Taliesin Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture graduate and undergraduate students have been blogging on PrairieMod about their project to build a small modern home on the grounds of Taliesin West. Now, the Mod.Fab is complete, and it’s a compelling demonstration of passive and active environmental control systems, water catchment, top-tier insulation, a gray water system, native landscaping, and a solar power system.
Housefish Design, a firm specializing in furniture design, has produced a line of eco-friendly, modular storage furniture — you can buy individual pieces and stack them practically anyway you like. Why is it green? Well, the furniture is flat-packed for shipping (you only need a hammer to assemble), the wood is sustainably harvested FSC maple plywood, and the pieces are finished with a zero-VOC finish. Sounds good!
We've seen some interesting living walls and green roofs, but this goes beyond these applications and into the realm of being a complete living house. Referred to as the Lost in Paris House, the structure took five years to complete and was designed by R&Sie architects. The unique living envelope comprises 1200 ferns (or Dryopteris filix-mas) in a hydroponic system – the plants are not sustained by soil but by a chemical mixture of bacteria, nutrients, and rainwater.
This is the View Box green home plan by FreeGreen, a company we mentioned earlier with a similar house plan called the Smart Box. Since we mentioned the Smart Box in May 2008, FreeGreen has been tearing it up with new green plans of all sorts of styles. But not only are they expanding their selection of in-house plans, they’re also on Twitter and Allison Arieff gave them a NY Times shout out about a week ago. Things are going well …
Google is testing a prototype product that they've dubbed the PowerMeter, which is designed to convey electricity use information to electricity users. PowerMeter is premised on the famous phrase by Lord Kelvin: "If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it." Accordingly, the PowerMeter takes energy consumption information from your smart meter and gives it to you in real time using the iGoogle gadget. It's a dead simple concept — certainly the most low hanging of low hanging fruit. An absolute no-brainer that's important and more crucial than ever.
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