You remember Paul Stankey of Hive Modular?  We mentioned his container cabin this time last year, and since that time, the rustic retreat has been showcased in probably every quality design magazine in the country.  What interesting, however, is that Paul’s been working on phase two: A new project adjacent to the cabin.

Paul was speaking with the folks at loll about their waste and came to find out that they have huge pallets sitting around.  So he decided that the pallets could be put to clever use, I mean, they’re sturdy and heavy, weighing in at roughly 200 pounds each.  He designed Pallet Barn.

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This could just be one of the most innovative sustainable designs you’ll see all year.  Here’s the background: a team from Weber Thompson designed this building for the Cascadia Natural Talent Design Competition put on by the Emerging Green Builders of the USGBC.  They won the Cascadia competition and moved on to compete against about 15 other regional winners from around the country.   They won there, too, and "Eco-Laboratory" was announced as the winner of the 2008 Natural Talent Design Competition at Greenbuild.  Eco-Laboratory is a theoretical design set in Seattle with affordable and market-rate residential housing, a job training center, homeless shelter, hygiene station, and public farmer’s market. 

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Talk about a serious transformation!  VaST, a Colorado-based a+d firm, purchased an old porn shop earlier this year — the building was located close to Boulder — and completely gutted the place.  Now, you wouldn’t even know it used to have super skeezy viewing booths.  VaST took all that out and set a new standard in using green materials, particularly salvaged and unique materials.  Located at 1720 15th Street in Boulder, Candy Shop is the right kind of place for a budding green professional or socially aware independent looking for some co-working space.  Plus, they’ve just added solar panels to supply a portion of the building’s energy … check out the particulars of the renovation:

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A couple weeks ago, New York Magazine showcased Daniel Libeskind‘s proposal for his first New York building.  The design features prominent sky gardens — an element some pragmatic developers might shy away from for fear of losing usable square footage.  But by including the sky gardens, apartment occupants will have access to balconies and greenery and oxygen.  They’ll have the opportunity to welcome nature right at the back door. 

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Update 6/15/2010: Puma City Revised for World Cup 2010!

Realizing this site might be a little overweight in the container architecture department, I'm going to blog this and try to abstain in the next few weeks.  But Puma City, like the Freitag Flagship Store in Zurich (only less banged up looking), is another illustration of industrial design and adaptive reuse combined. The 11,000 sf retail installation was designed by LOT-EK and uses three levels of forty-foot containers stacked four units wide to create an incredibly dynamic design. 

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