Colombian firm Jaramillo-Azuero Architects (J-A) have proposed a plan to transform a series of obsolete Italian viaducts into a network of state-of-the-art, sustainable energy education and research centers. The brilliant design was showcased in the “Solar Park South” international competition, which sought solutions that repurpose the viaducts instead of spending 40 million euros to demolish them. The J-A proposal features a wave-powered rail line, community-centered parks and sustainable energy research facilities, but the cornerstone of their proposal is the assertion that the most sustainable form of energy in the world is education.

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Post tags: "sustainable architecture", eco design, Green Building, green design, Sustainable Building, sustainable design

Design and engineering innovations over the last two decades have had a dramatic impact on our ability to create beautiful, environmentally sensitive structures that help contribute to a more sustainable future. A dramatic example of the confluence of design, technology and environmental sustainability can be seen in the proliferation of innovative bridge designs around the world. We’ve put together a list of five of our favorites. Check them out and let us know what you think!

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Post tags: "sustainable architecture", "wind power", Green Building, green design, renewable energy, Solar Power, Sustainable Building, sustainable design

According to the Forest Products Laboratory, a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree. Putting this principle into practice, Whole Tree Architecture is dedicated to building with materials that lumber companies consider scrap – weed trees, also know as ‘managed forest thinnings.’ The resulting projects are beautiful displays of locally sourced and sustainably managed materials.

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Post tags: green architecture, Green Building, green design, managed forests, renewable materials, whole tree architecture

Clothes hangers are clogging our landfills at a rate of nearly 8 billion per year. We’ve recently brought you designers who have been developing brilliant ways to tackle the problem through eco-friendly materials and innovative new designs. Now industrial designers Alex Witko and Courtney Hunt at Organelle Design have hit upon another great idea — Hangeliers, wonderful chandeliers made from off-the-shelf plastic and wood hangers.

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Post tags: eco design, green design, green furniture, green Interiors, industrial design, Recycled Materials, sustainable design

There are reportedly over 750,000 abandoned concrete bunkers scattered throughout Albania, remnants of Communist dictator Enver Hoxha and his policies of paranoid xenophobia. Now graduate students Gyler Mydyti & Elian Stefa have developed a plan called Concrete Mushrooms that would ‘invert the meaning’ of these structures by turning them into a network of habitable eco-hostels, cafés, gift shops and more.

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Post tags: "sustainable architecture", concrete mushrooms, Green Building, green design, Recycled Materials, Sustainable Building, sustainable design

Today is Blog Action Day, and this year’s theme is Climate Change – a topic near and dear to our hearts here at Inhabitat. To kick things off, we took a look back over last the past year’s posts and pulled together a list of our top 5 favorite climate change stories to hit the pages of Inhabitat. The following [completely biased] list is in no particular order. It does, however, attempt to focus on solutions to the problem – because we believe that there is hope for our planet if we act now. Check it out and please, comment copiously. We love a good debate!

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Post tags: alternative energy, Climate Change, Environment, global warming, green design, sustainable design, sustainable transportation

Now that it’s clear that the flying cars we were promised as youngsters are not going to appear anytime soon, we can perhaps take comfort in the arrival of the brilliant HEPAV 1.1, a human-electric powered amphibious vehicle from the creative mind of Czech designer and inventor David Buchwaldek. Like an eco-superhero’s signature ride, the HEPAV 1.1 can travel the streets in style and drive straight into the water without missing a beat. Sustainable, human-powered locomotion never looked so good.

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Post tags: amphibian velomobile, bicycle, bike, boat, green design, Green Transportation, hepav 1.1, pedal power, sustainable design, water bike

Pedal power is clearly on the rise. Bike sharing programs are spreading throughout the world, David Byrne’s new book Bicycle Diaries is flying off the shelves, and brilliant new designs like this, this and this, are appearing all over the globe. A wonderfully quirky addition to the scene is the Hopworksfiets party bike, a brilliant mash-up of human-powered pizza delivery, brew pub, and portable entertainment system. Created by Portland, OR-based bike builders Metrofiets, the Hopworksfiets is designed to deliver everything you need to get your pedal-powered party rolling.

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Post tags: bike sharing, green design, Green Transportation, Hopworksfiets, party bike, Portland, sustainable design

Magically appearing from the trees along Great Ocean Road, Australia is Cocoon, an incredible weekend getaway by the terrific design duo Bellemo & Cat. One part zeppelin, one part finely-crafted yacht, Cocoon was conceived as a “a matchbox inside an egg, a rectangle within an oval.”

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Post tags: bellemo & cat, blimp, cocoon, green design, Green renovation, Recycled Materials, sustainable design, zeppelin house

Buildings account for thirty-eight percent of the CO2 emissions in the U.S., according to the U.S. Green Building Council, and demand for carbon neutral and/or zero footprint buildings is at an all-time high. Now there is a new building material that is not just carbon neutral, but is actually carbon negative. Developed by U.K.-based Lhoist Group, Tradical® Hemcrete® is a bio-composite, thermal walling material made from hemp, lime and water. What makes it carbon negative? There is more CO2 locked-up in the process of growing and harvesting of the hemp than is released in the production of the lime binder. Of course the equation is more complicated than that, but Hemcrete® is still an amazing new technology that could change the building industry.

