Reference

This Day, That Year
When the first passengers of the London Underground boarded 150 years ago this January, the trains were powered by steam engines. This presented engineers with a new challenge: ventilating a system powered by steam-belching locomotives. The solution was large vents. Effective, but ugly and altogether inappropriate. In the affluent suburb of Leinster Gardens, a novel solution was employed: Five-foot-thick concrete facades were designed to look exactly like the fronts of the other houses on the block (complete with plants in window boxes). They’re still there today, though a casual visitor might never know that behind them lay open Tube tracks (http://www
.urban75.org/blog/the-fake-houses-at-23-and-24-leinster-gardens-bayswater-london-w2/). A similar solution was employed in Brooklyn, New York, on Joralemon Street, where a faux brick front hides the subway’s emergency exit (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/nyregion/thecity/26shaf.html?_r=0).

Amuneal
Repurposing materials is very much in vogue. But the ultimate recycling story might be one that appeared first in our pages. Paul Pedini, a Boston-based engineer, partnered with Single Speed Design to use more than 600,000 pounds of recycled construction material from Boston’s Big Dig project to build a modern home called the Big Dig House; that project won the first-ever Metropolis-sponsored Next Generation competition in 2004 (http://www.metropolismag.com.com/story/20060515/from-highway-to-home ). But even that project seems tame when compared to the Wing House, built entirely of parts from a retired Boeing 747-200 airplane, (http://www.treehugger.com /sustainable-product-design/architect-builds-house-using-45-million-boeing-747-parts.html). Architect David Hertz had plenty to work with. Most of the 395,000-pound plane was repurposed for seven buildings, including the main house, built from the plane’s wings; a meditation pavilion; a guesthouse; and an animal barn (for housing endangered species) made from the jet’s cargo hold. All of this repurposing took place on a 55-acre hilltop property in Malibu, California.