Casa 205 on a hillside in Vacarisses, Spain. designed by H Arquitectes.
The setting of the project is a plot with steep slopes and a great amount of trees and bushes. The aim is building a house without causing any serious impacts on the land. The house will be built on a natural rocky platform. This platform will also be used as either the exit or the garden of the house. The architects and the property developers have agreed on minimizing land movements in order to build the artificial landscaped platforms. The target is to make good use of the existing land shelves. This will allow us to preserve the natural physiognomy of the wood. The only uneven area will be the path ramp, which will cross the piece of land diagonally. This artificial ramp will communicate the street with the different plot levels.
The inner layout of the house is based on a lineal sequence of rooms of different proportions linked to the structure. There are great sliding opened areas, which will provide both harmony and versatility. The house can work as an open-plan space or as individual, closed spaces.
We are covering this house on G Living not because its the greenest building on the planet or anything, but because it the design elements, could be green. So, the ideas behind the building are very green and just might give you some ideas to put into your own future green pad.
The Baltazar Residence by Public Architects, is a small one story bungalow sat on a substandard lot between two nondescript condominiums. Within that small house lived a growing family with a modern aesthetic who wanted to take advantage of the ocean views their site offered while adding square footage. The house has a concrete base that rises out of the ground with a minimal amount of openings until the second story, where it turns into a steel frame with a glass window wall that offers a panoramic view out to the Pacific Ocean.
Container Heads around the world, start rejoicing. Yes, a new container house has been born and it’s a Texan. The developers (Numen) and family are calling it the Cordell House and here is what they have to say about their new baby.
Developer -The Cordell House is the result of a 2-year design discussion between the builders and the designers. It was conceived as an exercise in efficient building, with the most expensive aspects of the house – the structural elements and mechanical core – being partially prefabricated in a shop environment. The roof and infill floor areas are a panelized system that, in conjunction with the modular steel structure, allowed a very rapid dry-in time for the building, reducing on-site time and susceptibility to weather-related delays. This approach to construction also resulted in a home that can be substantially dismantled into component parts for reuse or recycling at the end of its useful life.
Prefabs are quickly becoming my version of porn. If I’m not careful, I could spend all day cruising the internet, looking to be titillated the latest and sexiest designs. Each one has its own unique allure, its own enormous capacity for satisfaction.
Take the Perrinepod House. The 411 on this hottie claims it can be built in three days and that its heavy pre-cast, pre-stressed concrete walls can withstand tornadoes and earthquakes. Sufficiently teased by this claim, I look more closely and find that while the walls in most standard houses have an insulation R value of 1.9, the ones on this baby are a staggering 6.8. That’s the kind of statistic that could get a prefab junkie’s blood boiling. Not only does it provide sufficient shelter, it stays cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.
Coming soon to a building near you: green! Starring: rooftop gardens! Natural lighting produced by: low-emmissivity glass! And introducing: natural ventilation! All helping to reduce the building’s operating costs by a glamorous thirty percent. And that sexy hilltop site won’t need a facelift — the architects, KMD in San Francisco, will only disturb ten percent of it during construction to reduce the impact it has on the natural landscape.
That’s hot — in an environmentally responsible sort of way.
Talking about the new headquarters for Cinepolis, the sixth largest movie multiplex chain in the world. It won’t make its debut in Los Angeles or New York. It’s not an innovation for a super-green city like Portland or Chicago. The Cinepolis Headquarters is a little further south, in Morelia, Mexico.
When you think of mushrooms, you think of dark, dank environments. I should know, as a child we grew some in our kitchen cupboard under the watchful eye of my mother. (Here’s a tip, kids: never complain of being bored, or there’s a chance you’ll be roped into “fun” experiments such as home mushroom cultivation.)
But now, a designer from Down Under has flipped this concept on its head. The mushroom floor lamp is the brainchild of Australian designer Simon Duff, whose innovative designs promise to illuminate any dark, dank environment. Embedded in the mushrooms gills are low wattage LED lights, which offer the user the ability to change color and intensify the light source. The good part is, not only can you create your own mood lighting, you’ll be doing so in an energy efficient way.
The saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” holds true on the other side of the Atlantic, too. The only difference is, we call it rubbish in the UK. Semantics aside, how do you transform household rubbish, especially hard-to-recycle plastic, into a new design aesthetic? Well, if you’re Brit designer Richard Liddle of Cohda Design, you invent a machine and demonstrate in front of a live audience.
Cohda Design’s innovative event took place from October 20 – 28 as part of the UK Design Council’s dot07.com festival. The public was invited to bring plastic waste items to be broken down in Cohda’s modified industrial machinery. The plastic was then re-heated, re-formed and recycled into one long spaghetti-like strand, which was then manipulated to create colorful chairs, tables and whatever else the imagination could dream up.
Who would have thought an homage to a Porsche could come in a Green package? Certainly not me. But the T-Bone house, erected in the town of Waiblingen, Germany, is exactly that. Built by Zlatko Antolovic and Alexander Wendlik’s architectural practice COAST, the house was designed to showcase the client’s love of his 1974 Porsche Targa.
The house earned its name for the so-called T-shape form of the building. Rising above glazed infills on the ground floor to a large horizontal cross section above, the home gives sweeping views of the surrounding landscape. One of the glazed infills houses the open “living room in the landscape”, which has large windows on each of three sides, while the other clear glass area is the home of the 1974 Targa.
When I think of a straw house, I imagine three little pigs and a nasty wolf. But of course, straw houses only exist in fairy tales, right?
Think again. Check out Felix Jerusalem’s Stroh Haus in Switzerland. This cool (and literally green) house is made from compressed straw bales that serve two distinct purposes: not only do they provide the building’s exterior surface (beneath a translucent siding), they serve as the structure’s soundproofing insulation.
From Chile, the country with the most superb summertime snow skiing in the new world, comes Casa Cachagua, the Forest House by F3 Arquitectos (that’s “architects” for you gringos out there).
The Forest House, located in Cachagua, Chile has created a seamless immersion and union with its forest surroundings through the use of wood for every surface of the residence. That’s right, no white stucco peaking out from underneath the forest canopy, no brick or mortar to stand in stark contrast to the natural beauty within. The floor, walls, and roof blend utterly and completely in harmony with the surrounding forest, and a tree allowed to grow over the entry porch lends to the abode a symbolic meaning that cannot be lost on even the most casual observers.
In business, location is everything. But who says you can’t be in business before you find a location (or in this case, before your location is ready)? If you’re Uniqlo, you hire innovative designers LOT-EK to create some temporary venues and jump right in. And if the concept is cool enough, you’ll generate enough free publicity to get your product noticed.
Pretty smart, right? Last year, as they waited for the completion of their swank 36,000 square foot SoHo flagship store, Uniqlo (the Japanese equivalent of H&M) dropped several modified shipping containers around New York City and opened for business.
Functioning somewhere between the style of a summer street fair (common in the city) and a fully operating retail venue, the container stores were located in nine choice New York neighborhoods, including the West Village, Jones Beach, Cobble Hill Brooklyn, Coney Island. Each had vertical strip windows cut into the exterior and was powered by an external generator. The door and ramp opened and closed via hydraulic struts and the insides were lined inside with laminated cubes for shelves.
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