Today at West Coast Green 2009, Green Horizon showcased their new SFH40 on-demand housing, and it's an impressive unit.  Designed to be a self-sustaining home for a family of four, it can be shipped anywhere in the world in a standard shipping container and set up in less than two hours by unskilled people.  Each unit has two bedrooms with built in furniture, a bathroom, and a kitchen area.  But it's also designed to be a self-sustaining shelter in the aftermath of a disaster when infrastructure may be damaged, so it includes solar panels and batteries, a bio-diesel generator as backup, and water purification equipment.  Units can be interconnected to share power and water.

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Earlier this year, the OC Register highlighted one company's efforts to transform unused warehouse space in Santa Ana, California.  Orange County based Marketing Via Postal Group, Inc. needed offices for their new warehouse and decided to reuse 10 twenty-foot shipping containers as offices and a kitchen.  MVP's employees did the work and the container spaces now have porthole windows, office furniture, plants, and bathrooms/sinks. 

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This summer Gerding Edlen Development opened a 51-unit apartment building in Portland, Oregon called The 20 on Hawthorne.  The 20 is over 50% leased already and LEED Silver certification is pending.  Homes range in price from $900-$2,500 and in size from 502 to 968 square feet.  Perhaps more interestingly, though, this building has a stackable, automated parking system that fetches cars in about 30-40 seconds on average.  It's pretty cool to watch. 

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A few months back, we reported that PNC (NYSE: PNC) was in the process of installing the largest green wall in North American on the exterior of their Pittsburgh headquarters building, One PNC Plaza.  Now, as you can see in this monstrous image, PNC has successfully installed the 2,380 square-foot living wall with 602 modular panels.  Each 2'x2' panel has roughly 24 plants, so there’s approximately 14,448 plants covering the wall of this 30-story building.  Wow!

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A few months after receiving LEED Platinum in Georgia, New World Home has now received Platinum certification for this home in Youngsville, New York.  It's the first manufactured home in New York to receive the certification and the first home of any type in the state to receive the same level of certification without needing solar panels, wind turbines, or a geothermal system.  Like the Georgia home, this one accomplishes the task with non-exotic things like tight construction, efficient mechanicals, and green materials.

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