Posted in: Monroeville, USA by Franny Wentzel. It was a nice day for a walk in the little suburban cul-de-sac near the park spotted this lovely little cottage on the street that makes a loop... looked vaguely familiar something like this Plasticville model of a Googie style house this being a dull industrial town even a little architectural flourish goes a long way that is one sweet lawn decoration no... really... oh hell, yeah! farmer's truck weather vane FTW! all the requisites of mid-century modern all the comforts of home

Posted in: Monroeville, USA by Franny Wentzel. It's getting close to springtime and the snowpack has melted away leaving wolfie a little tipsy and in a lawn strewn with debris...

This delightful Drops pouf is a chair made of an inner tube covered with recycled upholstery material. It was inspired by the process behind making tassels (bunching together lots of strips of leftover fabric) and introduces elements of color and fun into the user’s everyday life. The designer, Camilla Hounsell Halvorsen is a Masters student in Design at Oslo National Academy of the Arts and specializes in using recycled materials in furniture design and interior architecture to create unique pieces.

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Post tags: camilla hounsell, drops pouf, eco design, green design, inner tubes, pouf chair, recycled furniture, sustainable design, upcycled furniture, upholstery

Does foursquare know where you are? Can GoWalla identify what shop you are near? Can Yelp really position you inside or near your favorite bar? With so many different ways to check-in and share your...

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Smart meters — utility meters that provide detailed, real-time information on energy use — promise an easy way to bring down residential power consumption. They help consumers sniff out energy hogs and, by conveying data wirelessly, eliminate the need for armies of meter readers. But, great hopes — and $3 billion in stimulus money — aside, the meters have gotten off to a rocky start.

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Post tags: "energy efficiency", Green Building, green design, home energy monitoring, power meters, smart grid, smart meter, Sustainable Building, sustainable design

FreelandBuck is an architectural design practice based in New York and Los Angeles affiliated with Yale and Woodbury Universities.

Frito-Lay has been working for a year now on developing and testing a biodegradable bag that will completely break down in an ordinary compost pile. The corn-based polymer chip bags are set to hit store shelves soon and can be expected to biodegrade in a backyard compost pile within 14 weeks. Right now, Frito-Lay is only rolling out the new bags under their Sun Chip brand, so don’t try throwing your Doritos bag into your compost bin — you’ll only have to fish it out later.

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Post tags: biodegradable bag, biodegradable packaging, chip bag, compost, compostable, compostable chip bag, eco design, Frito Lay, green design, greener packaging, sun chips, sustainable design

Kundra says that while the E-Government fund is focused on four specific areas, OMB is trying to improve all the on-going projects. But there are four projects that OMB and agencies are specifically paying close attention to, including Grants.gov,...Read more

The National Building Museum is hosting a film festival for the next week showcasing movies about�you guessed it�buildings, including one Monday about the destruction of a Bucky Fuller project. Who needs South by Southwest? The Architect's Newspaper

Crowdsourcing is in use for naming! You sign up (18+) and if the client selects the name you suggest you take home the reward. There's a new geo app up for naming here. (If you win and you are regular reader, let us know and we'll tout your gre...Read more

Spring is in the air! Why not deliver a little piece of it to your favorite person via a Postcarden pop-up card? These adorable and clever greeting cards transform into mini gardens right on your table, desk or window sill bringing the outdoors in and putting a big smile on the recipient’s face. Check out the cool time-lapse video of a Postcarden card in action here!

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Post tags: a studio for design, blossoming greeting cards, eco kids, green family, green kids, greeting card garden, greeting card mini garden, greeting cards that blossom, postcarden

Our friend and ally Ben Saunders, polar explorer and contributor to the Worldchanging book, is about to head off on a new expedition, North2, where he will attempt to set a new world's record for fastest solo trip to the North Pole on foot.

As he explains on his blog, though technology has made the Arctic profoundly more accessible (a subject I'll be returning to in a piece in April), and satellites and submarines have made the mapping part of polar exploration unnecessary, today's polar explorers are pushing themselves to see new parts of the world in ways human beings were never able to before:

Falcon Scott (Captain Scott's grandson) said: "It's a lot easier to do than in my grandfather's day."

And it's not just Falcon. Everyone says much the same thing. Including me, up until a week ago. It's a no-brainer, surely: in Scott's era you sailed to Antarctica in a leaky wooden ship and got scurvy en route, nowadays my buddy Patrick Woodhead will fly you and your friends there in a Gulfstream private jet, and you'll be met by a private chef when you land.

During Douglas Mawson's four-month Antarctic expedition in 1912, his two team mates died, the soles of his feet fell off (due to vitamin A poisoning from eating the livers of his dogs after they died as well), he tied the skin on again with bandages and walked alone for another four weeks before reaching his base camp (where he was welcomed with the words, "My God! Which one are you?"). They didn't sail home until the next year.

