Wouldn’t it be great to be able change the shape and position of the walls of your house to go along with your mood, or more practically, the weather? Michael Jantzen’s transformable M-Velope® is just such a structure, offering an inspired approach to designing smaller and more usable spaces. The 230 sq foot flexible space can be rearranged into various positions by moving the slated wood panels on its steel frame. All homes really should have this capacity - to move, change and morph depending on our needs.

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What is stronger than steel and stands to revolutionize our built environment? Paper! Or rather, buckypaper to be more precise. Buckypaper is a material composed of carbon nanotubes that is 10 times lighter and over 500 times stronger than steel. While the miraculous material used to be prohibitively expensive and hard to make, scientists from Florida State University believe that they have made several key developments that will allow them to efficiently manufacture it for a variety of applications including airplanes and vehicles.

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Bioplastics are becoming a burgeoning industry as the cost of oil climbs and the disastrous nature of petroleum-based plastics is revealed in full effect. This past Monday Metabolix announced an incredible development: they have found a way to generate “significant amounts” of ecologically-sound bioplastic by growing it in directly in switchgrass. The fast-growing perennial plant is paving the way for a sustainable source of Mirel, the company’s biodegradable brand of bioplastic.

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We all know that art can come in many forms, but the oh so au-natural form of grass is a new one that takes green to a whole new level. This year at the 2008 Wimbledon Tennis Championships, Grass Art takes center court in a new kind of art installation. UK artists, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey used grass as a photographic paper by projecting a black and white image on it while growing in a dark room.

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Portland-based db clay recently celebrated its 10th birthday by unveiling its latest lineup of eco-chic wallets, and they’re all awash in in the vibrant hues and textures of summer. The visually evocative portefeuilles are billed as pieces of pocketable art, and each comes complete with a story that inspired its creation. Db clay’s slim and sturdy billfolds are waterproof, printed using environmentally friendly inks and dyes, and constructed out of a specialized material called “Tope” that touts a bevy of eco-friendly features.

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Early last week, German giants BMW unveiled the GINA Light Visionary Model, a highly anticipated concept set to transform the boundaries of traditional car design. ‘GINA’, an acronym for “Geometry and Functions In ‘N’ Adaptations”, has a seamless outer skin made entirely from a textile fabric (polyurethane-coated Lycra) pulled taut around a moveable frame of metal and carbon fiber wires. This lightweight design requires far less energy to produce than traditional BMW models and the overall car weight is significantly reduced, making it far more fuel-efficient.

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Eco-friendly lightbulbs are an energy efficient step in the right direction, but it could be that the bulb’s days are numbered. First we had light-emitting wallpaper, and now Saazs’ light-emitting glass plates. Using planilum technology, these plates are the world’s first active light-emitting glass. Incorporated into shelves and tables, the technology provides beautiful, understated lighting for homes and offices.

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We are perennial fans of Brooklyn-based Brave Space Design, and not just because their pieces helped turn the Inhabitat-curated Green Room at Designers & Agents into a sustainable style eco-haven this week. We adore Brave Space for their fresh, fun, multi-functional eco designs that are driven by a “think global, design local” philosophy.

We’ve just discovered Brave Space’s new Light Block lamps, which will debut at BKLYN Designs this weekend. Made from FSC-certified walnut and 3 Form EcoResin, these modern lighting fixtures are definitely on our must see list in Brooklyn this year.

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The Queensland University of Technology recently announced that it has been working with Dyesol to develop an innovative solar cell technology that re-envisions windows as clear, clean energy providers. Professor John Bell has said that these dye-infused solar cells would significantly reduce building energy costs, and could even generate surplus energy to be stored or sold. The development has been touted as the most promising advance in solar cell technology since the invention of the silicon cell.

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With alternative lighting solutions becoming a typical consideration in sustainable interior design, Jonas Samson’s illuminated wallpaper is set to take the Salone Internazionale del Mobile and its design junkies by storm. A clever mix of the graphic, textile-inspired papers of the recent-past and organic technologies of the future, his light-emitting wallpaper happily straddles the fence between kiddie night-light and inventive design feature. It’s eco-credentials: turning a two-dimensional surface into a light source versus the traditional bulb/lamp construct.

