Some of the AIA San Francisco Home Tours took us to parts of this city by the bay that are changing so rapidly, they are barely recognizable. The much-anticipated residential development, Arterra High-Rise, is one such spanking new project. The building is in what is part of a larger, 300-acre development known as Mission Bay. This part of San Francisco, along the south waterfront is built almost entirely on fill and represents the residual economic effects of the late 1990s ‘dot-com boom’, much like the mid 1880s gold rush led to the rapid development of what is now the Financial District in San Francisco.
Recycled shipping containers are becoming more and more popular as a viable sustainable building material, and this year’s West Coast Green show house highlights this growing trend. The showroom highlight of this year’s event is Lawrence Group’s SG Blocks Container House, fashion out of five shipping containers and a plethora of other eco-friendly building materials. As a prefab, the home is affordable, cute, and easy to assemble — demonstrated by the fact that the model at West Coast Green was erected in less than 5 hours.
Chrysler unveiled three EVs this week, one from each of its divisions. There’s a Jeep SUV EV, a Chrysler minivan EV, and a Dodge sports car EV, all slated to go on sale in the U.S. in 2010 as 2011 models. If the automaker can hit that mark, Chrysler’s EVs will beat the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt to market. I bet that fact didn’t escape Chrysler execs.
Chrysler’s EV development team, ENVI, promises that these vehicles will allow drivers to go about their merry way without making major changes to their driving style. The Jeep, for instance, will be a body-on-frame four-wheel-drive vehicle, while the sporty Dodge will be rear-wheel drive.
The vehicles don’t have names yet, but Chrysler has published specs:
Dodge EV:
200 kW = 268 hp
0-60 in under 5 seconds
Top speed 120+ mph
150-200 mile range
Jeep EV:
200 kW = 268 hp
0-60 in 9.0 seconds
Two- or four-wheel drive
400 miles (with help from a small gasoline engine)
Chrysler EV:
190 kW = 268 hp
0-60 in 8.7 seconds
Seats seven
400 miles (with help from a small gasoline engine)
With a structural system reminiscent of Shigeru Ban’s Paper Church, Architect Li Xianggang’s Paper-Brick House showcasing at this year’s annual Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy is a mesmerizing paper fortress. Composed of paper tubes, paper boxes, and adhesive tape (and some metal connections), the materials work together to mimic a brick house. And something about it makes me nostalgic for the cardboard forts of my youth which only required an empty basement, a lot of boxes, and my imagination fully intact.
Bottled water is anathema to many hardcore environmentalists. Taking water from the land and sky, putting it into containers made from oil, and shipping it around the world defies core eco-friendly values in many ways. Yet premium bottled water producer FIJI Water is aggressively marketing itself as green. You may have seen ads with the slogan “Our Promise, Our Progress” or “Every drop is green” and images of a bottle of FIJI Water next to a big green earth. On the bottle itself, the iconic hibiscus flower is now joined by a prominent green water droplet, and the back of the bottle invites you to visit FIJIGreen.com to find out more about the environmental impact of the water you’re drinking.
For the past nine years, Justin Rudd has organized a monthly beach cleanup of the beach around Granada Avenue in Long Beach, California. On the third Saturday of every month, volunteers show up at 10 AM to comb the beach for garbage, socialize, and take part in keeping the natural beauty of their community intact. The 30-Minute Cleanup team provides trash bags, gloves, and refreshments courtesy of a variety of local sponsors. Over time, the event has grown and its popularity has blossomed, to the point that the average cleanup now boasts over 150 participants!
In order to encourage participation, Rudd decided to make the cleanups short, in order to emphasize the fun, positive aspect of the activity. And it worked. The cleanups have been growing in popularity since they first started, all the way back in June of 1999. At this point, the 30-Minute Beach Cleanups have become a widely recognized community event in the Long Beach area. In fact, Rudd recently received the Hal Albertson Volunteer of the Year Award from Keep California Beautiful, a non-profit dedicated to maintaining California’s natural beauty. While he’s honored to receive the award, Rudd plans to continue his efforts to keep his community litter-free and beautiful for years to come.
For more information on 30-Minute beach cleanups, click here.
Creating a sustainable building was a fusion of old-school building techniques and modern technology in the design for the Pearl Academy of Fashion. Designed by Morphogenesis, an architecture firm based in New Delhi and Pune, the academy is planned to be extremely energy efficient with the use of cooling methods traditionally found in buildings in the hot-dry desert climate of Rajasthan. Although the academy in Jaipur, India is still in the design stages, the amazing renderings of the building are already proving it should be a pretty amazing place to go to school.
West Coast Green kicked off this morning and we’re excited to reveal this year’s stunning show house: the SG Blocks Harbinger prefab! Composed of five recycled shipping containers, the home features a durable steel envelope that is capable of withstanding hurricanes in Florida and earthquakes in California. A paragon of sustainability, the Harbinger house also features FSC-certified woods, solar panels, rainwater recycling, and an Agilewaves resource monitoring system. Designed by the Lawrence Group, the prefab was fabricated in a month and assembled on-site in just 4 hours and 47 minutes!
We all know that trees are generous givers. They eliminate carbon dioxide, provide a home for little critters, and offer us shade. However, there seems to be one last untapped resource: trees can also produce small amounts of electricity. And now researchers at MIT have begun to develop a way to harness that power so trees can finally do something for themselves: track climate changes that will help minimize damage from forest fires.
This year, Americans will drink more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water. To raise awareness of the alarming problem of plastic waste, Jasmine Zimmerman created the Bottle House - an open-roofed greenhouse made from hundreds of recycled plastic bottles. It’s an excellent example of repurposing a harmful and overlooked material into one that will grow vegetation, and Jasmine plans to exhibit the greenhouse in empty lots, rooftops, parks, and vacant buildings to help spread the word. We caught up with the structure in Seattle at Bumbershoot 2008, where it was joined by a number of socially and environmentally charged installations and performances.
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