By contrast, 21st-century Antarctic explorers, if the ghost-written books and five-part documentaries are to be believed, consist largely of tearful TV celebs trailed by film crews in pick-up trucks and complaining about blisters. Clearly we've gone soft. Clearly the Golden Age is over. Adventurepreneurs? Luxpeditions? Glamping? Pass me the puke bucket.

But wait. Hold. Your. Horses. The platitudes about polar expeditions being easier nowadays make about as much sense, it strikes me, as saying that surfing is easier now than it was a century ago. Or skiing, or climbing, or sailing round Cape Horn, or driving a racing car, or any one of a million pursuits. Duke Kahanamoku surfed in Shackleton's heyday on a wooden board that weighed 52kg, and it would have taken months to travel by ship from London to Hawaii, yet it's clear that today's surfers (and skiers, climbers, sailors, racing drivers et al.) are pushing limits that would have been utterly unattainable to those of 90 years ago, and the same is true of polar expeditions – travelling solo would have been unthinkable, as would swimming across areas of open water, or hauling 180kg (the start weight of my sled in 2004 – in contrast Captain Scott's team pulled 200lbs, or 91kg each).

The polar regions are infinitely more accessible than they were a hundred years ago, but I would argue that the toughest polar expeditions are getting more challenging, not less so.

I expect that ultimately, on a finite planet, all explorations of the Earth will become about people pushing new performance limits and discovering worlds inside themselves, not trying simply to be the first person to set foot on some particular piece of land. And, frankly, I don't think we'll see meaningful manned exploration of unknown Outer Space -- that which can't be more easily mapped by probes and rovers -- in my lifetime; and explorations of Space that make no discoveries that couldn't be made in some other way are really just unbelievably expensive versions of setting records on Earth, the interplanetary equivalent of "first!"

Finding more about the unknown reaches within ourselves and the unknown workings of our planet is probably the new frontier. Discovering home, and ourselves.

You can follow Ben on Twitter: @polarben

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Imagining the Future at 11:45 AM)

We’ve already brought you living bath mats, a carpet made of moss, and a biodegradable mushroom stool, so it was only a matter of time before we pulled out some moss coffee tables for you to throw your feet on. Designed by home furniture company Ayodhyatra, the Secret Garden Table is a mosaic of various greens and textures that recall landscapes ranging from Tuscany’s rolling hills to the exotic Amazon rainforests. We dare you to pull your gaze away from these enchanting micro-landscapes.

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Post tags: "green furniture", ayodhya, green design, green interiors, living furniture, moss table, organic furniture, plant furniture, sustainable design, Sustainable Materials

At Inhabitat we love gadgets, but sometimes we cringe at the environmental costs of their manufacturing. So, we perked up when we heard about GGRP’s brilliant album packaging that transforms into a cardboard record player. The 45 rpm album sleeve unfolds into a miniature record player, and with the help a pencil you can become a DIY zero-energy DJ.

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Post tags: 45 rpm, advertising, cardboard, DIY, dj, GGRP, marketing, music, record, record player, recycleable, sound designers

I've had the good fortune to view the world through a Japanese lens over the past 10 days — specifically, the worlds of green business and clean technology, about which I've come to Japan to speak.

My host is the U.S. State Department, whose Office of International Information Programs invites a range of speakers to various foreign outposts at the host countries' request. (I did a similar speaking tour in Europe last fall, and another, in India, in 2000.) This latest trip took me to four cities — Tokyo, Fukuoma, Nagoya, and Osaka — to give presentations and to participate in two international symposia. My overall focus was on green innovation in the U.S. toward the goal of a "low-carbon economy."

That's a term that seems to be gaining currency in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, though it isn't uttered often in the U.S., where, at best, adherents of green business, renewable energy, and sustainable commerce typically refer to the more generic "green economy." "Low carbon" demonstrates the growing focus on climate change among business and governmental leaders in Japan and elsewhere.

It was an interesting time to be here. On Friday, Japan's Cabinet approved a major piece of climate legislation — Japan's first. And while it represents a major hurdle, it is less than it's cracked up to be. As the English-language Daily Yomiuri reported this past weekend:

The bill incorporates bold reductions first touted by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama when he addressed the United Nations in September, saying Japan would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

The bill also includes policies that were rejected by past Liberal Democratic Party-led governments due to concerns by business circles. If the bill becomes law, it will mark a major turning point in the country's global warming policy.

However, details of the policies incorporated in the bill are still to be discussed, and there are differing opinions within the government. The government will be required to tackle a mountain of problems in the days ahead to resolve these issues.