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Researchers at Guardian Industries have recently unveiled a new breed of vacuum-glazed super glass with an incredible R12-R13 insulation rating. For those of you who know nothing about R-value (the standard construction measurement of how insulating a material is), this is an incredible insulation value for glass. Typical insulation brick and plaster walls usually have an R12 rating, and glass usually gets a R1 or R2. That means this new vacuum glass is as insulative as a thick insulated wall. Using the same principle as a vacuum thermos bottle, these glass panels essentially negate two principal modes of heat transfer, paving the way towards windows that actually supply thermal energy instead of leaking it.

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If we told you there was a sustainable substitute for concrete you’d probably say rubbish!… and you would be right. The dream of a resource-saving, emissions-reducing replacement for concrete is becoming a reality in the form of BituBlock - made from post-consumer waste. Dr. John Forth of the University of Leeds is behind the revolutionary process that turns rubbish into a strong, less-energy intensive structural material that is poised to make concrete obsolete.

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The Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (iom3) is playing host to a number of events throughout London Design Week through the Materials and Design Exchange (MaDE) which was set up to facilitate the development of design skills to exploit the benefits of new materials and processes. On Wednesday morning, a number of speakers were invited to talk about new advances in lighting, including Chris Williams from UK Displays & Lighting and Ceravision.

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Just when you thought mushrooms were only useful as culinary garnishes (or maybe hallucinogenics as well), Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer, two students from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found a more noble purpose for the functional fungi- building insulation made from oyster mushrooms.

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What if architecture was designed to work for you to keep you healthy? Soo-in Yang and David Benjamin, architects at The Living have come up with a new material called “Living Glass” that will look out for your health by monitoring CO2 levels in the air. The new smart material is a thin, transparent, non-mechanical surface which automatically opens and closes “gills” in response to human presence to control the air quality in the room.

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As mentioned on Inhabitat’s Green Building 101 design guide, PVC has been repeatedly linked to many health concerns. So, you may ask yourself, why isn’t it a subject of the supposedly comprehensive LEED certification criteria? That is the question that the LEED steering committee recently asked the US Green Building Council Technical and Scientific Advisory Committee (TSAC) to investigate further. And the results, while mixed, point to a definitive answer: PVC, when ranked throughout its life cycle, is consistently found as one of the worst materials for cancer related impacts.

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Meditation Room in Blacksburg VA, Virginia Tech Design Team for ABC’s Extreme Makeover

We’ve been singing the praises of daylighting and translucent architecture ever since we began preaching the green design gospel here at Inhabitat. Using translucent daylight panels, you can fill your house with diffused sunlight during the day — aiding your health and well-being, and cutting down your electricity bills at the same time. There are plenty of building companies that have been making polycarbonate, nanogel-filled “Daylighting Panels” for awhile now, but Duo-Gard is the first company to push the envelope to its logical conclusion by bringing colored LED lights into the mix.
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Samples! Product representatives have opened our eyes before about their company’s sustainable efforts. So we were thrilled to receive this sample bracelet from 3form, a company that makes laminate panels for walls, doors, stair treads, tables- pretty much anything you can think of.

The bracelet is fabricated from the company’s Ecoresin, which is a non-toxic polyester resin. (They also offer a line called 100 Percent, which is made entirely from post-consumer HDPE.) Rather than sandwiching bamboo, glass, fabric, or any of the other popular materials inside the Ecoresin, 3form created a version which they call Ithemba, which translates as “hope” in the native language of the Xhosa - a people of South Africa.

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The Sawfish has been around for a couple years now, but we took notice after spotting it at Greenbuild two weeks ago. The timber provided by this robotic logger received accolades as one of Building Green’s Top 10 Green Building Products, which were announced during the conference. The Sawfish is a remotely operated lumberjack vehicle, developed to harvest timber from underwater standing trees. Triton Logging Inc. estimates that there is over 5 billion linear board feet of usable timber submerged in the forests of British Columbia’s lakes and reservoirs - and that’s less than 5% of the potentially viable timber worldwide!

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For those of you who think that last week’s Greenbuild Conference was all about grass roofs and composting toilets, think again. One of the more diverse sessions was led by a group of chemists from the Green Chemistry Institute. Their concepts are not far from those advocated by the design community, such as Biomimicry and Cradle-to Cradle. However, these chemists are working to enhance human health and the environment by changing products at a molecular level.

Just think about the possibilities: Smog Eating Concrete!

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