Journal Summary

The story starts with my obsession with window shopping at IKEA and museum design stores. I always enjoy looking at smart little design inventions that change our way of living from different scales and aspects. My every trip there is always interwoven with countless “wow” and exclamation such as “this is such a smart design!” However, I’ve never carefully think about the inner implication of these great designs: what makes a design good and smart? After this semester’s following of the latest news of the design world, I think I’ve found one answer to this question: green and sustainable design is good design today.

My architecture journal this semester centered on posts from inhabitat.com and radiates to various other sources that have sustainability and green design news. Inhabitat.com is a weblog devoted to investigate emerging trends in product, interior and architectural design that are pushing architecture and design towards a smarter and more sustainable future. Its news has an extremely wide range of topics, including architecture and interior design, product design, art, technology, energy, transportation and fashion. This provides me a broad way of viewing green design. Start from the environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy’s nature art work and end at a new recycled material design of chandelier made with hangers, the stories I’ve covered during this semester may seem irrelevant at first glance, but inherently they all conveys the same message of today’s design trend, that is: design innovations today are becoming more and more eco-friendly, efficient, sustainable and energy-saving. This trend is so widespread that the applications of its design philosophy range from the microcosm — small objects for everyday use, through to the macrocosm — buildings, cities, and the earth's physical surface.

After taking this semester’s modern architecture class, I feel it is also interesting to look at our current green design revolution in a larger historical context. As mentioned in the mission of Inhabitat.com, the idea of green design is essentially the belief that design should balance substance with style, or more broadly put, that form and function should be intertwined, and form should follows function. The idea of “form follows function” was first mentioned by Louis Sullivan in his writing, The tall office building artistically considered. It also became the central concept of modernism architecture. After all, if we were to abandon the shape of the building from the old pattern book of medieval, ancient Greek and ancient Rome, something must arise to determine the form of our new age. It was not going to be religion, social hierarchy, nor the lavish and somewhat superfluous intention of decoration itself, rather, it was going to be the function of the building. I think what determines the form of the green design today is a further exploration in function, a function that seeks to create a more efficient, sustainable and energy-saving life style. This function is definitely extremely valuable because our world is more and more endangered by pollution, energy-shortage, global warming and other environmental issues.

However, we cannot ignore that currently there is still a gap between green design and designs that are actually marketable and can be widely accept by the general public. To solve this problem, we need a tight cooperation among architects, designers, engineer and environmental scientists. This cooperative nature makes the green design revolution so comprehensive, extensive and deeply associated to every aspect of our life. With green design’s central goal of creating something that is based on thoughtful consideration of the user, the social, economical context and the impact of an object on the surrounding environment, I am confident that we can eventually reach a best solution that solves all of these concerns, and the green design revolution is going to be the next great architecture and design movement recorded in history.

Hangeliers

Keywords: recycled materials, green products
Source: Orangelle Design



Clothes hangers are clogging our landfills at a rate of nearly 8 billion per year. We’ve recently brought you designers who have been developing brilliant ways to tackle the problem through eco-friendly materials and innovative new designs. Now industrial designers Alex Witko and Courtney Hunt at Organelle Design have hit upon another great idea — Hangeliers, wonderful chandeliers made from off-the-shelf plastic and wood hangers.

As many Inhabitat readers already know, re-purposing objects, recycled and/or found, can be a tricky business. It takes time, a good eye and not a little bit of luck. With Hangeliers, Organelle Design got it right. Organelle uses re-purposed off-the-shelf hangers, which removes them [if only temporarily] from the landfill cycle. Hangeliers are unique, beautiful and draw attention to the issue of landfill waste at the same time.

Not to be confused with ‘The Langoliers’ [the notoriously awful TV movie based on Stephen King's novella] Organelle’s Hangeliers are reminiscent of modern masters such as Nelson and Henningson—elegant design, precise thinking and a subtle nostalgia. With their commitment to innovation, sustainability and high design, Organelle is certainly a shop to watch.

Comment: Products with recycled and reused materials have always been a good idea, but few designs have achieved such a level elegancy as the hangeliers by the design firm Organelle. Forget about the expensive crystal chandeliers, this hangelier is usuful and beautiful, and most importantly, saved our already very crowded landfills.

