Berlin’s Housing Crisis Solution is to Buy Houses
Not Berlin, but a good city nonetheless. If you’re like me and was born in the 80s then you’ve lived through a time in which housing policies have been gutted…
shelter
Harvard Built a Zero Emissions Home
Buildings use a lot of energy for heating and cooling throughout the year, homes are no exception. Harvard decided to build a zero emission “home” to test solutions that can…
A Community Built Around Ending Homelessness
A community sprouted up outside of Austin, Texas with the goal of bringing people together to help end homelessness. Community First! Village started from a Texan developer trying to help…
In Singapore Housing Crises are a Thing of the Past
Singapore lacks land and this causes interesting land use problems. In the city state they ran into issues around housing their citizens ranging from land to cost. Instead of letting…
This New Paris Community Demonstrates Sustainable Cities
In the capital of France, the new Clichy-Batignolles development demonstrates how a city can have a carbon-neutral footprint while providing modern living. The development itself is built on old industrial…
What We Know After Building Generation One of Net Zero
Popular building low density developments like then pictured above are really bad for the environment. To truly understand how disastrous low density housing is one needs to consider the physical…
Living Off the Grid in a Major City
Most people think living off the grid means living the countryside with your own well, reenable energy, and food source. The truth is that style of off the grid requires…
These Plants Clean Your Household Air According to NASA
A few years ago we looked at a TED talk on how to grow fresh air inside. The information was based largely on NASA’s research done in the 1980s called…
How Pressure from Pedestrians and Cyclists Make Better Cities
Depending on where you live you may think streets are for people or for cars. The correct answer is that streets are for moving people and not built for the…
Turning Homes Into Business Could Save the Suburbs
The suburbs are an energy-intensive housing solution that started in North America and has spread worldwide. The appeal of the tract housing the very thing that makes the suburbs detrimental…
Building the WikiHouse of the Future
Affordable housing is a problem for every country and over the years there have been initiatives to lower the cost of being a home, today some of those are efforts…
Building a City From Mushrooms
Climate change is destroying many parts of the world, which increases pressure on cities and farms to make more use of less space. Building flood walls will only buy so…
Celebrating Resiliency
The Rockefeller Foundation has produced a new documentary celebrating areas humans live in that are designed to be resilient to climate change. By building our cities and countries around the…
Incremental Design to Address Housing Inequality
Basically every nation has basic housing problems that need to be addressed. Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena won this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize because of his work on community housing. It…
Timber Towers
Skyscrapers have been made out of concrete, glass, and steel since the first skyscraper was built. Before these building materials were used it was impossible to build that high –…
Architecture Should Be A Story
For architect Ole Scheeren, the people who live and work inside a building are as much a part of that building as concrete, steel and glass. He asks: Can architecture…
A Tiny, Efficient, Affordable, and Inexpensive House
It’s often argued that providing homes to people will alleviate poverty, the problem is that homes are insanely expensive. Many attempts at making cheap house have happened but most meet…
Preparing Suburbia for Disasters
The suburbs are not resilient places when it comes to disasters or having to quickly change to accommodate new realities. At Nautilus they have dedicated their recent issue to the…
Why We (Still) Need To Change The Suburbs
The suburbs are massive urban design problem because they have a large footprint. The footprint is evident in the energy inefficiencies present in suburban design from sprawl to increased costs.…
The Slow City, The Good Life
Cities are often associated with the hustle and bustle of life and commerce. Whereas the countryside is associated with stillness and slowness. One author, William Powers, decided to see what…