Living off-the-grid in the foothills of the colorful Colorado Rocky Mountains, Andrew Michler LEED AP BD+C and his wife Jennie are learning firsthand what low entropy living really means. He is building a Passive House rest/work space and is currently writing the book [ours] Hyper-Localization of Sustainable Architecture to be published in 2014.
Follow Andrew on twitter @andrewmichler
It's the last day to vote for the Inhabitat Halloween Costume Contest, and while Han Solo may be stuck in carbonite he is defiantly in the race for the top three. If you like Rob Miller’s
The demand for green jobs has increased even as the larger jobs market declines, and now many colleges and universities have begun to offer courses in sustainability. The Ecotech Institute,
Mitchell Joachim and his team at Terraform 1 are provocateurs of the built environment that excel at dreaming up new ways of building and getting around. Their recycled Creatureama installation
Contemporary condo design gets quite literally fishy in this stackable Fish Hotel designed to mimic a modern high-rise. The quirky aquatic condo conceived by Teddy Luong and sold by Umbra won
A wind farm which opened in this week in West Virginia marks an important milestone in wind energy -- the farm is using a battery system to store energy and improve performance. Laurel
Photo Eichler Social While it may be presumptuous to think that a childhood home can be an elemental starting point for one of our greatest design geniuses, the power of architecture can be a
One of the most mysterious towers ever conceived, the Tower For the Dead is actually a practical solution that adresses the needs of our growing and aging population. The proposal won honorable
The dream of going wireless with a laptop or iPad becomes pretty meaningless when reality hits and you're left with a battery drained to nothing. But Voltaic's new solar backpack brings things
What is striking about the home is how well the old and the new have been integrated. Relying on modern glass and old stone walls, the fusion creates a mix of hard and soft, and the result is an
From above the center is almost indistinguishable from the landscape, as the stepped green roof tops a pair of undulating wings. Views of the landscape dominate from this vantage point, which
The home’s low-impact design goes well beyond its use of raw and minimally processed materials. The home is set on only six piers and constructed with beams and eucalyptus poles, so it can be
The pavilion was commissioned by the Norwegian Wild Reindeer Foundation to allow visitors to behold the range of the reindeer. Snøhetta's design for the center may have taken a cue from the
The Glidehouse is one of the first contemporary prefab designs intended to be “plug-and-play”. Unfortunately, the promise of high design with the convenience of pre-manufacturing grabbed a
Dog poop is a blight upon city streets and parks, however researchers recently unveiled a new breed of robot capable of picking up the offensive little landmines before they find someone’s
The iconic DeLorean Motor Company has weathered a stormy past, but it's coming back with a vengeance by introducing an electric version of it gull-winged masterpiece. The company just rolled out
37 teams from all over the world are making a go at this year’s World Solar Challenge, by traversing continental Australia in a solar vehicle. Teams need to cross 3,000 km of desert, from
Santa Fe is the ideal climate for modeling Passivhaus buildings -- summers can get hot and dry, while winters are bitterly cold at an elevation well north of 7,000 feet. Luckily, the sun shines
The Sports Center, which opened in July in Oakland’s Ira Jinkins Park, is in the heart of one of the Bay Area’s hardest hit neighborhoods. Cut off both physically and economically from the
The Lodge sits on a diverse forest region in northern Patagonia and is a base camp at the Hulio Hulio preserve for ecotourists looking to spot a puma or explore the local waterfalls. The hotel
John Muir once called a redwood grove his cathedral. Similar in vein, De Groene Kathedraal (translated as the Green Cathedral) is an organic copy of the famed Notre Dame, and is very much in
The original plan was to remodel the original brick building located on the city’s west side, but when fire damage was uncovered plans needed to be rethought. While much of the building had to
The project is an extension of a small home that was getting very cramped housing three generations of a family. The tiny lot, lack of privacy, and narrow streets catalyzed a fresh design
Tonji University is no stranger to the Decathlon -- their Bambu House turned a lot of heads last year in Barcelona with an aggressive bamboo façade and structure. This year the team is using
The original thought was to reclaim an airport terminal for displays of the proposed green development, but when the budget came in so low, the design team took a fresh tact by reclaiming the
Although death is universal, it seems that the final choice of how our bodies are laid to rest is not - and traditional burials are looking like less and less attractive as they take up land and
French designer Véronique Maire teamed with the landscape architect and artist Francoise Maire to create The Stockroom - a petite garden shed made from planks and bottles using very old
MIT researchers just officially unveiled a device that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The device builds upon a breakthrough hydrogen producing technology developed in
Carbon capture technologies are a bit of a holy grail in green chemistry, and researchers from Northwestern University have just reported in the Journal of the American Chemistry Society that
The two-bedroom house is a cute little bungalow with an inviting front porch and a tract home-like façade -- a characteristic that, we'll admit, had us brushing the house off at first. Inside,
One of the oddest quirks in our homes is that we flush toilets with water good enough for drinking -- and toilets consume on average 40% of a household’s water use. To address this issue Sloan
