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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Maybe Samsø started a trend in becoming a net exporter of renewable energy because it appears that the Vatican is thinking about doing something similar.  The curvaceous roof of Paul VI Audience Hall, a building that's located right by the famous St. Peter's Basilica, has been topped with 2,400 photovoltaic panels to source energy for lighting, heat, and air conditioning. 

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Rødovre, an independent municipality of Denmark, was looking for a new residential tower and MVRDV, with co-architect ADEPT, rose to the challenge.  On Monday, it was announced that their "Sky Village" concept won a design challenge to create the next Rødovre skyscraper.  The 116 meter (~381 foot) tower will feature apartments, retail, offices, an hotel, as well as a public park and plaza.  The architects’ contemporary design is based on a flexible grid of boxes, or "pixels," which are ~646 square feet each and arranged around the building’s central core. 

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Earlier this month, the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design announced a total of 66 buildings as winners of the prestigious and coveted American Architecture Awards program.  One of those buildings was Tom Eliot Fisch’s and LMN Architects‘ design for the City College of San Francisco’s (CCSF) new performing arts center.  As you can tell from the rendering, it’s going to be a beautiful, contemporary structure with tons of green features and natural lighting.  Scheduled to be complete in Spring 2010, the performing arts center will target LEED Gold certification with some of the following features:

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When you decide to outfit a building with a green roof, the plants have to come from somewhere.  In this particular case, 8,355 square feet of plants are growing at T & L Nursery in Woodinville, Washington for installation at the new Olive 8.  Currently under construction, Olive 8 will be Seattle's first LEED hotel/condo (pursuing LEED Silver certification).  In addition, it will have one of the city's largest green roofs with 20 different varieties of drought-tolerant sedums growing in 700 planters totaling nearly 24,000 plants.  That's a lot of green to have on the fourth floor for everyone to enjoy. 

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