picNYC Table by Haiko Cornelissen Architekten
Haiko Cornelissen Architekten designed this dining table with the intention to bring a little bit of nature into your city interior.
The picNYC is made from aluminum with sturdy square legs and a tray-like table top. Stones sit at the bottom, which is topped with soil and finally a layer of sod. Watering the sod is done by hand and drains down into the stones. Sunlight, irrigation and interior climatic conditions all determine the status of your table. Read More…
Yoyogi Village in the Shibuya, Tokyo
Yoyogi Village in the Shibuya designed by Wonderwall and other designers is a small commercial development that aims to provide a more eco-conscious alternative to the average Tokyo mall. Yoyogi Village includes an organic Italian restaurant, Code Kurkku, and a music bar where the selection is overseen by Kobayashi and hip DJ/producer Shinichi Osawa. You’ll also find a good coffee shop, Roots & Beat Coffee, alongside a travel agency, art gallery and Urban Research fashion store specializing in ‘pre-organic’ cotton clothing.
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Guerrilla Grafters in San Fransisco
A group of renegade agriculturalists called Guerrilla Grafters in San Francisco are grafting fruit-bearing branches onto public trees that otherwise don’t bear fruit. The group has created a web app to help locals find trees that might be good candidates for a new, fruit-bearing branches and provides tips on how to pull off a successful grafting.
Indoor Garden and Compost by Ferber and Dieckmann
Designers Charlotte Dieckmann and Nils Ferber have design “Parasite Farm”, a full-cycle indoor garden that raises vegetables and composts their waste into fresh soil. This indoor garden and compost system is designed to fit into your existing furniture, with a series of grow beds with grow lights and a table-mounted compost bin.
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Rooftop Hydroponic Garden NYC
New York restaurateur John Mooney has redefined garden with a rooftop that is now a home to melons, mint, garbanzo, tomatoes, lettuce, and much more. . He is the first chef in the U.S. to grow all of his produce on a rooftop farm. Their produce is grown in sixty vertical tower hydroponic systems, designed and engineered by Future Growing LLC., of Orlando, Florida. Unlike traditional gardening methods, hydroponics uses a pH balanced ionic mineral based water solution that is pumped through a central tower that comes in contact with the plants’ roots. The Tower Garden™ uses a closed system technology to recycle 100% of the nutrients and water minimizing waste. Read More…
Aptera 2E, Three-Wheeled Electric Car
Aptera has developed an electric three-wheeled car called the Aptera 2e that goes zero to 60 in 10 seconds and can hit a top speed of 90 miles per hour. The all-electric version gets an equivalent of 200 miles per gallon and the company has discussed developing hybrid too.
Philips’ Urban Beehive
The urban beehive consists of two pieces that attach through a hole in a window. The outside part provides an entry into the main hive and holds a flower pot for the bees to gather pollen, while the inside contains honeycomb frames ready for the bees to deposit their wax.
A pull on the bottom of the hive is a smoke actuator that lets you calm the bees down before you pop off the cover or collect honey.
To make their hives, bees produce wax and propolis, a resinous mixture that varies with the bees’ environment and diet. Propolis has a structural function but is also believed to inhibit harmful pathogens in the hive and is sold as an alternative medicine. Once the health benefits of honey and propolis are better understood, the urban beehive could also have a role in the home apothecary. Read More…
Freight Farms: Grow Fresh Food in Any Environment
Freight Farms are modular, expandable, portable crop production units that can quickly and easily grow food ANYWHERE. They have the ability to quickly expand critical access to high volumes of fresh food and create local economies that can empower communities to reduce the global footprint of food in a sustainable and profitable manner. Read More…
Open-Centre Turbine, Tidal Turbine by OpenHydro
OpenHydro is an Irish energy technology company whose business is the design and manufacture of marine turbines for generating renewable energy from tidal streams. The company’s vision is to deploy arrays of tidal turbines under the world’s oceans, silently and invisibly generating electricity at no cost to the environment. The Open-Centre Turbine is designed to be deployed directly on the seabed. Installations will be silent and invisible from the surface. They will be located at depth and present no navigational hazard. Farms of Open-Centre Turbines will provide a significant and undetectable supply of clean, predictable, renewable energy. Communities that benefit from power supplied by Open-Centre Turbine technology will never be conscious of the turbines’ existence.
OpenHydro and French utility company EDF are in the final stage of deploying the first of four 16m tidal turbines off the coast of Paimpol-Bréhat.
The first stage of a project which in 2012 will create the world’s largest tidal array generating power onto the French grid. The turbines are supplied by Greenore-based OpenHydro and each has the capacity to generate over 2MW of energy.
Openhydro and its partner DCNS have now completed the assembly of the first turbine for the Paimpol-Bréhat project. The installation is performed using the custom designed installation barge, the ‘Openhydro Triskell’.
