With a past life in corporate interior and architectural design in San Francisco, I have been aware of 3Form’s many uses as an interior manufacturing company for several years now. I had seen their products used again and again in our sustainable projects, but the image of a conference room divider using their organic Varia Ecoresin Interlayers, in which bear grass had been entombed within a sheet of 40 percent preconsumer recycled material still resonates in my mind. So when I was asked to preview their new showroom, I was confronted with a question I had never thought of before: how does 3Form use 3Form in their interiors?

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It’s hard to believe that spring is here. Almost more surprising than being able to wear shorts in March is the fact that the great concrete jungle that’s New York City actually has a wide array of brightly colored native plant life, such as the red columbine and southern magnolia. Already in bloom, the gardens at Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 1 give those of us who can’t get out of the city for a day the opportunity to find the beauty of nature just across the water from the financial district.

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One of the first lessons you learn in a big city is the concept of “space”, rather, too little of it. While our country cousins may learn about the cycles of the moon and that those three stars in a line make up Orion’s belt, those of us who live in a dense, high-rise metropolis learn how to make the most of a shoe-box sized apartment and covet having doors to our bedrooms.

This lack of urban space has lead to The City College of New York Team’s concept for the 2011 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. The international competition challenges 20 college teams from New Zealand, Belgium, Canada and China as well as across the United States to take on issues of creating solar-powered homes. Aside from the problems the teams already face, Team New York (one of two New York City teams, the other being a collaboration between the New School Parsons School of Architecture and Stevens Institute of Technology) has a unique problem: there just aren’t enough places to build homes here that will receive enough sunlight. Read more…

Ok, so New Yorkers may not get the fuss, but we understand that special bond between a person and his car… and that Lamborghini driving down the street… or that blue VW Bug that reminds us of childhood. We may envision a future of vehicles fueled by renewable alternatives, and we  may have had a collective heart attack when the gas bill came this month, but there’s just something special about seeing a pristine, leather interior 1969 Yenko Chevrolet next to its other muscle car “bros”.

Those at the Museo Dell’Automobile di Torino get it. In April, they presented their new offering to the four-wheeled gods: a gorgeous building created by architect Cino Zucchi with the Recchi Engineering Srl company and the Proger SpA firm, and enhanced with displays by Francois Confino. “In the new Museum, we will tell the story of the motor car, its transformation from a means of transport to an object of worship, from its origins right up to the contemporary evolution of creative thought,”  states the website. 

To tell that story, they created what is, essentially, a very expensive garage for their 200 or so original cars, dating from the mid-19th century to present. The new housing is now a stunning mosaic structure with a curved façade reminiscent of the type of winding road you imagine most of the cars zipping down through the mountains. It’s reflective surface and frosted windows silhouetting vehicles such as the Ford Model T creates an inside-outside effect combining luxury with mechanical elements, the illusion of driving with the serenity of nature. 

The plan behind the design was to mesh the museum’s almost 90-year history with advancements in design, architecture and technology, while emphasizing the creative genius behind each car. Here visitors can see these mechanical masterpieces in a new light as ingenious forms, not just another gas-guzzler that took their parking spot.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the average American is finding his or her relationship to health and wellness a bit… well… on the rocks. In a time of decreased fitness, increased processed foods, and a general lack of self awareness, most of us can’t figure out how to repair this broken relationship, though we really want to. A classic case of “it’s not you, it’s me.” Who’d have thought that the semester of health classes in high school wouldn’t give us the answers we’d need 5, 10, 20 or even 50 years later?

Enter Kaiser Permanente’s interactive Center for Total Health—the therapist you’ve been looking for, that is, if you’re in the Washington D.C. area. The new center was created to begin the discussion on national health as well as act as a meet-and-greet between patients and new medical innovations.

That tablet your doctor is carrying instead of her standard clipboard? It’s probably the new Blackberry Playbook which is being used to look up your medical chart or scan the barcode of the prescription you’ll be picking up in an hour. Having trouble remembering when to take how much of that particular medicine? The Philips Medication Dispensing Service will dispense, in your home, the correct medication at the right dosage at the right time. Or even if you’re in perfect health, you may be intrigued by GE Health’s Vscan ultrasound, which looks like a sleek device from the iPod family, but is capable of allowing sonographers to take their services to rural areas where such technologies aren’t yet available. In the realistic future, we may not be androids, but we sure are using them to our advantage. Read more…

Last Spring I enrolled in a sustainable construction development class thinking it would be nice to know a thing or two about healthy building material alternatives. Despite the section of my bookcase now dedicated to green manuals and alternative materials catalogs, I have learned an important lesson that most building professionals, concerned with health and sustainability, have learned before me: there is no such thing as “a thing or two.” It’s more like a few thousand things, most of them with crazy scientific names ending with “-ene” or “-ide.” You can spend hours just figuring out what type of paint to invest in (or, should that be wallpaper instead?) to minimize the VOCs used, and that’s even before the dreaded “egg shell white, or linen white?” debate.

