Inspired by this Financial Times article on “the joys of working out of a backyard hideaway,” TreeHugger recently put together a roundup of home-office garden sheds. Here are a few we could spend a little time working in (such as the modular House Arc, above). Read more
Over on Treehugger Lloyd Alter weighs in on this inventive new workspace from Zurich-based architecture firm NAU. The “Immersive Cocoon” is just an idea at this point but it’s a good one. A pod that stands alone within a room and does away with our dependency on the computer and mouse. You’ve got to wonder what kind of a chair we’d design for this sort of space!
Charlie Lazor has been designing some of the loveliest modern prefab houses in the country since the beginning of the start of the prefab meme. But there is something really special about his latest, the Week’nder, on Madeline Island in Lake Superior. I have been staring at it for hours. First of all, it is not really a flatpack like Charlie Lazor is known for, but it appears to be made of two prefabricated modules with a site built roof installed between them.
I have always thought that this was perhaps the most efficient way to build modular; one is not shipping a lot of air in empty boxes. Instead, one is putting the complicated stuff in the boxes and just adding a roof over. Michelle Kaufmann did this in the Breezehouse and it was done in the early sixties as well.
Aristotle said “No great genius was without a mixture of insanity.” Marcel Proust wrote “Everything great in the world is created by neurotics. They have composed our masterpieces, but we don’t consider what they have cost their creators in sleepless nights, and worst of all, fear of death.”
Perhaps that’s why Jakub Szczęsny designed this hermitage, this “studio for invited guests – young creators and intellectualists from all over the world.”- it will drive them completely crazy.
When I first wrote about Tham & Videgård’s glass treehouse it got 911 comments and a couple of million pageviews, so many that TreeHugger completely crashed. Once built, it turned out to be truly a thing of beauty. Now you can own your own Mirrorcube; the TreeHotel people have put it up for sale as a prefab.
Read more
The next time someone says your iPhone case looks like you found it in the trash, you can take it as a compliment. But that’s only if you’ve got a ReCase from Miniwiz, made from 100% recycled agricultural waste and post-consumer plastic. Miniwiz also make HYmini Biscuit – a handheld green universal charger, Solarbulb – which turns plastic bottles into out door garden lights and ReeCharge which is a bike-integrated, weather proof, green universal adaptor.
The Miniwiz iPhone cases are also made to carry credit cards and an RFID card, so you have the option of tracking your phone should you lose it. The material comes from by-products of rice farming- the rice husks are combined with the plastic to form POLLIBER™.
By Alex Davies.
This story appears in partnership with treehugger, a one-stop shop for green news, solutions, and product information
As awesome as cities are, getting away from time to time is a good idea. But as refreshing and necessary as a vacation in the countryside can be, it comes with its own headaches, especially in terms of increased carbon footprint. But if you’re lucky enough to be around Bordeaux, in Southwestern France, you don’t have to go far to find a great spot to kick back. Just outside Bordeaux, you can find Le Nuage (the Cloud), a “playful and poetic” lakeside peri-urban retreat, made of wood and Plexiglas, which sleeps seven.
Read more
Sunset Magazine always makes a splash on their Celebration Weekend with a model home; Michelle Kaufmann got her big launch when they presented her first Glidehouse there, and the first Breezehouse in 2005. They are often grand things, like Henry Siegel’s in 2006. But times being what they are, this year’s home is small, affordable, and built from a recycled shipping container.
It’s designed by Hybrid Architecture of Seattle, who have been doing shipping container architecture for years, calling it Cargotecture. and have it down to a science. They are insulated with soy foam, have bamboo flooring and a tiny boat-like bathroom. The C 192 will retail for $59,500, or $309 per square foot, which will no doubt be a cause for complaint. But as I have noted before, small houses cost more per square foot than big ones.
With this post from Lloyd Alter we welcome leading green site Treehugger to Lifework. We’re excited to share Lifework stories on Treehugger and their stories here. At Herman Miller we share Treehugger’s wish to drive sustainability mainstream. In fact ,you can read about our commitment to the environment here. It’s at the core of what we do at Herman Miller and it’s what drives Treehugger in everything they do from their green buying guides to posts on green house design and the joys of cycling around New York City. We start with Lloyd Alter’s favorite lamp from ICFF.
A few years ago, looking for new markets for its sustainably harvested wood, the Swedish forestry company Södra developed Durapulp, a mix of wood pulp and polylactide, or PLA, the thermoplastic made from corn or sugarcane. They consulted with the architectural firm Claesson Koivisto Rune, who developed a prize-winning chair out of the stuff, and who then approached a sceptical Magnus Wästberg, who wondered about the virtues of mixing paper and electrical wiring. But with modern low-voltage LEDs, the old preconceptions no longer apply, and the result is the DuraPulp lamp,(formally the Claesson Koivisto Rune w101, nice that he names it after the designers!) which combines the strength of the material with a folded origami-like form that gives it rigidity.
Above: Magnus Wästberg holds the durapulp material that is pressed and cut into the lamps. There are 4 thin uninsulated copper wires laid in between the layers; a heavy power supply base makes it stable and supplies power to the LED lamps in the head. Rip those two things out and you can toss the thing on a compost heap.
There are so many things to love about this kind of thinking. LEDs reduce the voltage and amperage of the light to the point that the wires are barely there, and can be safely embedded in paper. A lumber company finds another use for the pulp that is often a byproduct of softwood lumber production. A designer figures out how to shape it for strength and form. The result is an attractive, effective and affordable product that at the end of its life is compostable. It’s the best example of sustainable design that I saw at this year’s ICFF.
Sweden is really far north, and the winters are long and dark. It’s not surprising that Swedes get philosophical about light; one sees it in their architecture, in the colours they use in interior design. In 2008 Wästberg even wrote a manifesto for his new company, titled Lamps for A Neanderthal Man, (pdf download here), in which he quotes the famous Swedish author and playwright August Strindberg: “The electric light will make people work themselves to death.”
He had a point; I wonder what he would have thought about computers. But now that we can work anywhere at any time, we need greener, healthier and more efficient tools that have a lower impact on our environment. The Durapulp lamp is a good example.
More at Wästberg
This story appears in partnership with treehugger, a one-stop shop for green news, solutions, and product information
We had a busy day yesterday with bloggers from all over the blogger-sphere dropping by our booth. It was great to finally put faces to names. Definitely look out for Jaime Derringer ‘s ICFF round-up on Design Milk. And for an extraordinary array of interviews with designers you can’t go past PSFK – plus their map has been a great guide through the ICFF maze. PSFK’s senior editor Dave Pinter dropped by the booth yesterday armed with two very serious looking cameras. You can check out his coverage here. We spent a bit of time with Lloyd Alter from Treehugger. We’re thrilled to announce we will be sharing stories with Lloyd over the coming months. Look out for those. Lloyd was particularly impressed with Wastberg’s paper lamp (pictured above). I put him onto the lovely Cappello lamps (below) by Molo – a great little desk light for Lifework readers.
