All images by FIXd Architecture

The problem with sustainable design? Sometimes the architects can forget the “design” part, letting the means for achieving sustainability define a project’s aesthetics. Since the late 1960s, this kind of structural and technical exhibitionism has become a widely practiced metaphor for the building-as-metabolic-system. The not-so-hidden agenda, of course, is to display the technical proficiency of a given architect and to make obvious the immense array of complex systems any designer must manage.

The latest example of this is the Mo Ventus house, by FIXd Architecture. This conceptual zero-net-energy, luxury residence—thus far realized only in digital renderings—can be built almost anywhere, unbound by climate or existing infrastructure.

more

Jane Fonda: esteemed actress, iconic fashion model, health guru, outspoken political activist, and… avant-garde architectural inspiration? Yes, the Hollywood star and 1980s face of fitness has recently lent her name — knowingly or not — to a project by Spanish firm Elli Studio. The Jane Fonda Kit House (abbreviated as JF-Kit) is a prototype residence and pop-up gymnasium that envisions a future in which healthy, active inhabitants power their own homes through physical exercise. More after the jump.

more

This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Popular Choice Award in the Architecture + Self-Initiated category. See the full list of winners here.

For all the gains in sustainability that the architecture and construction industry have made in recent years, certain blind spots remain, including one area that should be a no-brainer: the expos and conferences that the profession puts on for itself. Expo CIHAC, the largest building-industry gathering in Latin America, attracts hundreds of exhibitors each year. But, as the architects at the Mexico City–based Bunker Arquitectura point out, “Almost all the pavilions of the different brands and products related to the architecture and construction industry end up in the trash.”

For the 2012 event in Mexico City, Bunker wanted to set an example for all those exhibitors. The architects approached the CIHAC organizers and made them an offer that was hard to refuse: Bunker would build a zero-waste cafeteria pavilion using 5,000 soda crates on loan from Coca-Cola. “Besides the aesthetic qualities and the environmental virtues they saw in it, our biggest selling point was that it would not cost them a cent,” recall the designers. With its curving, masonry-like walls and bold, graphic patterning of the Coke logo, Bunker’s Upcycled Pavilion won over our readers, too. The project is the, er, pop winner in the self-initiated category of the A+ Awards. Click through for more pictures!

more

Pittsburgh’s Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, a leader in sustainable building practices, has just opened one of the greenest structures in the world. (And we’re not just talking in terms of plants!) The Center for Sustainable Landscapes, the conservatory’s new education and research facility, aims to be the first building to achieve Living Building Challenge (net-zero water, net-zero energy), LEED Platinum, and Sustainable Sites Initiative certification. The goal, says Phipps’ marketing and communications manager Liz Fetchin, at a recent presentation in New York City: to create a building that “literally has as much impact on the environment as a flower.” Read more.

more

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

More than 400,000 people in Chicago live in food deserts—that is, areas without grocers that stock affordable fresh food. In 2011, Architecture for Humanity Chicago joined forces with the nonprofit Food Desert Action to transform a decommissioned Chicago Transit Authority bus into a mobile produce market. The project cleverly repurposes a strategy well known to Mr. Softee (and his younger, hipper cousin, the taco truck) for the cause of food justice. In fact, the Fresh Moves Mobile Produce Market makes so much sense that we’re embarrassed for everyone who never thought of it (ourselves included!). And so are our A+ jurors, who, naturally, awarded Fresh Moves the jury prize in the Architecture + Farming category of the A+ Awards. Read more!

more

This project won the 2013 Architizer A+ Jury Award in the office low-rise category. See the full list of winners here.

Few objects convey suburban malaise as succinctly as the office park. You know, those drab clusters of concrete buildings situated in vast parking lots that have come to define sprawl.  Well, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates wants to rehabilitate the much-maligned office park—starting with Centra at Metropark, a sustainable steel-and-glass stunner located in (of all places) Iselin, New Jersey.

“We wanted to attack the question of the suburban office,” says KPF Design Principal Hugh Trumbull. “What could it be? How could we create a great, productive experience for the users?” Read more!

more

Project: Cairns Botanic Gardens Visitors Centre

Architect: Charles Wright Architects

Location: Cairns, Australia

Charles Wright Architects recently completed this new gateway to the botanic gardens of Cairns, a city with a mission to be seen as progressive and sustainable both nationally and globally. Moving away from the traditional, vernacular architecture of the city, this striking mirrored building reflects the surrounding vegetation and blends seamlessly into the landscape and gardens. The visitor center is a model for green building, featuring solar panels for feedback into the energy grid, stormwater harvesting tanks, mixed-mode air-conditioning systems, long lifecycle-efficiency materials and construction, and naturally ventilated circulation corridors.

Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Photos: Patrick Bingham Hall

more

NLÉ’s proposal for a floating community to improve slum conditions in the lagoon settlement of Makoko in Lagos, Nigeria.

The usual approach to building in a flood zone is to put everything on stilts, as many residents of Rockaway, Queens, are considering in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. That’s also been the approach in the slum settlement of Makoko in Lagos, Nigeria, where many residents live in illegal wood shanties propped up on stilts, accessible only by canoe. Recently the slum and its population of roughly 250,000 Nigerians have been a target of a government that sees the settlement as an eyesore and an impediment to Lagos’s metamorphosis into a modern megacity of 40 million. Last summer the government went on an anti-slum campaign, sending out forces to cut the houses’ stilts with machetes.

But the Nigerian-born, Netherlands-based architect Kunlé Adeyemi sees potential in the lagoon as a future site of a sustainable floating community. For his opening gambit, Adeyemi and his firm, NLÉ, are putting the finishing touches on a three-story, 2,300-square-foot floating school for 100 students between the ages of 4 and 12. Constructed from locally sourced wood and a base of 256 used plastic drums, the new school features enclosed classrooms on the second level and an open-air classroom on the third floor, all anchored by a waterside playground and green space. The Makoko school, which held a preview celebration earlier this month, completes the first phase of NLÉ’s plan to erect a livable city on the lagoon. Read more!

more

When Australia’s weather watchers forecasted highs of 125 degrees Fahrenheight a few weeks back, the Bureau of Meteorology had to come up with a new color—electric purple—to add to the weather map. Meteorologists sweating through the Southern Hemisphere’s record-busting summer weren’t the only ones to find graphic inspiration in global warming. The more dire our climate circumstances become, it seems, the crazier we get with CAD. To expand on its experiments with algae-skinned bio-adaptive facades, Arup recently released its vision for buildings in 2050. Arup’s modular eco-tower functions as a self-contained ecosystem in itself, with co-working spaces, food-producing modules that grow meat and produce, health and education centers, gallery spaces, an underground transit network, and aerial cable cars knitting all the towers together. Oh, and the whole thing is built by robots. Read more!

more

Project: City Green Court

Architect: Richard Meier & Partners

Location: Prague

Richard Meier & Partners has just announced the completion of Green City Court, the third structure in a cluster of buildings designed by Meier in Prague. Located in the Pankrác area of the city, this is the first office project in the Czech Republic to attain the highest-rated LEED Platinum certification for sustainability under the 2009 system. This transparent, glass-curtain-wall office building stands like a sleek geometric cube above Radio Plaza—a benchmark for green building design in the Czech Republic. Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Photos: Roland Halbe

more