Even for design professionals with some experience in building healthy, the challenge can seem like a time consuming labyrinth of dictionary definitions and a frustrating exercise in weighing lesser evils.

For most of us, including those just beginning our professional lives, lessons on sustainability thinking can culminate in a confusing upward climb towards a healthy environment. But, thanks to Perkins + Will’s “Precautionary List”, understanding chemical compositions in the design world has become easier. The list was created by the architecture firm, with the understanding that it is up to every individual to apply the precautionary principle when it comes to the health of humans, other living beings, and the environment. Even if there’s only a chance of a material containing something harmful, why use it? Read more…

From the advice I was raised on, I’m going to assume that “eat right,” “turn off the lights when you leave a room,” “only do a full load of laundry,” and “how in the world do you spend so much money on gas in a month?!” are among the most often used phrases of any parent to their teenaged child. For the Lindell family of Hasselby outside of Stockholm, that advice not only worked on their 16 year old daughter, Hannah, but walked right into the center of the family home in the shape of a newspaper advertisement looking for test subjects.

Enter the One Tonne Life project. For the next six months, the four-person Lindell family, made up of parents Nils and Alicja, and Hannah and Jonathan, 13, will live in a state-of-the-art, climate-smart villa by A-hus and trade in their two gas-powered vehicles for a battery-powered Volvo C30 Electric. Although they get the perks of science at its environmentally-friendly best, the point of the One Tonne Life project is to show that the everyday nuclear family, with a relative understanding of sustainability, can lower its carbon footprint from 7.29 tons a year to a manageable 1 ton. The project’s webpage, onetonnelife.com, asks: “Is it possible to live carbon neutral today?… With energy-smart housing, electric cars and clean energy, we could go on living almost as usual. Couldn’t we? What does it really take for a family to live carbon neutral?” Read more…

During the winter months, some days it’s hard to imagine wanting to leave your bed. But the city of Helsinki is looking 5 degree Fahrenheit winters in the face (the average annual temperature is 41 degrees). Indeed, the new Helsinki Music Hall laughs at the cold. In a feat of technical ingenuity, the city of 600,000 is building a giant cube of glass, a material you don’t normally think of for its insulating properties. 

To handle the normal cold weather, as well as the sunny summer days which, suddenly, can hit 86 degrees for short spurts of time, LPR Architects and façade specialist Normek Oy are using 11,811 square feet of triple-pane glass, made by Interpane. The glass is called  iplus neutral E, and is rated at Ug-value: 1.1 W/m²K.

Ok, so, to many of us, that doesn’t mean anything. Glass is glass. Read more…

While we wait for the completion of the 1.3 million square foot Transbay Transit Center, in 2017, we have time to think about what this collaboration between Atelier Ten, Pelli Clark Pelli Architects, and Adamson Associates will bring to San Francisco.

To reach the goal of a LEED Gold ranking, Atelier Ten, a consultancy known for engineering sustainable solutions for very high performance buildings, focused on ways to cut energy use and carbon emissions, create a comprehensive waste management system, and incorporate sustainable materials. Their emphasis for this project, however, was water conservation. Read more…

What would Ferrari be if not eye-catching? The same aesthetic that has people stopping and staring on the street is now doing just that on a grandiose scale with Ferrari World, on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi. The 200,000 square meters of flat roof emerges out of the desert in startling iconographic clarity which can only elicit images of a Ferrari GT and get your blood pumping by the massive use of Ferrari’s trademark red. And if the pronged extraterrestrial roof isn’t enough to make your brain scream “FERRARI!”, Benoy Architects of London have added the world’s largest Ferrari logo, scaled at a little over 213 feet by 159 feet. Beneath the roof, a mosaic vertical structure of red aluminum paneling and Ipasol solar control glass creates a façade which is inclined at 10 degrees towards the interior and allows some of the outside light to penetrate the interior  while protecting the building from overheating. Read more…