After the Gulf Coast was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, FEMA provided temporary trailers to displaced people in Louisiana and Mississippi, which turned out to be not only inadequate but also a health hazard. To address the need for low-cost, emergency shelters made from non-hazardous materials, Green Horizon Manufacturing has developed QuickHab, flat-pack, modular housing system that clicks together and comes in a variety of sizes to meet most short- to medium-term housing needs.

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Post tags: "sips", Emergency housing, FEMA house, Flatpack house, Low cost prefab, low income housing, QuickHab

The LED-lit One Raffles Place Tower Two is a worthy successor to its taller neighbor, One Raffles Place Tower One, with a flair for environmentally advanced design. Located right in the heat of the bustling downtown of Singapore’s financial district, the tower’s 38 gleaming, LED-illuminated stories tell the tale of a new breed of buildings that are designed to do more with less. The building, which achieved the Green Mark Platinum Award, is the work of SAA and Paul Noritaka Tange, the son of the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kenzo Tange.

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Post tags: green mark, Green Mark Platinum, LED highrise, SAA architects, Singapore green building, Tange architects

It’s a pretty old trick to take a simple steamer or colander and use it as a light shade, so designer Nadia Belalia upped the ante with her series of transformed and customized steamer lamps. Belalia has deconstructed the lowly kitchen utensil into a series of lamps with a steampunk sensibility – rivets pin petals of folded stainless steel, giving each design a kinetic punch.

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Post tags: colander lamp, colander light, green lighting, Nadia Belalia, steampunk light

Dr. Steven Chu, head of the US Department of Energy, gave an information-packed, 50-minute speech at the World Renewable Energy Forum in Denver on Wednesday. Speaking to a crowd of renewable energy leaders, Dr. Chu patted the industry on its head but didn’t have many bones to feed a hungry audience. The talk felt more like a college lecture than a political stump speech, with the energy secretary discussing the economics of renewable energy without addressing the cost of carbon.

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Post tags: DOE, energy policy, green energy policy, steven chu, WREF

The term ‘building science’ is used quite often now in sustainable building circles, but much of what we understand of it can be traced back to the work of Dr. Joe Lstiburek, founder of Building Science Corporation. He is anything but your typical engineer or scientist who spends time crunching numbers or hiding away in a lab. Lstiburek has spent most of his career out in the field, testing and examining what works and what doesn’t. Many of the building standards today — from building codes to ASHRE to testing methodology — have his finger prints all over them, and his tough love criticism of building design is undercut with his wry humor and, of course, an encyclopedic knowledge of building construction. Read on to learn where buildings go wrong and what we can do about it.

Read the rest of INTERVIEW: Building Science Pioneer Dr. Joe Lstiburek on the Good, Bad and Ugly Side of Buildings

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Post tags: "leed", ASHRE, Building failures, Building Science, Green Building, green building expert, Joe Lstiburek, problems with LEED, Sustainable Building

Could what’s in this little container keep our planet healthy? The simple reality is we need to find a way to put carbon back into the soil, and making something called ‘biochar’ is perhaps the best way to do that. While attending the World Renewable Energy Forum in Denver, it was hard not to be attracted to what could be the lowest tech solution to our carbon problem — simply stabilize it and put it back into the ground from where it came. Biochar is a valuable soil amenity and fuel source, so its potential is just being tapped. The net-carbon negative process is being taken very seriously as the best, and thus far, only proven way to store carbon for the long term in large quantities.

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Post tags: bio-gas, biochar, climate change technology, Cool Planet, fixing carbon, soil amenity, WREF

Read the rest of The HEX Curtain by Rael San Fratello Makes a Kinetic Light Show Out of Your Window

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Post tags: Daylighting, green window design, kinetic room, Rael San Fratello, room shading, window shade

Read the rest of Composer Cheryl Leonard Creates Musical Works from the Sounds of Nature

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Post tags: "music experience", Antarctic, Antarctic recordings, Arctic recordings, Cheryl Leonard, instruments found in nature, music performance, natural instruments, nature audio, nature sounds, NSF artists

GE just announced a new LED light bulb replacement for the 100 watt incandescent that uses pulses of air to keep cool. The design is the first of its kind in the LED industry, and it comes just in the nick of time as the 100 watt incandescent bulb phase-out is on the horizon. The breakthrough hinges upon how the light ‘breathes’, keeping the LED chips from overheating and allowing engineers to pack twice the number of chips into a standard sized bulb.

Read the rest of GE Launches First 100 Watt Equivalent LED Bulb Cooled by an Air Pump

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Post tags: 100 watt LED, First 100 replacement LED, GE LED, GE LED lightbulb, LED breakthrough, light bulb ban

Bullet trains in Texas by 2020? That’s the proposal laid out by the Texas Central Railroad, and it could become a reality if it can come up with $10 billion in private funding. The railway would connect Houston with Fort Worth, Texas and travel at 205 miles per hour, making the trip in less than 90 minutes.

