Believe it or not, some of modern architecture’s most storied white boxes were never meant to remain so white. While Adolf Loos was skirmishing with Vienna’s Secessionist architects and descrying the whipping, stylized vines of their nature-inspired ornament, his 1930 Villa Müller in Brno was designed to be partially concealed in actual, living vines. Like Loos, Mies van der Rohe intended for some of his plastered white facades to be covered in vegetation. Few have paused to contemplate how this affects modernism’s clean, hard-edged historiographies, but with all this in mind, Act Romegialli Architects’ renovation of a disused garage on the slopes of the Raethian Alps — which uses raw nature as its primary form of exterior ornament — can be considered quite modern. More after the jump.

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Architects and aesthetes just love to disguise ugly infrastructure. We’ve seen so many kinds of proposals, from electrical substations made over with tiles and mirrors to highways trellised with ivy. Now the folks at AZPA want to dress up a coal-fired power plant outside Hamburg as a resplendent green “mountain” surrounded by new public park.

With a porous, mesh-like cladding that will support CO2-hungry creepers, the revamped plant would play a role in cleaning the air that it is also polluting. Can a lush, vegetated power plant become a genuine public good, or is this just a brilliant stroke of greenwashing? Read more!

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If Bjarke Ingels’s winning design for EuropaCity — an up-and-coming suburban oasis in Paris that boasts a sprawling landscaped rooftop — can attest to anything, it’s that the world is crazy for green roofs right now. Unfortunately, not every project is blessed with 800,000 square meters of undeveloped land to repopulate with natural flora. But with a still-sizable 100,000 square meters in the Kagithane Gardens business district in Istanbul, Julien de Smedt Architects (JDS Architects) has proposed an impressive commercial structure topped with curving, tiered, and interweaving green roofs and terraces that push the envelope for integrating landscape with architectural design. More after the break.

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The tower-and-podium typology could probably be described as the quintessential model for urban architecture of the 20th century. By now, it’s grown quite derivative, bland, and even unsustainable. WOHA architects have reimagined the tried-and-true formula for a new “green” century with a visionary urban complex that fuses the city with the  tropics. For their sprawling hotel row, the PARKROYAL on Pickering, the architects raised a series of 12-story towers over a block-long podium that’s threaded with sky gardens with frangipani, palm trees, and tropical plants.

The podium is sculpted to look like large eroded boulders, what the architects call a “topographical architecture.” This consists of stratified layers of precast concrete that move in and out of the forest of columns supporting the towers suspended above. The gardens are cantilevered off the face of the blocks at every fourth floor, helping to shade the rooms within. See more of the project here.

Photos: Patrick Bingham-Hall

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This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Jury Choice Award in the Architecture + Weather category. See the full list of winners here.

When submitting a design for an administrative office at the factory site of a cement plant in Rajasthan, India’s largest province, Sanjay Puri Architects were feeling the heat—heat in excess of 110°F (45°C), that is. Since Rajasthan features the Thar Desert, where temperatures during the summer months make the locale nearly inhospitable, the architects had to consider the climate and weather patterns for the proposed office’s design. To mitigate the effects of an extremely harsh climate, the architects turned to the traditional Indian design of incorporating open-air courtyards to create cooler internal spaces, and came up with a concept called BIOME. Read more!

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This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Jury Choice Award in the Architecture + Sustainability category. See the full list of winners here.

In contemporary architecture, the concept of sustainability is often associated with the latest technology. It might bring to mind glossy, high-performance buildings bedizened with photovoltaic cells, or LEED-stamped supertalls embedded with water- and energy-conserving systems. This notion of sustainability, however, caters to a metropolitan environment, its glass-and-steel facades blending in with the existing fabric of urban development. For its Off Grid Home in Extremadura, Spanish firm ÃBATON faced the challenge of transforming an abandoned stable tucked away on a hillside far from city infrastructure into a state-of-the-art, environmentally conscious family residence without disturbing the pristine ecological and aesthetic milieu of Cáceres, Spain. See more after the jump.

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Project: Bridge House

Architect: Max Pritchard Architects

Location: Ashbourne, Australia

An idyllic site near a creek and billabong—that’s Aussie for a pond left over after a river changes course—called for a home that would “touch the earth lightly.” To minimize the impact on this picturesque setting, Max Pritchard took a few clues from bridges and designed a home that spans the small creek’s path, barely occupying any land and providing the experience of living in the treetops. Keeping the intentions green, the home’s narrow plan allows for significant cross-ventilation in the summer, while a wood combustion heater supplements the natural passive heating. Solar hot-water heating and photovoltaic cells positioned on the garage roof further reduce the home’s carbon footprint. Now that’s what we call sustainable!

Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Photos: Sam Noonan

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Project: Vent Vert

Architect: Edward Suzuki Associates

Location: Tokyo

Located in the Minato-Ku ward of Tokyo, this eight-story building boasts a bounty of plants affixed to a curving lattice on its front façade. This lush hanging garden appears as a patchwork pattern, alternating between blocks of green and transparent windows, bringing the serenity of the natural environment into the bustle of one of the world’s largest cities. A commercial space is located on the street level, while the upper floors host apartments that take in the benefits of the living wall.

Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Photos: Edward Suzuki Associates

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Project: Transformada Ciel

Architect: Rojkind Arquitectos and AGENT

Location: Mexico City

Renovating abandoned transportation structures is all the rage these days. As part of an ongoing collaboration with Coca-Cola, Rojkind Arquitectos and AGENT transformed the unused helipad and rooftop of the company’s Foro Ciel building into a productive co-working center surrounded by green space. The revived helipad also functions as a green roof by incorporating vegetation that does not require water from the grid, installing a rainwater collection system, using recycled materials, and reutilizing existing structural elements from the roof. Solar panels collect energy for the dynamic interior office spaces, which include non-toxic customized furniture and interchangeable modules for a flexible interior where different groups can re-arrange the layout as required of their workflow.

Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Photos: Jaime Navarro

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Voting for the A+ Public Choice Winners is finishing strong! Today we’re bringing Architecture + Sustainability to the forefront. It’s no secret that the unprecedented growth of urban environments has come at the expense of the environment—and we architects, planners, and urban designers are largely responsible. While rapid urbanization is the root cause for many of the world’s dire environmental problems, it’s also the sector most affected by design that addresses environmentally damaging practices with innovative, environment-friendly solutions. From off-the-grid houses to transit-oriented development, the following projects show how truly great design can address global problems with local, sustainable remedies. Click through to see them all!

Like what you see? Make sure to vote for your favorite project over at the A+ Public Voting site!

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