Category Archives: Architecture
Inking your skin is a greener affair now, with this eco-friendly tattoo parlor in Pineville on La. Highway 28 East. Known as the Natural Mystic Inc. Tattoo Dome, this tattoo shop is unlike any other seen before. Touted to be the world’s first eco-friendly parlor, its dome shape sure attracts a load of curious visitors, who end up getting inked, and grinning away with satisfaction and wonder. Stick your head out if you’re driving down the 5420 La. Highway 28 East, and you’ll see this Spongebob’s-neighbor’s-home-replica. By Mel Collier and wife Lori, the Natural Mystic studio houses 2,800 feet of enclosed floor space on 1,500 feet of soil. After much research and traveling, the Colliers came up with this building, using bamboo, a fast growing variety.
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India is making room for greener habitats for its people, starting with designer Pinakin Patel’s Hara Villas. The Hara (green in Hindi) Villas will bring to India the concept of plug-in homes, and will be India’s first prefabs. These limited edition houses will cost $26,000 and only 25 will be sold. The villas are made from local timber, with bathrooms using water conservation techniques and energy efficient lighting. Optionally, these houses can exploit the sun too. Being prefab homes, the Hara Villas have no concrete foundation. They come packed with loads of goodies to make your life worth living, including a set of china, paintings, and carpets designed by Patel himself.
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Casino Group is learning the ways of the sun, with a little help from SunPower Corp., having signed an agreement to supply an additional 20 megawatts of high-efficiency solar photovoltaic panels. Properties belonging to the Casino Group in mainland France will have their share of solar power with these solar panels being installed by the end of 2011. Under-utilized roof space and parking areas belonging to the Casino Group will play host to these solar panels, transforming into energy producing powerhouses. This will indirectly help the Casino Group reduce its carbon footprint and emission rate to quite an extent.
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We’ve seen quite a few eco-friendly and environment friendly stadiums like the Thyagaraj Stadium in New Delhi and the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban before. Here’s yet another one that takes the whole idea of involving green in sports to a whole new level. This soccer stadium in Vancouver, known as the Empire Field Stadium, has its field made partly of recycled tires, 22,450 of them in all. This soccer stadium uses 346,000 pounds of crumb rubber made from tires. This is the largest installation of crumb rubber in all of British Columbia, which has given 22,450 scrap tires a new life of sports. The rubber is used as an additive to the soil with an improved drainage and provides a level of cushioning to keep away nasty on-field injuries.
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This year’s 2010 Solar Decathlon Design Competition had 17 solar powered homes competing, brick to brick, to be the greenest of them all. The competition sure has the world understanding the need to juice the sun for a better future. The competition had over a thousand students competing to come up with the most cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive solar powered home. Though, one outshone all, the solar-juice drinking Lumenhaus. This solar powered home is spacious, spanning 800 square feet. Ranked 4th in the competition’s architecture category, the Lumenhaus designed by Virginia Tech is named for its “power of light” elements.
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Why live in a silly old concrete block apartment building, sucking energy out of the grid at every little point in your day, instead of living in a cleaner, greener and more environment friendly home? Well, Ecofabulous thought the same, and came up with this green home, for sale at just around $65,000. The home was unveiled on Friday at the 2010 Dwell on Design conference in Los Angeles. And if you’ve been picturing an amenity void tree-house, you’re in for a surprise. This home comes packed and loaded with everything you’ll find around you in your crib, with a greener shade.
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We haven’t seen the last of eco-city designs. Dubai’s Xeritown and Abu Dhabi’s Masdar city have yet another green and clean civilization design to look out for, the Al Jadida Agropolis, a self sufficient city that could show up amongst the sands of Egypt. The Nile delta is seeing a population burst in recent times, with places like Cairo and Alexandria having a population growth. The population there though is completely unsustainable. Overstretched infrastructures, satellite developments and the likes have decreased the quality of life in those areas. So, the Agropolis could be a life saving answer.
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China presents the world with the most sustainable building, a flower. The Wuhan Energy Flower, designed by Dutch company Grontmij in collaboration with Soeters Van Eldonk architects is the first in the world to receive a Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) outstanding accreditation, which isn’t really an easy achievement. Inspired by the Calla Lily flower, this building will play host to the energy center of Wuhan, with zero carbon emissions and zero energy ambitions, with the main office building standing 140 meters tall and surrounded by laboratories in the form of leaves.
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Look around the Big Apple and you’ll see incomplete woodwork of what would be a full-scale building, thanks to the recession. Well, there’s something that could cover up the mess, and give the city its beauty back. Woods Bagot, the architecture mega-firm has come up with an inflatable solution that could get rid of these open incomplete spaces. Developers waiting for money to pour back into their respective projects could now use temporary inflatable buildings in the mean time. These unused sites remain incomplete because of developers running out of finances, with taxes as much as $2 million a year. So, temporary structures enable the site developers to collect rent, and puff up in the form of steel structure wrapped in high-tech plastic fabric called EFTE with air beams stitched into it.
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Cities around the world are growing, vertically, horizontally and are being subjected to increasing populations as time passes by. This quickly developing urban jungle though is a knife in the throat of our environment, causing adverse effects on the environment. Well, the way we live in future could change, if cities adopt Woods Bagot’s and Buro Happold’s Zero Emissions Design (Zero-E) sustainable development design. With Zero-E, developments in future could soon go zero carbon and emission free.
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