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Post tags: bullet train, Central Texas high speed rail, Huston Ft Worth trian, Texas Central Railroad, Texas high speed rail, Texas Rail

Shigeru Ban’s temporary cardboard cathedral finally got the green light to be erected in Christchurch, New Zealand. Now called the “Transitional Cathedral”, the building will replace a 19th century church that was heavily damaged in the 2011 earthquake – until funds for a permanent building are raised. The temporary building will hold 700 parishioners, it can be constructed with a fraction of the time and cost it takes to create a traditional building, and it can be re-erected for a different purpose in the future.

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Post tags: "sustainable architecture", cardboard building, Christ church church, Green Building, green design, New Zealand Church, shigeru ban cardboard church, shigeru ban christchurch cathedra, Shigeru Ban Church

A new type of heat map was introduced in the UK and it maps out, quite literally, the heating needs of the entire country. While designed to help implement heating infrastructure like district heat plants, the map is also a very useful tool in seeing how energy usage, right down to the neighborhood, can be visualized. Developed for the Department of Energy & Climate Change (what a refreshingly honest name) the map’s accuracy is based on individual buildings — but the designers promises the data does not compromise privacy.

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Post tags: British Heat Map, Centre for Sustainable Energy, CHP, Department of Energy & Climate Change, energy map, English Heat Map

Hydraulic fracking is getting a pretty bad reputation for its potential to pollute water, cause cancer, and trigger earthquakes — need we go on? But a new study from Cornell reports that the natural gas extraction technique may be more harmful than even coal when it comes to global warming. The research team has updated their controversial findings with fresh data to support the conclusion that fracking in a major source of released methane. The study looks at how much gas is released into the atmosphere, revealing a significant jump in atmospheric methane. Methane, as compared to CO2, has the potential to trap over 100 times more heat over the course of ten years, making fracking one of the most environmentally destructive ways to source energy.

Read the rest of Updated Cornell Study Shows Fracking Causes More Global Warming Than Coal

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Post tags: Cornell Fracking Study, Fracking GWP, global warming, methane release, Robert Howarth

Read the rest of Plaza Diane in Wyoming is a LEED Gold Art Center Converted from a Former Gas Station

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Post tags: Green Art Gallery, LEED gold, rain garden, Solar Power, Wyoming green building

Read the rest of Stéphane Maupin’s M Building is a Village-Like Social Housing Complex in Paris

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Post tags: corrugated steel, french green building, Paris housing, Stéphane Maupin, urban social housing

Read the rest of Christo’s Over the River Approved for a 6 Mile Stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado

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Post tags: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Christo art, Christo Colorado, Colorado art, envrionmental art, Over the river

Boston’s Big Dig tunnel is set to undergo a complete LED lighting retrofit, as many of its existing lights have prematurely corroded and the older fluorescent tube fixtures are failing at their support points due to design flaws. The $55 million retrofit will replace the fixtures with sealed LED lights that will save $2.5 million a year in electricity, and even more from the steep reduction in maintenance costs – not to mention providing peace of mind from falling debris.

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Post tags: Big Dig LED, Big Dig lights falling, Boston Big Dig, green lighting, led retrofit

EVolo Magazine has made a name for itself with its annual skyscraper competition, which started in 2006. Since then there have been over 4,000 submissions arriving from across the planet, seemingly covering just about every imaginable design parameter when it comes to vertical construction. Their newly released book, EVOLO SKYSCRAPERS, is a selection of 300 of the best projects spanning six chapters and a hefty 1,223 pages. If you’re an aficionado of futurism in building design, then this is the decisive book on one of the largest scale human interfaces with the environment — the skyscraper.

Read the rest of BOOK REVIEW: EVolo Skyscrapers – A Reference Manual on the Future of Architecture?

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Post tags: "eVolo", eco building design, eco skyscraper, eco skyscrapers, evolo magazine, future building design, futurism, green building design, green buildings, ground breaking building design, mega skyscraper, skyscraper book, vertical farm

Chinese material scientists have been studying the design of butterfly wings to unlock ways to make solar electricity more efficient. Inspired by the way that butterflies use their wings to collect solar heat, researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University took a closer look at the wings’ makeup. What they found was a shingle-like structure whose complex shape allows light to fall to the lower layers, doubling the light-gathering potential. The insight could pave the way to electric solar panels which can produce much more energy in a smaller area.

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Post tags: American Chemical Society, butterfly wings, Dr. Tongxiang Fan, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, solar biomimicry, solar butterfly wing, Solar Power, solar power inspiration from butterflies, solar power wing

The price tag for the proposed high speed rail system in California has just taking a major cut, with a price chop of $30 billion. The latest budget projection comes in with last-minute design changes that propose using existing track in the urban regions of the Bay Area and Los Angeles. The reduction comes as a response to the serious sticker shock experienced from the original plan’s budget, which rang in at $98 billion dollars, 5 months ago. However, Governor Jerry Brown is hoping that the new cost estimates will put the project back on its legislative tracks.

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Post tags: california high speed rail cost, California transportation budget, Californina rail transportation, future transportation, high speed rail