A couple years ago, Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture and builders Höllviksnäs Förvaltnings AB won an open competition for four Passivhaus homes on a vacant lot in the city of Malmö, Sweden. The team won the competition and the low-energy houses are now finished. The project may be referred to as Salongen 35 and includes a greenhouse, green roof, gray water treatment, and solar panels.
Hexagon is a new wall tile collection by Form Us with Love for Träullit, a manufacturer of wood wool cement board in Sweden. The shapely material absorbs sound, retains heat, resists fire, and resists moisture — making it easy to dress up a large blank wall or add a block of color to an otherwise minimal space. Träullit makes each tile with a combination of wood wool, cement, and water. Hexagon is on display at a church in a secret location in conjunction with Stockholm Design Week 2011.
The average American will produce something like 20 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year; however, in Sweden the average amount is something like six-eight tons (or tonnes) per year. So when several companies join forces to put a four-person Swedish family on one-ton-per-year lifestyle, perhaps there might be something for us to learn from the experiment. That experiment is the One Tonne Life project.
Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture recently let us know of a newly completed Passive House in Borlänge, Sweden. It’s beautiful, prefabricated, contemporary, and, stating the obvious, circular. The 1,700 square-foot home features an interior atrium, lake-facing kitchen and living room, and more private bedrooms and bathrooms on the other side of the home.
There’s a lot of talk about eco-cities and we’ve mentioned at least two of them (Dongtan + Masdar). But an unassuming Swedish suburb, known as Hammarby Sjöstad, has received high praises as a legitimate sustainable community. In Hammarby Sjöstad, houses use half the energy and water than normal Swedish properties. Plus, all the homes are built to sustainable standards and will house roughly 25,000 people by 2015 (11,000 units).
