The Mexico-based practice SAC Studio de Arquitectura y Ciudad won first place in the Denver Architectural League’s ideas competition for riverfront micro-housing. SAC team members: Wyatt O’Day, Rodolfo Unda, João Barbosa, Jovana Grujevska, and Armando Birlain López.

On Friday the Denver Architectural League announced the winners of its micro-housing ideas competition. The contest solicited designs for an eight-unit building with micro-apartments that range from 250 to 375 square feet, sited on a narrow swath of riverbank in a sparse industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown. The league invited architects to imagine a structure so virtuous—net-zero, built on a leftover slope of undesirable land, virtually no parking, etc.—that its inhabitants might just be theoretical figments themselves. (Who wants to live in 250 square feet and be forced to take the bus to town?)

All in all, the competition drew 70 proposals, 25 of which came from abroad. And what do you know, the winners all hail from outside the United States, which makes sense given this country’s general discomfort with small (New York, San Francisco, and this place excepted). Read more!

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Roth Sheppard’s design competition is inspired by micro-units in Europe, such as this short-stay apartment in The Hague by Maff. Photo courtesy of Maff

Architects love to design micro-apartments, but do people love to live in them? Jeff Sheppard, principal of Roth Sheppard Architects, hopes so. He and his colleagues at the Denver Architectural League are betting that tiny units will appeal to young Denverites who find themselves priced out of the mortgage market and who want to live in dense neighborhoods. The league recently launched a tiny-dwelling design competition that adds up to a particularly tall order: an eight-unit net-zero building on a difficult slice of riverbank on the outskirts of downtown. At 375 square feet a pop, the units will definitely be more generous than the 220-square-footers planned for San Francisco and the 250 now allowed in New York—but still diminutive compared with Denver’s 500-square-foot prefab tiny Starbucks. Read more!

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When the Bullitt Center opens in Seattle in April, this all-renewables net-zero powerhouse designed by Miller Hull will be able to sustain itself rain and shine. With solar arrays, aggressive rainwater collection, and composting toilets, the new headquarters for the Bullitt Foundation—which supports sustainable development in the Pacific Northwest—will be on track to meet the Living Building Challenge. As the most stringent green standard around, the challenge requires 100 percent in everything that counts: namely, 100 percent of energy needs met with on-site renewables, 100 percent of water supplied by on-site rainwater collection, and on-site waste management. But if the architects succeed, they may run afoul of the law. Read more!

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The lotus is one of the most potent symbols in Chinese culture, representing purity, enlightenment, and good fortune. Soon, thanks to PLaT Architects,  it could also become a symbol of innovative architecture and luxury vacationing! The Asian architecture firm has recently unveiled plans for its Lotus Hotel — a sprawling resort nestled in China’s Xiangshawan Desert. Located more than 500 miles from Beijing, the hotel will be built with local materials — well, as local as the middle of the desert can get — and will not use water or concrete during construction. The final structure will include petal-like canopies arranged in a circular bloom. Read more!

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While we were scrolling through adorable photos of tiny houses, the San Francisco–based architect David Baker was doing backyard homesteaders one better with an ambitious project of his own. With its shiny recycled-metal rain screen and jauntily angled rooftop solar array, the 712-square-foot Zero Cottage is both charming and formidably sustainable. The structure has already made LEED for Homes Platinum and scored 203 GreenPoints, and it is targeting Passivhaus and net-zero energy. When all the certifications come in, the cottage will have more titles per square foot than Denver’s prefab tiny Starbucks. Read more!

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Sung’s installation, “Bloom,” at the Materials & Applications gallery in Los Angeles, opens and closes according to environmental conditions. Photo: Brandon Shigeta

To build a smarter building, you could start with making better sensors. Or you could take a cue from biologist-turned-architect Doris Kim Sung and invent building materials that react to the environment on their own, bypassing the on/off switch entirely.

“We can’t do net-zero energy just by making mechanical systems more efficient,” Sung explained in a TED Talk earlier this year, which was released online Thursday. Instead, Sung takes our natural biological defenses as a model. “What I propose is that our building skins should be more similar to human skin, and by doing so can be much more dynamic and responsive,” said the architect, who is principal of dO|Su Studio Architecture and an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. Read more!

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The EPA estimates that toilet flushing consumes some 4.8 billion gallons of water each day in the United States alone. Why not turn recycle this waste water and put it to use, say, in the service of generating heat for building? Green tech start-up OriginOil believes it’s possible to do just that by collecting the flushed water and re-using it to grow algae, which is then processed into heat. As Smart Planet reports, the company claims that furnishing large buildings with their own algae production “labs” could yield a large heating source that would significantly reduce the structures’ overall energy consumption and help them to produce their own clean energy–the first steps towards becoming net zero.

OriginOil has developed a flat panel photobioreactor (PBRs) that can be applied in a manner similar to solar cells and panels, which is to say, they can be placed on large area rooftops and even vertical surfaces of tall office building and high-rise apartment complexes. The algae-laden photobioreactor has one key advantage over other these photovoltaic systems, in that not only can it produce energy, but it can also purify wastewater by absorbing CO2 and other chemicals inherent within it. The company, which is currently testing its systems in France and elsewhere, expects their panels to become competitive at an area of 4000 m2 and beyond. According to the Riggs Eckelberry, OriginOil’s CEO, an algae farm of this size “installed on a 10,000 floor area building would generate 40 kWh per m2 of floor surface per year.” For every unit of power produced, there is a return of 4 units of heat, which, when projected at large-scales, can be converted for heating usage.

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