Building Sponge City: Redesigning LA For Long-Term Drought The Los Angeles River in 2013. Engineers turned it into a narrow concrete channel in the 1940s, after a flood destroyed homes and left 100 people dead in 1938. Steve Lyon/Flickr hide caption itoggle caption Steve Lyon/Flickr The Los Angeles River in 2013. Skolkovo Innovation Center The logo of Skolkovo The Scheme of Work[edit] In March 2010 Vekselberg announced the necessity of developing a special legal order in Skolkovo and emphasized the need to offer a tax holiday lasting 5–7 years.[6] In April 2010 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev charged the government with working out specific legal, administrative, tax and customs regulations on Skolkovo.[7] Brad Pitt's Make It Right Houses a Drag on New Orleans Other than the nine hours spent clinging to a rooftop, the loss of the house she'd bought in 1977, and the two and a half years spent shuttling back and forth to her daughter's home in Atlanta, Hurricane Katrina has been pretty good to 72-year-old Gloria Guy. That's because, about five years ago now, Brad Pitt built her a really, really nice house. Guy was the first beneficiary of the Make It Right foundation, the charity Pitt started in 2007 to furnish homes for those in the already dirt-poor Lower Ninth Ward who lost theirs. These new homes were not just slap-dash replacements. Guy's mustard-yellow four-bedroom is perched on seven-foot-tall stilts, with a roof that slants upward from front to back and leans to one side like a jaunty haircut—a bizarre sight in this city of graceful Creole symmetry.
Sustainable City Development Sustainable City Development Malmö, Sweden "From industrial waste land to sustainable city" City of Malmö is highlighted by ClimateAction in partnership with United Nations Environment Programme as a city with high ambitions in sustainability. Read the full article by former Mayor Ilmar Reepalu at ClimateActions website. Windwheel concept combines tourist attraction with "silent turbine" The Dutch have long used windmills to harness wind energy. A new concept proposed for city of Rotterdam, however, is surely one of the most elaborate windmills ever conceived. The Dutch Windwheel is a huge circular wind energy converter that houses apartments, a hotel and a giant coaster ride.
modern,contemporary,architecture,green,home-design All designs Copyright 2009, Leap Adaptive. Web site design by Leap Adaptive Leap Adaptive logo and "Homes for a Green Generation" are trademarks of Leap Adaptive. The Leap Adaptive 'Dragonfly' is our most evolved home design to date. It features an active sliding moon-roof over a dramatic 2-story glass stair well in a progressive-modern design. The nearly 2,000 square foot design provides for contemporary family living with a spacious open family-dining room, designer kitchen, and an opulent master suite. Subterranean roads proposed for greener London Fresh from being the subject of an idea to move its pedestrians and cyclists below ground, London might now see the same happen to its motorists. New proposals would see a number of the city's roads buried. The aim is to create new space above ground and make the city greener and more pleasant. View all The proposal was announced by Mayor of London Boris Johnson during a recent visit to Boston, US, where a similar project has taken place.
10 Homes Built from Straw Written by Ryan Hollitz | 19 December 2009 Posted in Blog - Green Building New building materials could really make your house green from the ground up! Straw! History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places One rainy January night in Raleigh, North Carolina, Matt Tomasulo went out to commit what some would call vandalism. Along with his girlfriend and a friend, the graduate student walked around downtown hanging homemade signs on lampposts and telephone poles. The signs featured arrows pointing the way to popular downtown destinations, along with average walking times. Tomasulo called the project “guerrilla wayfinding.” His decidedly un-criminal intent was to promote more walking among Raleigh citizens.
Architecture student imagines moving population of the Maldives onto oil rigs Taking the view that rising sea levels caused by climate change could eventually result in the loss of the low-lying island country of the Maldives, architecture student Mayank Thammalla envisions moving the country's entire population onto existing oil rigs. Designed for Thammalla's final year Masters of Architecture thesis, Swim or Sink isn't meant to be a final plan ready for implementation, and is best considered food-for-thought as to the role architects might take in mitigating the effects of climate change. "I was interested in looking at the future of the Maldives because their situation is very unique," explains Thammalla. "They are a nation that can lose their entire identity, a 2,000 year old culture and their geographical position on the planet, due to projected sea level rise within the next 100 years. The Maldivians are talking about purchasing land in Australia, what will the costs be there?
Resurrecting the Original Road Trip on America's Ghost Highway A piece of the Old Spanish Trail, Milton, Fla. (Photo: drivetheost/Flickr) In the past 15 years, while hunting for missing pieces of the Old Spanish Trail, Charlotte Kahl would sometimes find herself following pick-up trucks. She could be in a town she'd never been in before, at 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning, and everything would be quiet.
In Spain, Entire Villages Are Up For Sale — And They're Going Cheap : Parallels The abandoned village of O Penso, in northwest Spain, is for sale for about $230,000. The last resident died a decade ago. The village includes 100 acres with half a dozen houses, two sprawling farms with room for 70 cattle and a stand-alone bread-making kitchen. Lauren Frayer for NPR hide caption itoggle caption Lauren Frayer for NPR The abandoned village of O Penso, in northwest Spain, is for sale for about $230,000.
Vincent Callebaut Architecte LILYPAD PROGRAM : Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees / Mixing Uses LOCATION : Oceans SURFACE AREA : 500.000 m² PERSPECTIVES : Philippe Steels / www.pixelab.be Further to the anthropogenic activity, the climate warms up and the ocean level increases. According to the principle of Archimedes and contrary to preconceived notions, the melting of the arctic ice-floe will not change the rising of the water exactly as an ice cube melting in a glass of water does not make its level rise. However, there are two huge ice reservoirs that are not on the water and whose melting will transfer their volume towards the oceans, leading to their rising.
Dramatic rise in crime casts a shadow on downtown L.A.'s gentrification As Lauren Mishkind was walking along 7th Street this summer in downtown Los Angeles, a man pulled a handgun and pointed it at another person standing behind her. Terrified, she hid behind a car while the assailant tackled the victim. An earlier version of this post identified Lauren Mishkind as a licensed architect. She is an architectural designer. “I was just shaking for the rest of the day,” said Mishkind, who lives downtown and works at an architecture firm in the area. “You kind of assume it's par for the course living down here, which is kind of more shocking.”