A new field of research, that doesn’t even have a proper name yet, is looking into ways we can incorporate biology into our built environment. It turns out the bacteria and germs found in our indoor worlds are vastly different than those found in natural environments. It makes me wonder
Continue readingTag: shelter
Things Are Good: Urban Living Cheaper, More Sustainable Than Suburban
Years of car-focused suburban designs have unleashed problems in the 21st century that we will have to deal with and accommodate. The years of the suburbs are coming to an end and it can’t be soon enough. With every passing years more and more municipalities discover that urban design is
Continue readingThings Are Good: Copenhagen Designed a Neighbourhood to Cope With Climate Change
Climate change is happening faster than projected and this means that cities need to react sooner than anticipated. We’ve seen efforts in New York that will create barriers against rising sea levels and other cities have done similar infrastructure improvements. Copenhagen has taken the next logical step: converting an existing
Continue readingThings Are Good: Painting Neighbourhoods
Artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn create community art by painting entire neighborhoods, and involving those who live there — from the favelas of Rio to the streets of North Philadelphia. What’s made their projects succeed? In this funny and inspiring talk, the artists explain their art-first approach — and
Continue readingThings Are Good: This Classroom Makes More Energy Than it Consumes
Anderson Anderson Architecture has built a classroom in Hawaii that generates more energy than it consumes, making what they call a “energy positive” building. The term “energy positive” is being encouraged to replace “net zero” as the benchmark for environmental consciousness in architecture. The classroom does use roof solar panels
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Rebel Architect in Vietnam Creates Green Space
Al Jazeera has a series on rebel architects who are improving the world around them. In the documentary they released today they look at award-winning architect Vo Trong Nghia’s work in reshaping Vietnamese buildings to contain more green space. This film follows Nghia as he tries to find support for
Continue readingThings Are Good: Emergency Shelter Packaged Like a Coffee Cup
Reaction Call to Action from Reaction on Vimeo. Reaction is a new company which recently crowd funded enough money to send a boatload of housing to help refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria. The company makes Exo shelters which are stackable and easily shippable emergency shelters that can be deployed
Continue readingThings Are Good: Better Urban Design Can Increase Happiness and Sexiness
Obesity is a growing problem in North America and it looks like this health issue will continue to grow. There are many contributing factors to what’s referred to as an obesity epidemic, and some designers think that we can curb at least one contributing factor: poor urban planning. Not coincidentally,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Building Better Homes for Refugees
Ikea’s charitable arm has used the expertise of the cheap furniture manufacturer to design a better housing unit for refugees with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). Hopefully these designs will help people around the world who are living in poor conditions. The Refugee Housing Unit started working on a project
Continue readingThings Are Good: Save the Environment, Live in a City
The IEEE Spectrum recently interview William Meyer who is the author of the book The Environmental Advantages of Cities: Countering Commonsense Antiurbanism. The book’s central thesis is that we need to change the discourse around cities from a negative one to a more positive conversation about the efficiencies of cities
Continue readingThings Are Good: Algae-Powered Building Opens This Week
Algae can be used for all sorts of wonderful things from cleaning up oil to producing energy. Architects in Hamburg have built a building that uses algae to power the complex and it opens this week. The building is meant to be a demonstration of cutting-edge sustainable architecture. “Using bio-chemical
Continue readingThings Are Good: New Homes in Lancaster, California Required to Produce Solar Energy
Lancaster, California has nearly half a million citizens and they want to reduce their carbon footprint. Their most recent step to being a green city is a world’s first as far as I know: every new residential development in the city is required to produce energy using the sun. “However,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Earthships Taking Off in the Netherlands
Earthships are a type of house that are built using reused materials to construct a structure that is sustainable. Often the earthships are off the gird and can function autonomously from external systems. In the Netherlands, these types of buildings are growing in popularity. Earthships use dirt- and sand-filled tires
Continue readingLeDaro: Armageddon on December 21st, 2012
If you don’t believe me watch the videos below. You must send donations to me and I will build a big shelter, in a nearby moutain, to accommodate few hundred people and save their lives. 🙂
Continue readingThings Are Good: USA Urban Population Growth Outpaces the Suburbs
Regular readers know that in the modern world an urban lifestyle is more sustainable than a suburban lifestyle so it’s pretty good news to see that more people in the USA are moving into urban centres. America is where the suburbs started and have had the largest cultural impact and
Continue readingThings Are Good: Dwell’s Top Green Projects of 2012
Architecture magazine Dwell has released their top ten green projects in the USA for this year. It would be great to see this done in a global perspective. On April 19th, AIA’s Committee on the Environment (COTE) announced the COTE Top Ten Green Project Awards: their selection of the most
Continue readingThings Are Good: Talking About Cities With People Who Don’t Live in One
When it comes to talking about the divide between urban and non-urban living there’s more differences than just who lives in a more sustainable community. People living in non-urban areas just don’t understand the positive urban living that is being espoused, and in fact, can take insult to how pro-urban
Continue readingThings Are Good: Proposed Wooden Skyscraper
Yesterday we looked at making a key building material, cement, more green and today we’re looking at a skyscraper to be built out of wood. Wood is a much kinder material to the environment thanks to the fact that wood is renewable because it comes from trees. The idea may
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Growing Industry of Green Cement
Cement is a very popular building material for a lot of good reasons, the problem though is that the process of making it requires a ton of energy. This problem has led to a growing number of people looking into ways to make cement less damaging to the planet. We’ve
Continue readingThings Are Good: More Happiness by Having Fewer Things
Here’s a quick, short, and inspiring TED Talk from the founder of TreeHugger about getting rid of material things can bring happiness to your life.
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