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Post tags: Architecture, building materials, carbon negative concrete, concrete, Green Building, green design, hemcrete, sustainable design, tradical

At Inhabitat we’ve brought you some terrific examples of recycled aircraft here, here, here and here. But Dave Drimmer’s Cosmic Muffin, the iconic ‘plane-boat’ made from Howard Hughes’ prized Boeing B-307, has to be the quintessential example. Deemed un-flyable in 1969, Hughes’ former ‘flying office’ was rescued from the landfill by Fort Lauderdale Realtor and pilot Kenneth W. London who then spent the next four years transforming it into an exotic houseboat that has been featured everywhere from CNN to Ripley’s Believe It or Not! to Jimmy Buffet’s 1996 song “Desdemona’s Building A Rocketship”!

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Post tags: cosmic muffin, dave drimmer, planeboat, recycled planes

In one of the most ambitious examples of speculative architecture of the year, Paris-based OFF Architecture recently unveiled an incredible eco-bridge spanning the Bering Strait from Russia to the United States that would facilitate international trade, protect wildlife, mitigate global warming, and promote peace. Every bit as beautiful and eco-conscious as it is quixotic, the project stole the show at the Bering Strait International Ideas Competition.

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Post tags: Architecture, bering strait, bering strait international ideas competition, green design, infrastructure, off architecture, sustainable design

In answer to the ever-intensifying global water crisis, industrial designer Talia Radford has created the AquaIris, an elegant, portable water purifier for developing countries with tropical climates that is simple to use and requires no electricity! How does it work? Contaminated water enters the AquaIris, passes over a removable/re-usable filter, then travels under a layer of ‘converter crystals’ where germicidal UVC rays purify the water molecules as they pass by.

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Post tags: AquaIris, green design, industrial design, Talia Radford, water filter, water purifier

A hot shower is relaxing, but is also a huge waste of energy: we heat our water with massive amounts of natural gas, oil or electricity, then transport the heated water to our tubs for a few seconds of sudsing, before washing it down the drain full of raw, wasted heat and energy! What if we could recapture this untapped source of wasted energy by transferring the heat from that shower waste-water to cold incoming water? The EcoDrain, a simple heat exchange unit, does just that, saving water heater use by up to 40%.

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Post tags: ecodrain, energy efficient, energy reduction, Green Building, green design, green hot water heater, interior, product, sustainable design, water fixture, water heat exchanger

After weeks of public outcry , the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to place a hold of at least one year upon the “Greenest Building on the West Coast”. Designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, the 110 Embarcadero project is now under review to determine the historical significance of the site and the proposed 10-story height of the project. Just months ago, the architects had been given the go-ahead to construct the uber-green office building, which was set to become the first commercial building on the West Coast to receive a LEED Platinum rating.

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Post tags: "sustainable architecture", 110 embarcadero, Green Building, green design, greenest building on the west coast, leed platinum high rise, Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, San Francisco, solar panels

On the western outskirts of Shanghai, China, a dragon is coming to life. Constructed of concrete, steel and glass, the new corporate headquarters of Giant Pharmaceutical Corp looks for all the world like something between a sci-fi battleship landing on a highway, and a steampunk dragon frozen in time. L.A.-based architectural firm Morphosis is focusing on the building’s sustainability as much as its aesthetics, with a green roof, generous use of skylights, and advanced insulation materials like cement-fiberboard paneling and a double-layer, fritted-glass curtain wall.

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Post tags: "sustainable architecture", Daylighting, giant pharmaceuticals company, Green Building, green roof, morphosis architecture, morphosis office, shanghai dragon

Typical “leather” footwear is nearly impossible to dispose of or recycle properly, is constructed using a combination of chromium-tanned leather and bonded, man-made materials and is usually manufactured in a developing country with substandard (or nonexistent) occupational health regulations. Cradle to Cradle authors and Inhabitat favorites William McDonough and Michael Braungart have even gone so far as to call mainstream footwear “hazardous waste” for the feet. Flying in the face of this perception is the Nike Zoom MVP Trash Talk All-Star Game Player Exclusive, a new shoe made from left-over Nike sneaker scraps – a.k.a. trash!

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Post tags: eco sneakers, Nike, nike footwear

Generally associated with plastic and wooden 55 gallon drums covered with slimy moss, rainwater harvesting just doesn’t seem to capture the imagination like an exotic green roof or a gleaming solar array — until now. The CISTA rainwater harvesting system (which we just spotted on Kohler’s new H2OVisions website) is a dramatic, elegant and space-saving solution for the urban environment that conserves water, increases green space and just might finally bring rainwater harvesting the kind of attention it deserves.

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Post tags: CISTA, green roof, Kohler, rainwater harvesting, solar array

Living ‘close to the earth’ can mean many things — living in harmony with nature, living in touch with natural processes, or in the case of Casa de los Pinos (House Among the Pines), living on the top of a mountain, smack in the middle of a stand of breathtaking pine. But that is just the beginning of this terrific project by architectural firm XPIRAL. The house showcases a host of sustainable features including the use of rocks from the site for stone-work, vegetation from the grounds remade into construction material, and timber on the site used in the pathways. And to top it all off, the architects replanted the same number of trees on the property that it took to clear the building site!

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Post tags: "sustainable architecture", casa de los pinos, energy efficient house, Green Building, locally sourced materials, xpiral architecture

Scholastic architecture doesn’t get much better than these stunning Mode-Gakuen Spiral Towers in Nagoya, Japan. The shimmering towers corkscrew 36 stories [170 m] above the busy streets of Nagoya, Japan, and house educational facilities for three different disciplines in three tapered ‘wings’ – fashion design, computer programming and a medical support. Architectural group Nikken Sekkei included a host of ecological features in the towers including a double-glassed air flow window system and a natural air ventilation system.

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Post tags: "sustainable architecture", Green Building, green high-rise, mode gakuen spiral towers, nagoya japan skyscraper, natural ventilation skyscraper, nikken sekkei