I think another important thing is that this design actually shows us a new possibility of reuse materials-- use massive amount of recycled materials in a repetitve form to recreate. Hangers are not inherently related to chandeliers, nor are they the only thing to make a recycled chanderlier, we may also make recycled chanderliers by shattered mirrors, combs, cups, glass bottles, whatever thing you could think of. On the other side, chanderlier is not the only form recycled materials can lead to. Any daily objects we see can be made from something else. I think by doing this kind of open-ending, unending thought experiment, we will definitely have more amazing green designs like this.

UrbanBuds: Soiled Suitcases Grow Food

Keywords: recycled materials, green products
Source: designboom, urbanbuds


Gionata Gatto, an Italian designer based in the Netherlands, has soiled and seeded suitcases and such for gardening on the go. Designed as a graduation project, UrbanBuds enlivens luggage to grow up to 36 different food plants, either as still life or meals on wheels. Get a handle on your personal baggage and turn any place into a sustainable space simply by showing up and showing off some cultivation.

Used suitecases seem to be doomed to go to our landfilles. However, Gatto's design gives used suitecases a new life. With this design, the growth of landfills will definitely be minimalized dramatically, and it is promoting a new idea of garden on the go. A used suitecase is undoubtedly the best object for a garden-on-the-go, for 5 out of its 6 faces will be able to be planted plants on. This three demensional approach also challenges our traditional way of making a potted plan: why can't we build plants on all faces of a bulk of soil instead of just one? In that way, our green space will be increased while the actual space the plant takes is not increased at all. Also, it may not only be suitcases that can be recycled, but all kinds of other containers.

Meanwhile, i think it is very important to grow organic food in alternative ways nowadays. If these urbanbuds can be further developed by put in a variety of built in vegetable seeds and ferterlizer, and then put them into mass production and actually sell in the market, I'm sure there will be a new trend of "grow it yourself" hit our world.

Old School Bus As Bus Stop

Keywords: recycled materials
Source: Christopher Fennell, spaceinvading, inhabitat

Decommissioned school buses get sent to the scrapyard every day, so sculptor Christopher Fennell created this brilliant yellow bus shelter to keep the spirit of these buses going round and round. Situated in Athens, Georgia, the shelter is composed of three iconic yellow school buses dating from the years ‘62, ‘72, and ‘77. To create it Chris carefully chose pieces from the scrapped buses and then welded them together along with seats taken from an old city line. We love how the shelter’s beautiful reuse of salvaged materials perfectly suits its new purpose as it stands ready to welcome passengers as they wait for their next bus.


Designer: Christopher Fennell
Location: Atlanta, GA
The Bus Shelter is made from 3 old school buses, years: 62, 72 and 77. The seat is from one of Atlanta's decommissioned city buses.


Old school bus can always reminds me a lot of good memories back in elementry school. It is kinda sad to see them retired. Fennell's design is a very smart way to rescue the retired school buses. This design is meaningful in that it not only recycled the materials, but also produce a metephorical (or symbolical) meaning, create an association to the viewers. I think good design should always contain a substantial meaning--such as recycled material, and a symbolical meaning-- reminds us its original function and how it is related to the current function, in this case.

World's Largest Mountain Towers Over Berlin

Keyword: artificial nature

German architect Jakob Tigges has unveiled a plan for a 1,000m tall faux mountain at the site of the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, and his supporters are taking it rather seriously. Dubbed “The Berg,” the snow-capped colossus would be the world’s largest man-made mountain and would serve as a tourist attraction for skiers in the otherwise slope-less city. We’re all about adding green space to urban environments, but devoting an enormous amount of time, energy and resources into a gigantic landmass that isn’t even inhabitable on the inside seems like a huge mound of you-know-what, if you ask us.
Plans for The Berg seem to have spawned out of a severe case of “peakis-envy”. Says Tigges in his manifesto “While big and wealthy cities in many parts of the world challenge the limits of possibility by building gigantic hotels with fancy shapes, erecting sky-high office towers or constructing hovering philharmonic temples, Berlin sets up a decent mountain… Hamburg, as stiff as flat, turns green with envy, rich and once proud Munich starts to feel ashamed of its distant Alp-panorama and planners of the Middle-East, experienced in taking the spell off any kind of architectural utopia immediately design authentic copies of the iconic Berlin-Mountain.”

