritage. The findings were disturbing, to say the least. Many of the city’s most prized structures, from the neoclassical Bolshoi Theater to the Mayakovskaya Metro station (left), a landmark of the avant-garde, are in dire jeopardy, as are countless less famous places that together give Moscow its essential character.

Of course, Moscow residents doesn’t need a report to tell them that their city’s architectural patrimony is in danger any more than they need a weather advisory to tell them there’s snow on the ground in February. They need only look out their windows. The city’s brutal climate takes a toll on anything that stands outdoors. But the larger threat might just be rapacious developers, lately deterred by the economic downturn but typically contemptuous of anything that might stand in their way, including Russia’s poorly enforced preservation laws.

“We want Moscow to know that the international community cares about how it treats its architecture, that these are internationally significant buildings,” says Clementine Cecil, one of the founders of MAPS and a coauthor of the report. “Moscow is being destroyed more quickly by the bulldozer than any other European city and our motivation in writing the report was to present the case for another approach.”

The study also includes a chapter on St. Petersburg, where more than one hundred buildings have been destroyed over the last six years, even as many were on official state “protected” lists.

The Tower Formerly Known as Sears

Mason Currey — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:17:44 +0000

Today, the Sears Tower is officially being rechristened Willis Tower, in honor of its new principle tenant, the London insurance broker Willis Group Holdings. (The Sears company itself has not occupied the building since 2004.) Although newspapers and blogs have been busy reporting on the inevitable backlash from Chicago residents, who insist they will always call it the Sears, I think that Willis’s claim that people will eventually accept the name is probably correct. Old habits die hard, but die they do–just look at the MetLife Building. And while I sympathize with the folks over at the online petition It’s the SEARS Tower, I also can’t help thinking that, hey, it could be a lot worse. Willis is a mercifully neutral, unoffensive name. Chicagoans should feel lucky that they’re not waking up this morning to the new Tropicana Tower, Time Warner Cable Tower, or Margaritaville Enterprises Tower.