Container Home Kit
(Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano are two enthusiastic architects that use existing materials and objects to warp them into magnificent living spaces. Take for instance the true genius shown in their “container home kit” which uses ISO cargo containers to build sustainable homes. Your prefabricated home can be delivered anywhere in the world, and in any color. Your home can be as big as the number of cargo containers you use. This article from The New York Times narrates the story behind LOT-EK architectural firm and the creative minds behind it.)
A Lot-Ek Solution
By PILAR VILADAS
Published: June 8, 2008
When you meet Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, the partners in the New York architecture firm LOT-EK (pronounced low-tech), the first thing you notice about them - apart from their Italian good looks - is their enthusiasm, a trait that many of their peers in the profession conceal beneath a facade of chilly reserve. But Tolla and Lignano, who came to this country in the early 1990s after completing architecture school in Naples, can’t help themselves. There’s just too much great stuff out there waiting to be turned into architecture: shipping containers, scaffolding, truck backs, ductwork, plastic mesh. Huh?
In fact, LOT-EK - which was a finalist in this year’s National Design Awards - has been making architecture out of industrialized society’s detritus for more than 15 years, turning the drum of a cement mixer into a media lounge, or the tank of an oil truck into the bedrooms and bathrooms of a loft apartment, or recycled shipping containers into mobile clothing stores, offices and apartments. Unlike architects who envision a perfect world of jewel-like buildings in meticulously planned settings, Tolla and Lignano love the messy layering of ad hoc, incremental urban growth; they’ve described their aesthetic as being more “Blade Runner” than “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Olympia Kazi, the director of the Institute for Urban Design, a New York nonprofit, says of LOT-EK, “The way they deal with urban reality is just to accept it.”
Filed under Design, Materials | Comment (1)Net Zero Home
(Imagine a home that produces as much energy as it uses. This was the dream of Eric Doub founder of Eco Futures Company, and it wasn’t until 2004 that he and his family moved into their dream home a model that may represent how people will build their homes in the future…)
The Showhouse That Sustainability Built
by Barnaby J. Feder
Eric Doub knows the difference between talking about building a green home and living in one: more than 2,600 energy-conscious visitors have traipsed through his model home in the last two and a half years.
Four years ago, Mr. Doub, the owner of Ecofutures Building in Boulder, Colo., was one of a growing number of builders intent on designing environmental sustainability into new homes and retrofitted projects. But clients willing to go all out for energy-efficient design and materials were scarce. And on a personal level, certain restrictions in the north Boulder development in which he and his wife, Catherine Childs, lived with their two young children hampered his ability to practice what he preached.
Then Ms. Childs discovered a large lot nearby where they could build their dream house - a house to prove that comfort, and even touches of luxury like a hot tub, did not have to be sacrificed to do right by the environment.
Filed under Architects, Design | Comment (0)Global City Architecture Goes Green
(In Geneva Switzerland, Merk Serono, a biotechnology company decides to create an environment that focuses on the health of it’s workers and it’s environment and the architects and designers at Mackay and partners help make that happen…)
Ecological Antidote: A biotechnology company considers environmental health and sustainability for its new headquarters
by Penny Bonda
The client and the design team of the new Merck Serono headquarters in Geneva brilliantly accomplished an outcome rarely identified as a guiding design vision, yet one unquestionably important to organizational success: sense of place. The 1,200 workers at the global biotechnology company, created by a merger in 2006, had been scattered over six sites in the Swiss city. Bringing the disparate staff together to a single campus-style location was an obvious project directive; uniting them into a community, however, did not happen automatically or easily. It required strategic space and materials solutions that emphasized community, comfort, and communication.
Filed under Design | Comment (0)