Among those issues is that the 25 percent reduction goal has the precondition "that all major greenhouse gas-emitting nations will agree on a fair and effective international framework and ambitious goals," the paper reports. Suffice to say, that precondition doesn't seem forthcoming any time soon.

Nonetheless, Japan's enlightened business leaders are focused on how to move forward on a low-carbon economy, though my conclusion is that they don't have much more of a plan to get there than do the Americans. At the events I attended, there was much discussion about how to achieve the green vision of Hatoyama, the first prime minister who seems to "get it," when it comes to the economic potential of cleantech and a green economy, but whose vision is thwarted by the legislature. That was one recurring theme. Another was commiserating over how to motivate employees to engage in green practices. They expressed frustration in Japanese consumers' willingness to buy green products. They wondered how stable oil prices will affect progress, not to mention the impacts of the global economic recession. They asked repeatedly about President Obama's "New Green Deal," a remnant of the 2008 campaign that, far as I can tell, has disappeared into the ether.

For an American visitor, it seemed, much as I wrote during my visit here in 2007, that "I was six thousand miles from home, but I could have been anywhere in the U.S., given the stories I was hearing."

But far more than I expected, the conversation that took place seemed less about Japan than about China. Japan's neighbor to the southwest seems to be causing a mild case of dyspepsia in the Land of the Rising Sun. Though the events I attended featured only one Chinese speaker, there was much conversation, and more than a little handwringing, about the role China will play in the low-carbon economy.

The conversation about China has taken a dramatic turn over the past year or so. In the past, it had more to do with "What happens when 1.3 billion Chinese want to achieve the same standard of living as their Western (and Japanese) counterparts?" That's still a concern, of course. But the conversations I've been hearing lately, in both the U.S. and Japan, have more to do with "What happens when China produces the clean technologies we'll all be needing?"

That's Japan's concern. Indeed, it seems a cruel turn of fate from just a quarter-century ago, when American leaders were asking the same question about Japan. At the time, that country seemed to be eating our proverbial lunch, outperforming us in producing a wide range of goods that had been invented in America, from solar panels to televisions.

Japan now worries that China will be a similar threat, with its weak intellectual property laws, which mean that it can easily "own" the technological secrets of things invented elsewhere, made cheaply due to its low-cost labor and manufacturing prowess. Already, for example, Japan has dropped from the number-one producer of solar panels to the number-three producer, behind China and Germany, according to the Earth Policy Institute. (The U.S. is fifth, just after Taiwan and ahead of India.) As the Institute reported last week, "Chinese annual production skyrocketed from 40 megawatts in 2004 to 1,848 megawatts in 2008, nearly five times the output of the United States."

It's that state of affairs that has Japan — and the U.S. — fretting. Not just about climate change but also about the economic climate that may see their global competitiveness fall further and further behind.

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(Posted by Joel Makower in Bright Green Economy at 10:52 AM)

Frank Lloyd Wright's 1905 Prairie work, the Mary M. W. Adams Residence in Highland Park, IL has recently come on the market for $699,000. Check out the details and more photos here.

Image copyright D. Gunning

This is just a quick reminder to anyone in Los Angeles that Architizer's official L.A. launch party is tonight down at the A+D Museum's new location on Wilshire Boulevard. Stop by Architizer for more details—but it should be a beautiful evening to be out and about, and things kick off at 6:30pm.

This is a further reminder, as well, that Peter Cook of Archigram and Crab Studio will be throwing open the doors for a new exhibition over at SCI-Arc tomorrow night: London Eight features work by professors and their "proteges" from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Tomorrow night—Friday, March 19—also includes a group discussion, moderated by Peter Cook, with Yousef Al-Mehdari, Pascal Bronner, Johan Hybschmann, CJ Lim, marcosandmarjan, and Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen. That's at 6pm. Hope to see you at both events!

Barry Lehrman alerts us to some new regarding Frank Gehry's Lead Fish in the Rapson Hall courtyard. Infrascape Design

Most people would love it if their laundry rooms could be more efficient and frankly, more attractive – we hate spending time in there, but when we do, we might as well enjoy it, right? Luckily, the world of laundry is evolving and there are an increasing number of options out there to help people create smarter laundry rooms. Read on as we showcase the state of the art in green clothes cleaning!

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Post tags: eco laundry, energy efficient laundering, Green Appliances, green laundry, high efficiency home, high-efficiency appliances, home appliances, new technology for the laundry room, smarter laundry, smarter laundry room, sustainable appliances, sustainable laundry

Pfeiffer Partners Architects, Inc. seeking Architect/Designer, Planner/Urban Designer & Project Architect in New York, NY Levin & Associates Architects seeking Senior Architect in Los Angeles, CA LivingHomes seeking Consulting Managing Principal in Santa Monica, CA View thousands of active job listings in our jobs section | Post a Job