While it may seem counterintuitive to think that building a massive office building or condominium is more environmentally friendly than a mountain, it’s important to point out that inhabitable buildings cram tons of useful space onto relatively small footprints while a mountain (which from the renderings appears to be filled-in with no livable space inside) occupies a huge footprint while providing almost no other use than a place to enjoy outdoor sports.

While it remains unclear whether or not The Berg is an actual project with plans of being built or simply one man’s pie-in-the-sky dream, the concept has already become a hit on Facebook with almost 3,500 fans and has been published by multiple outlets in the German press. What do YOU think? Is The Berg worth building or just a mountain of unsustainable rubbish? Sound off by commenting below.

Source: Inhabitat
"The Berg" Official Website: http://www.mila-berlin.com/theberg/#


Comment: The building of this huge man-made mountain throws what we usually thought as "green design" into question. When talking about a mountain, one would usually associate it with green, good for nature. However, can an artificial mountain bring exactly the same green effect as a natural mountain does? When taking all the money and labor cost into consideration, building an artificial mountain may not be cheaper than building an office building or a commercial building. Furthermore, if we take the output of the investment into consideration, building an artificial may even be a worse plan: the mountain can do nothing but create a outdoor activity space, while building an office building may generate more social and economical effect. Furthermore, if we want green space, we can also achieve this by buiding a green roof on top of the office buildings.
Building this massive berg in the center of this city of Berlin may be a good experiment in artificial biosphere, but its economic cost should still be put into doubt. This reminds us to relook at sustainable design--something that looks green may not necessarily be sustainable. We should comprehensively review all aspect of the design process before making the conclusion of if a project can be considered "sustainable".

EDEN FALLS: Skyscraper Zoo Topped With a Waterfall

key words: artificial nature

Comment: Visiondivision's proposal for this vertical zoo is very innovative; it is almost like a sustainable skyscraper for animals. From enclosured zoos to safari park, our vision of zoos is once more changed by this bold and creative proposal. It also invokes us to thinking about the energy we used in maintaining a zoo. In order to create an artificial climate that is resemble to the original habitat of animals, traditional zoos uses a lot of energy in maintaining the temperature, humidity and so on. The proposal of Eden Fall makes us to think about how to create and reuse these energy by the zoo itself. The idea of use the energy of waterfall by turbine and generator is very smart, and the vertical division of areas for different animals employed the same idea of vertical plant zonation.

However, there are still a lot of issues left in terms of the project's practicality. Afterall, animals are unlike plants, they may not be that easily vertically arranged as plants' vertical zonation; will certain animals feel unconfortable of living on the 5th floor of an apartment? Also, the pumping of the water to such a high level also seems to be a big problem-- the energy generated by turbines may barely compensate for the pumping power. But in all, I still think this project is a very interesting idea that's worth building. Maybe the revenues generated by zoo admission fees can sustain its cost pretty well.

A Campbell Soup House?

Keywords: Prefab
Source: inhabitat, Austin+Mergold

Grain silos aren’t difficult to source from farm supply companies and they are fairly sturdy, designed to withstand wind and rain while keeping the grain inside dry. Made from 14 GA galvanized corrugated steel (a little over 1/16″ thick), a grain silo could serve as a beefy, industrial looking exterior for a home. Similar in concept to using a shipping container as the shell for a project, grain silo fabrication is easily and cheaply accomplished.

The House-In-A-Can home design utilizes a 36-foot diameter grain silo and features with three levels totaling 2,000 square feet of living space. Two or three bedrooms can be located on the second level, with the living and dining space on the bottom. The top floor can be used as a deck, extended living space, or even a greenhouse. Also, multiple silos could be connected to each other to create larger homes or apartment blocks. And if you buy 5, Austin + Mergold will happily give you the 6th for free!