Driverless Shuttle Pod, the Future of Public Transport Unveiled at Heathrow Airport, Uk
The future of public transport has finally arrived with Heathrow Airport officially unveiling laser-guided travel pods.
The design was a joint effort between Heathrow’s owners DAA and Manufacturer ULTra PRT to prove the technology could be reliable, efficient, and most importantly, can work around complex existing infrastructure. The 22 electric pod cars replaced two diesel-powered buses that made 216 trips every day. They’re a sound solution for the endless loops that airport transportation must make. Plus, they’re not nearly as expensive as a monorail.
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Spiral Garden Museum by Influx Studio
Spiral Garden Museum is a sustainable structure that is an entry into the competition for the new Taipei city museum in Taiwan designed by Influx Studio, a Paris based architectural firm. The design of the building is very individualistic and attempts to incorporate a lot of the Taiwanese culture in order to make it rather iconic.
The basic structure of the building includes a spiraling walkway that is as tastefully artistic as it is in touch with nature, considering the greenery of the park surrounding the building. The corkscrew building has five floors, and the floor area increases as we ascend towards the top.
The building is centered on the basic idea of a walkway lining the facade of the museum enabling people to climb to the top by taking the spiraling path.
The cork-screw and spiral architectural plan of the museum comprises of a green continuous walkway along the circumference of the building leading to the rooftop.
This would provide the visitors a 360′ view of the beautiful landscape apart from experiencing the beauty of the museum from within. The spiral ramp that connects the museum from the base to the top, is set at an inclination of 4% and is a circular route that has incorporated the green elements of the adjoining natural environment.The Sky Art Terrace is where the spiral ramp stops and leads to a vertically-spread cultural exhibition open- air area. However, internally, the building is organized into segments that offer various exhibition spaces and pliable lamellas that allow the areas to be used in many different layouts. Read More…
Eco-Friendly Loft in São Paulo, Brazil by Fernanda Marques
Fernanda Marques, Brazil based architect studio has designed this sustainable winter loft for ‘Casa Cor 2010 exhibit’. The house is build with modern open-space entirely covered with recycled wood inside and out. Efficient LED lighting system reduces energy consumption. Inspired by sustainability issues, this house is expended to horizon and nature.
The architects designed a modern open plan space which houses a living area, gourmet kitchen that is equipped with upscale stainless steel appliances, bar and a video hall. The living area seems huge and this is possible due to the floor to ceiling windows and the skyscraper picture on one of the walls. Furthermore the bar has a sculpture like a mountain form behind it, which is also used for storage and captures light beautifully.
‘EcoGlobe’ for Dubai’s Technopark by James Law
James Law known for his work in ‘cybertecture‘, which is a combination of advanced technologies, architecture, and multimedia experiences for users is coming with a new project, the Technosphere. The building will create a self-breathing environment and will generate solar electricity to supplement the energy needs of the building and also integrate a distributed array of sky gardens for offices and a hotel. This concept takes the planet’s ecosystem and interprets it as a Cybertecture building that mimics the forces of nature to produce a building that is wonder for people to visit, live and work in, and be a symbol of the power of Technology.
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Bacsquare, kitchen Garden by Bacsac
Bacsquare is an ecological garden to grow berries or flowers in small garden on balconies or terraces. The bag consists of a light material and offers plants and soil ideal conditions. as developed in the year 2009 by the French company Bacsac.
The idea behind Bacsac is to make it easier to have an own smaller garden on the rooftop in big cities. Read More…
Housing Complex by 2:pm Architectures Collectives
By exploring new materials in environmentally friendly housing design 2:pm Architectures Collectives successfully replaces wood with steel for their Eco project. The feature that makes these housing units stand apart is the fact that the units do not contain any wood at all. the project is the choice of expressing a habitat in the density of implantation and two totaling 11 units.
AME-LOT Wooden Pallet Building by Malka Architecture
AME-LOT is a project created by Malka Architecture who wanted the whole process to be nature friendly.
He aimed at minimizing excess materials and utilizing them more efficiently to reduce carbon footprint. The project is destined for rue Amelot in Paris.
The skin consists of an existing module: the wooden pallet. Held using horizontal hinges, the pallets contract towards the top, allowing privacy or large openings. The modularity of the various palettes creates varied geometries, which are based on use and constantly regenerated. The reappropriation of materials recycles the existing without additional processing, which would cost energy in terms of production and create byproduct pollution. Read More…
Float, Pendant Light by Benjamin Hubert
Float pendant Light hand-turned out of Portuguese agglomerate cork blocks is a collaboration between Hubert and Scandinavian lighting manufacturer andtradition. The lamps build by Bemjamin Hubert for are . The blocks are made from recovered waste that is the result of wine cork manufacturer. Read More…
Volskar Lamp by Bleu Nature
Bleu Nature, an eco designer created this collection of lamps that merges the aesthetics of nature and design. The base of these lamps consists of a natural birch trunk and a white lacquer lampshade. Read More…
